For Writing Out Loud or a Potential Workshop on Fiction
Alun Rowlands. “For Writing Out Loud or A Potential Workshop on Fiction (with insert of Will Holder’s Demonstration for A and B).”
Originally published In: Barefoot in the Head, edited by Mark Beasley, Alun Rowlands, and John Russell, 108.
Volume 4of Art-Writing-Research series, Series Editor, David Burrows. Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 2011.
Distributed by Central Books
ISBN 978-1-873352-15-1
Contents
06 Partial Instructions
18 The Reconsidered Voice in Three Acts: melancholy, dirge and declension,
Mark Beasley
38 For Writing Out Loud or A Potential Workshop on Fiction, Alun Rowlands
68 A largely intolerable combination of two mainly unconnected texts: 1. Barefoot in the Head; 2. Fictioning and the End,
John Russell
BAREFOOT IN THE HEAD
Bruce High Quality University,
225 West Broadway, NYC 10013, New York as part of Performa '09
For Writing Out Loud, or A Potential Workshop on Fiction explores writing as a performative, collaborative, and ventriloquial practice that tests the limits between fiction, theory, and event. Departing from archival work on Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head and its “futurological poetry,” the essay stages a polyphonic encounter between collective modes of production from Will Holder and Dexter Sinister, to Amelia Saul and Bruce High Quality.
The text is hybrid operating simultaneously as documentation, reflection, and performance—an experiment in “writing out loud.” It enacts a multi-voiced, processual form that blurs the boundaries between script and transcript, reading and enactment. Language is treated as material, staging collisions between writing, speaking, and making. Here, writing is not late to he event, secondary to artistic production but is a generative, speculative act that performs its own conditions of possibility—fiction as epistemology, criticism as event, and reading as a workshop in becoming.
Sometime later, when all the, words, sounds, images and texts are presented and performed; the stutter and stammering went silent. The voices abated when the framing and formulating of thoughts found a silence, when the performative act came to an end. From now it is circulated only as footage and a new line up is built. The document of a situation on location with its specific stimulation fits in an already existing list of concepts in the frame of a transcript. Somewhere between voices, texts, enunciations or an act of ekphrasis what can appear is meagre bandwidth. What was just performed as spectacle now shadows into a surface, visible for all those who were not there. It might be just enough to see or to conjure a different narrative; a narrative coalescing around the potential of writing. To suggest that this would be a text of history, in the sense that, if it is a story of an event, it is just one story, another story, is always already a strictly guilty writing as a problem of theatricality.
The present writing would not be a script for there is no script that is not the ideal of immobilised body. A script necessarily has potential performance in mind, it contains provisions for stage directions and cues, but the transcript’s smallest claim is to be an ingenuous record. There would be only diverse pieces, each piece of variable format and belonging to its own instance with which it begins and ends – pieces that might or might not find their place here and there, or rather ‘subject here and there to the incandescence’. [1]
***
We had been working in the archives for some time. Nine unsorted, uncategorised acid-free boxes of unmade film screenplays and plagiarised manuscripts represent the holdings relating to an author – Brian Aldiss. Amongst the creased pages of drafts, texts, documents and letters we uncovered visions of the immanent future.
In the novel ‘Barefoot in the Head’, published 1969, we had rediscovered poetry punctuating fiction. A futurological and ‘auditory stabilised’ image that arranges montages based on attractions and correspondences. All visions become plural. The poetry itself orders sensory input differently. More compressive and affinitive, it is less bound by logical associations, linearity, and so on.
The outstanding characteristic of these texts is their ideogrammatic quality. In between their visible form, they add the optical gesture of the word to its semantic meaning. Abandoning the narrative structure of a novel the poems create a visual and aural sentence string as elements in the space of the page. Opacity is carried to a degree whereby the poems pilot their own structure, without curtailing the references of which they are composed. Presented as concrete objects, they accentuate distance, as ideograms, offering parallels to the realities to which they refer. They are verbal diagrams – the dynamics of movement and flight. And, a pictive multiplication of the field of apparition, attempting to depict in words as beyond-words, visionings, ecstasies and sensation processes. There is clearly a sense in which the poem offers a responsive and communicative tool for exploring our questions and reporting such disconnective experiences.
