Christina McPhee + Molly McPhee: Recipe (evacuee cake) 4

film stills from 'Recipe (evacuee cake)' Christina McPhee 2008
Here is the text of the poem :

Evacuee cake / Molly McPhee, 2007

[part one]

I am in receipt of words provided to me
Those that indicate we are reciprocals put into pies,
those surgical ones leading to a common maceration
Metrical, non-metric, cage, skull,
test of bars as lexical conversions, receipt with variation,
kits of taste...

Now wild words taste better so bitter whiskers against the bar
kitchen sashes, cull, play similars all

similars as to grow evacuee cakes,
minerals down buttresses
leaks into grip-tie emergencies
grow the garrison



deposit milks marbled culprits the littlest nutrient, the biggest
new fairly voluptuous in liberty around
still muling
still nailing

Let me ask you what you are trying to say.
We...
That's not what you said before. Name me five examples.
We...
You can't even do that simple thing?
We...
You live here for free. Pull your shit together.
we...
You're crying already?
we...
Get the fuck out of my vision.

Of the following, some are waves and some possible treats:
Organ juice solvent on the racks
a lobotomy yielding sweetbreads slippery of words provided,
earths of the released
evacuee cakes scoured with whip frets
Now carnivorous words taste worse so muscles ripped against the bar

Evisceration, then cooking

A recipe enters in throats vitriolic or vittles, now someone who wasn't fake
the girds contract sweats bloods
using more bills clips or leave unclipped to fly
from the arch of the gullet to quicklime

own wards pronounced anymore
for army splints only or
flung truants from bridges that boom

Don't Come

But all I wanted now you're gone was an animal to swallow and attest you never were.

Receipt of things to bake and fluff:
The brains of words, the crowns of panthers and illegals
scooped and opened to tissues,
hearings will sew up the next times still won't speak

we'll produce a slightly different texture deeper inside of us

Similars to expect:
scurried, torn, savory, mind numbing, and won,
Combine these, select similars:
roster pads, ghost arms, citizen
Positive, positive to be used in the mouth.





...

Merida T'Ho_MX: Todo en silenco

todo está en suspenso, todo tranquilo, todo inmóvil, todo apacible, todo silencioso, todo vacío, en el cielo, en la tierra.

Raúl Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, interview, October 2008, Santa Cruz, California.

"I have decolonized myself in order to begin the construction of the space. I have created discourses with artists whose conceptual work is inspired by Cildo Meireles and the dialectic of the 'disappeared" and the uspoken stories of 'uncharted regions"-- notably, the Coca-Cola project of 1970. The coke bottle project involved insertion and removal processes and then recirculation--exploring 'to register informations and critical opinions on bottles and return them to circulation.' (Cildo Meireles). The curatorial project becomes a collaborative art piece "always growing a matrix, in which not only the curators participate, but also the artists. Together, they create variable geometries." Reflecting on Cortázar,'having in our own histories those who are part of our cultural territory-- we had to bring back these histories, our cultural practices: we are now colonized by new media theorists; neo-conceptual spaces re-shifts when in the Latin American space, as we bring in through it our own concepts and issues...The omnipresence of the English language in new media meant that 'English was nominating, scripting, programming." The effect was a de facto prejudice, "we are not interested in non-English speaking artists. You couldn't be a new media artist in the late nineties" without dealing with this prejudice. This was'technopatriarchy-even though we were immersed in this transformative territory, this cross-section of disciplines, we were creating new knowledges but these served as but a fetish to the machine, to imperialist surveillance and the control of essence...such was the nature of the internet at that time (the late nineties)." We were breaking from the Cartesian model of scientific rationalism; we were concerned with the fundamental insight of [Mayan culture] of landscape as a data space. harks back, for Raul, to Rudolf Arnheim, whose empiricism was the foundation of knowledge- gained through all the senses via deep systems of metaphor underlying all the senses. Essentially, Raul argues for the primacy of direct observation and indigenous understanding-- that values and meanings arise from this matrix of sensing/perceiving/observing in a participatory context; these are his 'variable geometries" which make pathways of understanding and life-connection outside dominating systems of control.

Elin Lennox: Lubricants 3 + 4

With enough lubricant, we could all slip by

But for now, let's stick together

I use strange, small, translucent toys,
eggs, oils, pigments, lights, cameras, and computers
to build organic structures. These concoctions,
like George's marvelous medicine, escape their ingredients'
original uses, by framing a new context for them,
something strong and whizz-bang unexpected.

-Elin Lennox

Elin Lennox : Lubricants 1 + 2

ELIN LENNOX IS A PAINTER AND RECENT BFA GRADUATE OF CARNEGIE MELLON
UNIVERSITY. AS SUBSTITUTE TEACHER FOR DAYJOB SHE BIKES THE HILLS OF PITTSBURGH
AT EARLY HOURS TO NEIGHBORHOODS NO ONE WOULD EVER GO TO UNLESS
THEY KNEW SOMEBODY OR HAD SOME BUSINESS THERE. THE CITY SPREADS
OUT IN THE EARLY HOURS BEFORE TRAFFIC. LATER AT HOME SHE SWITCHES TO
LIGHTBOXES WITH ENOUGH LUBRICANT WE COULD ALL SLIP BY

Christina McPhee: pharmakon library magic

Pharmakon Library is an ongoing series of graphic folios created and curated by Jessica Silverman with Christina McPhee. The folios comprise a series of open works by artists who address, through image and/or text, the principle of critical reversability, or proximity of poison and cure. ...

---its one of those mcluhanesque things: the content is determined by the interaction of the artists with the general notions of recipe, poison, antidote, paint, talisman, gift, drug. So the content emerges via the transaction rather than from a default or a priori position. By leaving it up to the artists I think the library retains potency as itself a pharmakon, because the artists have to engage with the topic from an inside/outside position, right on the edge of the personal, and yet not- else it would not be a spell or a paint, something that goes over something else, or covers/reveals something else. A visual text that moves between error, errancy, exile, never quite home (so it's part of that unheimlich quality we feel when we encounter the strangely familiar). It's a bit like Bergman's fascination with the theatre. A little world which is actually much safer than the cruelty outside its walls; but perhaps in the proximity of the theatrical to everyday life a kabbalistic reordering of events could happen, as in his "Fanny and Alexander." (1982) My imagination takes me back to the lost Alexandrian library, which was purported to be filled with manuscripts including many items of an incantatory nature from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Similarly then the Pharmakon Library is like a networked incantation, or even a kind of seepage of white magic into the interfaces between spirit and matter, between the virtual network and physical spaces. Also there is a really interesting idea implicit in this, that the possible/probable opacity of meaning in the images is a kind of springboard towards a making of meanings on the fly on the part of the visitor- nothing indeed is fixed, everything is relation. There is no correct interpretation nor is there correct content vs incorrect; also there is no administration of content according to morphologies beyond these extremely fluid and practically nonsensical categories of recipe, poison, antidote etc. Why do this ? well the image can function, i can dream so anyhow, as a kind of immanence- I am an iconophiliac, i like the way that images apparently have a potency beyond conscious ken.