Thirty years on, we made a decision to initiate a dispersed and directed FUTUROLOGICAL POETRY EVENT — an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and contributors. [2] Multiply without limits, in the foaming, in the flicker, in an immeasurable extension. The ‘verbivocovisual’ event develops from a necessarily oblique engagement with the novel and confronts the idea of being possessed by poetry, possessed by fiction and possessed by philosophy. An exploration of the ecstatic potential of possession as a form of revelation, speaking in tongues, actions develop as or through a blizzard of words, voices and sounds that may exist as poetry or fiction. The final destination of all the material solicited would be the creation of a tenth box, to be held at the Aldiss archive in perpetuity.
Recalling a certain event calls up the trace of something as particular as the climate of a place, an element of the time of the saying, as though thought turned upon its occurrence. To rethink the event we have to get located in it, through writing or ‘writing through’ from sentences made up for the occasion. Questions, speculations, and a range of provisional verbal gestures spread out in radiant ecologies of concentration and attentive definition. ‘Every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks." [3] This remark, which describes every piece of writing as a preface, does not simply refer to the impossibility of translating the ‘all’ of an event into a single entity. Nor does it simply refer to those purely experiential obstacles that stand in the way of writing, preventing the text from attaining the pleasure it might have hoped for; instead, in returning written work to its derivative hesitation, we evoke the indeterminacy between work and draft.
All of our texts correspond to the basic tenets of the theoretical program elaborated in the dispersed scenario outlined above. They are all spatial-temporal structures in which highly reduced verbal material has been submitted to a rigidly controlled process. They are almost all completely multi-authored, operating as software that facilitates the event: there is no lyrical ‘I’ in this communal venture, nor is there a narrative voice. Rather than communicating a subjective experience or formulating a ‘message’ they exploit the visual, aural, and semantic qualities of their verbal material and explore the possibilities inherent in the collision of phonic and visual equivalence. All of this enfolds within the collision of a number of associative and affiliative contexts; our self-institutionalisation and location are shaped by history and education.
The spectre of an arrogant Futurism lurks off stage. [4] The rhetoric of a past manifesto permeates events through imagination without strings and words without freedom. The manifesto is a defunct literary format. The aggression, the half-apocalyptic, half-utopian thrust, the earnestness seems anachronistic now. For these reasons it is compelling, things that do not work have great potential. These historical tropes exhilarate proceedings through a tacit acknowledgement of their co-opted complicity with forms of ideology-capitalism-technology. Cultivation of the radical past sutures the frame of the present in a gestured destruction of syntax. Zealous appeals to construct a new orthography are in the air.
‘LINES WRITTEN IN FREE WORDS, SIMULTANEITY, COMPENETRATION, THE SHORT, ACTED-OUT POEM, THE DRAMATIZED SENSATION, COMIC DIALOGUE, THE NEGATIVE ACT, THE REECHOING LINE, "EXTRA-LOGICAL" DISCUSSION, SYNTHETIC DEFORMATION… SYMPHONIZE THE AUDIENCE'S SENSIBILITY BY EXPLORING IT, STIRRING UP ITS LAZIEST LAYERS WITH EVERY MEANS POSSIBLE; ELIMINATE THE PRECONCEPTION OF THE FOOTLIGHTS BY THROWING NETS OF SENSATION BETWEEN STAGE AND AUDIENCE; THE STAGE ACTION WILL INVADE THE ORCHESTRA SEATS, THE AUDIENCE… DRAMATIZE ALL THE DISCOVERIES.’ [5]
Our copy and paste adventure is sited within the specifics of a free university as ‘education in metaphor manipulation’. Sharing a fondness for the Futurist’s revelling in the proto-abbreviated acronyms – BHQFU, BYOU, BHQF, Bruceforma, Brucennial – the Bruce High Quality Foundation University smelts high finance and educational institutions, promoting an auto-didactic future orientated model of knowledge production. Their ‘working principles’ are declared in Proglomena to Any Future Art School evincing a belief in ‘the artistically educational possibilities of collaboration’ whereby a ‘group of concerned people come together to hash out ideas, try to figure out the world around them, and try to take some agency within its future.’ [6] That’s the why and how of The Bruce High Quality Foundation. Through the construction of something like a group BHQFU examines collective intelligence tracing through performative lectures, an art history in transition communing both its subject and its presentation to elicit transformation in its audience. [7] Somewhere between the chalkboard pedagogue and ubiquity of YouTube lectures, we cut the ties and drift – free knowledge, free curricula, rethink the world in permanent ignorance, free from art-school-as-low-level-imitation-corporate-culture, free to … DEMATERIALIZE! (Beyond the Zero), YOGA-OPEN LEVEL, BHQFU WRITING GROUP, THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE: INTRO ITALIAN, IRONY AND UTOPIA: HISTORY OF COMPUTER ART, THE ARTIST AT WORK, WHAT'S A METAPHOR?, PHILOSOPHY OF MOTION PICTURES II, TO BE CONTINUED (THE POINT OF ABANDON).
So what happens when all the books in the world become one single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? All of this is consummated in the exodus of knowledge from antique formulation of an academy. An academy loses control over the production of knowledge once there is potential to imagine a situation in which knowledge can be accessed from distributive networks. Networks care neither for significance nor consequence. Has radical politics really migrated into the artworld? A community of scholars, an expansive practice that demands more participants – BHQFU – that is where ‘U’ come in; ‘and a fuck you to the hegemony of critical solemnity and market-mediocre despair.’ [8] It appears that within a relatively short period we have moved from criticism to critique to criticality – from finding fault, to examining underlying assumptions, to operating from uncertain ground – whereby, the latter nevertheless wants to inhabit all scenarios bar analysis.
Our digression into the staging of knowledge production will reprise. Strange pacts are forged. Our views are always partial, this writing is constructed from what Aldiss deemed as ‘creative mishearings’, a vain attempt to orbit the event recalling not everything and everyone but only the most ‘iridescent’. [9] The university is on fire. Born as we are from electricity, technology and cinema, with our Futurist text as accelerant, cigarette smoke mingles the atmosphere of theatre with that of stage, smoke permeated by a single pink light joins audience and performer in a veil of innumerable possibilities – ‘EVERYTHING OF ANY VALUE IS THEATRICAL.’
***
Amelia Saul stands singularly projecting images that disintegrate in her mind. She rehearses stage directions of an absent play. ‘Happy Days Directions’ (2010) performs a pre-recorded relay of stage directions from Beckett’s eponymous ‘Happy Days’ (1961). Saul inverts the functions of the script synonymous with the fragmentary female protagonist given half-lines to build an internal world. Her performance removes the character’s poverty of words that barely deemed her stage-worthy in the first instance, focusing on the marginalia of handwritten stage directions. There are one hundred and fifty pauses in ‘Happy Days’ and each necessitates being filled with imagination, tension and thought.
Sinking across two acts, while being out of sync with the audience, Saul spotlights the division of labour between writer and performer, inventing connections between seemingly foreign bodies, the distance between things, between people and agency, implicit in Beckett’s writing. Beckett’s writing is all interrupted thought. It is as if he wrote in reverse, ideas appear as negative radiation. Saul poses the problem of theatrics: ‘outside is the fact, external to the theatrical space; on the stage is the narrative unwinding its dramatics; hidden in the wings, in the flies, under the stage, in the auditorium, is the director [metteur-en-scène], the narrator, with all his machinery.’ [10] The performer is supposed to undo all the machinery and machination, and restore what was excluded, having knocked down the walls of the theatre. And yet it becomes apparent that the performer is herself no more than another director, her narrative another product, her work another narration.
In dialogue, progress is possible. On the other hand, written words can perhaps only maintain an inaudible hush. What transpires if the oracular voice develops an alternative outlet in writing, writing that does not jeopardise the shame of inefficacy, to perform marginality, to espouse latency as a distinctive feature – a panicked episteme. Part theory, part fiction, intervening in the general forms of visibility, assembled so smoothly we cannot see the joins. Not so much writing as coalescing forces. We do not theorise, we secrete the seams, an interstice not only for fiction and theory but also for events in the process of capture and escape. What if writing finds a voice, writing out loud, where the voice is thrown – a gastromancer’s script.
Saul’s performance hinges on the occult internal voice of the author’s commandments. The voice exists autonomously from its material form, which allows for its inveterate expression to be revealed in incandescent forms. The page becomes an index for these recurring forms. Writing too becomes a possibility for communication between disembodied agencies. The written ‘I’ provides a template for a virtual voice, a ghost who speaks out of the crypt, a dematerialisation of the proper noun. The send and receive record crystallises these figures, the putative self-referring originators of the text. Figures that are at once invisible, absent, without location, detached from the voice, and unmoored from its origination and subsequent appearance.
Ventriloquism originated as a religious practice of ecstatic possession, and as an affliction of the stomach – gastromancy. The sounds produced by the stomach were thought to be the voices of the un-living, who took up residence in the gut of the ventriloquist. The performance demanded the interpretative ability to speak via the intestines to the dead, as well as foretell the future. In his writing Nietzsche advocated the clearing of conversational space with speechless beings, animate and inanimate alike attending to the concerns of the vocality of voiceless entities – the projection of our own voices onto the world. ‘All one needs in order to be a poet is… the urge to transform oneself and speak out of strange bodies… acting as though one had really entered another body, another character… we see a community of unconscious actors all of whom see one another as enchanted’. [11] Like the ventriloquist, the writer or artist throws her voice outward, a voice that at the same time is not her ordinary voice. These ventriloqual insights find affiliation with appropriation of events and equivalences with the ghostwriter, multi-authored screen-playwright, plagiarist and the pseudonymous literary double. [12]
‘The name and form of Dexter Sinister refers to a heraldic device, or the announcement of something to come: a plain shield with a single diagonal line running from the top right corner to the bottom left edge— in Latin, “dexter” and “sinister,” respectively. Tellingly, the insignia mirrors the heraldic device in the title of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1947 novel, ‘Bend Sinister’, which announces the coming of a totalitarian, conformist society that discourages individuality and celebrates the state.’ [13]
Dexter Sinister intrinsically operates in the territories of the ‘in-between’ – in between in every sense, in between the words of some texts, or of some bigger script hidden behind their work. Such scripts could only be following the logic of some texts, as they become exemplified, or exercised, in the practice of performing even within the collective. Seeking alternative models of production, they occupy other means and ecologies of dispersion, whereby ‘re-publication is offered as a form to keep thoughts in the loop, beyond the date of their planned obsolescence... To be in sync with just-in-time production means that you have to be ready to perform all the time and at all times.’ [14] At our event theirs is an open address, a public restaging, ventriloquised in this instance, as open letter:
‘This here isn't meant to be a definitive analysis of our situation and if anybody pleases themselves to regard it as such or pleases themselves to publish it as such I will be pleased to render unto them a knuckle sandwich right in the kisser not via typewriter but with my fist, so to speak, so to speak due to the fact of the matter - that is to say, I find bloodshed a form of communication. And speaking of definitive, as anybody knows, reality is that there is only the relatively definitive, which proves that the concept of some human beings as intellectuals is a phony concept because no one uses the word "definitive" except the intellectual which proves that he is an "intellectual" or in rational language a fat-assed-ego slob since no one with brains even recognizes definitive as a word even in the concept of an implied qualifier such as "relative".’ [15]
The hack polemic continues in rapid-fire delivery, dislocated between text, voice and performer. It ranges and rails against the war machinery of the state, the constitution, the ‘wrath of my friend and mentor, God’, returning library books, failure to suppress mania through a loathing of psychology, the sanity of publishing and the ventilation or not of ire. The anonymity of the pseudonym, embraces the limits of language, where it encounters its dispersion. Here, writing is finding a new way of existing in relation to an immanent practice. Signing off as Giles Weaver the performance as facsimile imbricates the voices of literary agents. Giles Weaver, is contentiously believed to be a pseudonym of J.D Salinger, a typical Salingerian name, venting an outburst from a self imposed silent seclusion. [16] Salinger stands as a symbol of introspection leading to silence, a voice co-opted on occasions with claim and counter claim as to its veracity. Signing off his log Weaver states that ‘maybe ghost writing is within the capacity of my ego if not my know-how.’ The language of the hired pen is always predictive, it neither speaks out nor conceals, but points to language that is essentially prophetic. It tunes into a murmuring, a kind of voice-under codifying that animates an otherwise uni-form state of distraction.
***
‘The hack is the one who starts from no distance. He begins from his own comodification, from the fact of being for hire. He may have nothing original to say, and will never be recognised. The hack has no use for academic credentials and does not even qualify as the owner of something like intellectual property. And, yet the hack is an empty and available form waiting to be filled… the hack operates and writes in the mist of business transaction, under terrible deadlines. The hack is attuned to the promiscuous circulation of information, to the equation of words and money. He is the one who works on magazines and screenplays, blurbs, press releases, novels and especially essays. Because the hack always shows up in the place where communication is supposed to happen.’ [17]
Across the city, Dexter Sinister occupy a ‘pop-up’ hosting space facing the New York Times headquarters. Writing, editing, designing and distributing ‘The First/ Last Newspaper’ in six large format broadsheets as an act of transparent information and knowledge production that inverts research as journalism. The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. Dexter Sinister assume the form of a practice, of ‘writing with’ artists work, questioning whether the artist, critic or historian, copy writer, commercial sponsor, studio or director, have the final word in determining value in visual culture.
Writing about art is bereft of hard method, pressed into shifting contexts; the staccato of essay-ism reflects and interrupts the post-fordist schedules associated with its liberation from systematic reproduction. A peripatetic wanderlust of ‘I know that you know, that I know... lets hope we do this elegantly’, maximises the oddments of knowledge, and acknowledges the embarrassment of discursive nudity. [18] Free from any commitment to any fixed audience it is a transitive endeavour; transitive through affinity for the possibility of a community, even if it is a community of those who have no community.
Object-free writing is a suspicious body of knowledge, written by those who do not consider themselves writers, whereby writing is a work of distance from the ecstasies of the event. But what if the event itself writes? No matter how much we assert ourselves through trope or method. We need art that writes out loud, to raise the voice of a community denied by a misreading of potentiality. How is this done? A fragmentary project, blogs, papers, possibilities, refusing to insist on narrative or theoretical completion, as well as, in the process, weakening the voice of authority, means both reader and writer are constantly moving toward understanding, toward that which has potential.
***
Events are moving at a pace within our host university. Performances overlap, incessant sounds and voices fashions opaque ‘aural images’, citations from a library of texts form polyphony of divergent spectres of language. The illegibility of the texts emerges through the interstitial space between pictures and words, between the on and off of the binary switch. They command us and we endeavour to seize the command. Jennie Hagevik Bringaker has seized the audience moving amongst them with purpose and a torch-lit copy of ‘Queen of the Night’ (2009). The un-translated Nordic poetry forms vowels and glottals, alveolar phonemes delivered in close unrounded pith patterns lacking lexical tone. The utterance-final fall that is so common in most languages is absent in the morphology of Norsk. What is occluded is orchestrated into something other than what is perceived. Superimposition and encryption conflate perception, which falls prey to deception, illusion and the imperceptibility of meaning.
Will Holder has commanded two performers split across two floors to voice a script ‘Demonstration (for A and B)’ (2009) devoid of syntax, structure and pattern. Syntax, like authority, can only be obeyed. It is therefore no use except when you have something particular to instruct – ‘sintalks’. Holder makes words strange through a demilitarization of language. As with Aldiss’ use of the concrete poems in ‘Barefoot in the Head’, Holder punctuates prose at habitual intervals, assembled in sections and pages that pose the question of the function of books. It is not poetry by reason of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing aural elements – time, sound – to be introduced to world of words. Repeating words on a continuous loop across two subjects, whereby words are lost, distorted to vocal sounds. Intruding themselves onto the taped sequence, Holder models the ‘thing-ness of the word, in the materiality of language – its non-linguistic or extra-linguistic qualities.’ This practice marks a reflective shift from analytical observation to performative inquiry lingering in circulation and the unpredictable processes of making the collaborative visible. For this purpose connective ‘empty words’ are more useful. Moreover, this discourse of ordinary prose – a passage from an interview, a newspaper paragraph, a statement from a lecture – could now be decomposed and recharged so as to uncover the controls of language. Holder reprises Cage’s statement that ‘language controls our thinking, and if we change our language, it is conceivable that our thinking would change.’ [19]
Imagine rewinding the moment in which Marcel Broodthaers forced forty-four volumes of poetry into plaster. [20] The intensity of a speculative act accompanied by a written announcement, recognised artists use of language as both staged and an occurrence of critical fiction. The performance oscillates between an instance of dispersion, positioned in the gap between presentation and narration. Amidst this insinuated projection there is a concern for writing out loud, and the impossibility of fiction which is at stake. There is a need to think of writing as somewhat divergent from information, as at least one sphere of invention that is excused from the encompassing compulsion to communicate.
This state of affairs will compel an active protagonist, a polymath, to fuse manifold encounters that demand new forms of critical fictioning. Fiction does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it time and again. Fiction is not made up, it is based on everything we can learn or use. Think of fiction as great epistemological amnesty, a zone in which all sources of knowledge are valid. Fiction is the imaginative writing fuelled by conjecture - scenario driven promissory notes. What next? Speculation, the subjunctive tense, the ‘as yet’ question that drives behaviours and actions as if we know that we would be here tomorrow, as if everything we see is as we see it.
***
In this pursuit, at the edge of visibility, constantly concealing, we find John Russell. A co-author of the event, slumped for the duration in a scopophobic state – that is the unreasonable fear of being seen or being stared at. An outdated piece of psychological terminology, capturing a shamefacedness, which used to be seen in asylums, scopophobia is a morbid dread of the visible. In minor degree, the patient covers the face with their hands. In greater degree, the form afflicting Russell, the patient will shun the visitor and escape from sight where possible. In a re-enactment of a half remembered performance his is a gesture of resigned acquiescence, or a Salingerian withdrawal. Russell is fond of quoting Foucault where he was asked if he had ever wanted to write fiction. He said he had never done anything else. ‘[Delirious] examples of performative, syrupy utterances, which conform to his speech act categories, and instances of utterance, which do not – for instance, PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCE ON STAGE. Proposing in a state of heightened excitement, the idea of ‘iterability’: where performative-statement-could-not-succeed-if-its-formulation-did-not-repeat-coded-or-iterable-statement. And…’ [21] Syrupy utterances are siphoned and juiced through Die Störung’s ‘In The Future, Urban Combat will Taste of Ginger’ (2009). Throughout proceedings the ‘always already interpolated subjects’ that constitute the sometimes-viral art collective pulp a vegetable-based fuel that ‘smacks the spittle from slack-jaw of culture.’ Die Störung’s sickly liquid lubricates scattered desires, whirring and whispering sweet nothings in the ear of authority.
We tried whispering. Encouraged we began to chant, to raise language’s temperature. Rose Kallal fires up apocalyptic film projectors and amplifiers, warm, saturated and visceral. The fissure in communication opens a space for the irrational to break through. Certain conduits for thinking rehearse different scenarios. What voices might these wires have carried, what energies radiate from this instrument, what sounds emit from this turntable and what visions we see when we close our eyes. Blanko & Noiry borrow titles and words from Ezra Pound in which they ‘came to think of translation as a model for the poetic act: blood brought to ghosts… essentially creating new life from old texts.’ It is a séance. Turn the lights down and focus on whom you want to contact. Dispense with literature altogether in an hallucinogenic-fuelled auto-de-fé and destroy complacent theoretical conformity, that prunes language of its deadwood, and allow events to be experienced in all their misshapen, singular opulence.
***
The connective script is relentless, without resolution, reduction to subjectivity or transcendence. Existing in the field of potentiality and possibility rather than of exclusive material production. Now we think of all these practices as linked in a process, an amalgam of tropes, of knowledge production. The event itself produces knowledge through experimental and inventive dimensions. We recognise our own imbrications in the moment but also the performative nature of action, of writing we might draft in relation. Holes in the historical and social are mirrored in a syntactical time warp. Here, as elsewhere, fiction and discourse are the fields that continue to speak. Reading entrains to the field, rising up from ‘in-between’ in the transversal ‘and’ that holds our provisional attention. To read becomes a workshop on fiction – a verb to write out loud.
— Alun Rowlands
1 Lyotard, J.F., Bodies, Texts: Conductors, In ‘Libidinal Economy’, Indiana University Press, 1992 p. 256
2 Barefoot in the Head: Futurological Poetry, 12 November 2009, Bruce High Quality Foundation University, 225 West Broadway, New York in association with Performa ‘09
3 Agamben, G., The Idea of Prose In a preface written for the translation of his ‘Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience’, Verso 1993
4 The centennial of the Italian movement, which advocated the art of action and public confrontation, informed the incarnation of Performa 09 in New York. Using the Futurist template of manifestos-for-the-future in all disciplines, Performa 09 explored new ideas in visual art, film, music, poetry, graphic design, dance, architecture, and urbanism. The city of New York itself featured as an evolving ignition of ideas, its streets, transportation, and airwaves providing a platform for public engagement.
5 From the conclusion to The Synthetic Futurist Theatre: A Manifesto (1915) Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli, Bruno Corra and Suzanne Cowan In: The Drama Review: TDR Vol. 15, No. 1 (Autumn, 1970), pp. 142-146 Published MIT Press
6 Full transcript of Proglomena to Any Future Art School Bruce High Quality Foundation can be found at http://bhqfu.org/Site/about.html
7 See: Explaining Pictures to a Dead Bull, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York, 30 July 2009
8 Bruce High Quality Foundation, op.cit
9 Aldiss, B. ,The Shape Of Further Things - Speculation On Change, London Faber 1970
10 Lyotard, F., Des Dispositifs Pulisionnels trans. Roger McKewon In ‘Notes on the Return of Capital’ Semiotext(e) 3 1978 , p.180-81
11 Nietzsche, F., The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) Section VIII
12 See: Goldblatt, D., Art and Ventriloquism (Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture), Routledge, 2005
13 Todd Alden, Whitney Biennial, 2008 http://whitney.org/www/2008biennial/www/section=artists&page=artist_sinister
14 Verwoert, J., Exhaustion and exuberance – ways to defy the pressure to perform, published by Dot Dot Dot 15, Dexter Sinister, New York 2008 p.89-111.
15 Excerpted from Weaver, G., Further Notes from the Underground, The Phoenix, Spring 1971.
16 See Phillips, M., Giles Weaver: Musings of a Social Soph, available at www.dextersinister.org/MEDIA/PDF/GuileWeaver.pdf
17 Kelsey, J., The Hack In Daniel Birnbaum, Isabelle Graw (Eds.) ‘Canvases and Careers Today: Criticism and Its Markets’ Sternberg Press, Berlin and New York, 2008
18 Zolghadr, Tirdad, Judgment and Art Criticism, lecture, Fillip British Columbia, ‘Judgement and Contemporary Art Criticism’, 27 February 2009
19 Editorial to Stuff and Nonsense, ‘F.R. David’, eds. Holder, W., Demeester, A., Roelstraete, D. De Appel 2008
20 Pense-Bête, 1964, unsold copies of self-published poetry turned unreadable, that Broodthaers declared his first ‘artistic proposal’, alongside the invitation which stated, ‘The idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind, and I set to work at once.’
21 Russell, J., Why are conceptual artists juicing again? Because they moisturise it's a glistening sparkle, Frieze Magazine, September 2009
