PRESS 2009-10: Chris Mann & the Performance of Performance

Last night Chris Mann performed a new piece working thru the signing tangles of "repetition," "knowledge," "madness," "teacher" as ill and student as "cure," and "the right to be misunderstood"--exciting for me, working on a couple essays, including one just published in Sibla, that deal with the aesthetics of repetition.  

I will stand firmly by this: I do not know why (or desire not to ruminate on) Chris gets so little attention in New York's "Art World," as he's doing work far more interesting than a lot of artists working right now.  Chris performed what is now part of his ongoing polyvocal/interactive web project The Use, a then-new piece, in New York circa winter 2002. It was then that I first witnessed an indescribable, an "other" aesthetic discourse, Mann's auctioneer-speed gesticulating barrage of carefully choreographed (yet admitting for chance) work, For Head-Phones.  A piece I worked with for a 4-channel performance (now part of Prefab Eulogies, soon to be downloadable at BlazeVox called "Eulogy for Headphones"), commissioned for The American Cybernetics Conference 2009, at which Chris also performed, which was my second time hearing/seeing him do what he does.  Which, perhaps, is best described as an interrogation of speech that implores us to misunderstand, where discomfort is in some sense high stakes.  If you do not feel discomfort during Mann's "performance," something has gone wrong.  

People at the well-attended event were into it, and indeed felt the discomfort, especially when realizing or refusing to realize, or deciding against being part of Mann's work insofar as the interactive part of it (overtly speaking), the discussion "afterwards," involves "the audience" interrogating itself as and against audience, in favor of...what?  Where this question lingers until we all go home.

I only regret feeling too ill to join up with Chris and Arun Chandra and Elizabeth Williamson, co-sponsors of the event, afterwards.  Was nice to see him, tho, and I hope to set up something with Chris in New York next time I'm there for a sustained period.  Still odd to me, very odd, that Mann's work is commissioned so often and so widely everywhere but, it seems, in the city where he lives.  

PRESS 2009-10: Chris Mann this Evening/ Kaia Sand & Jules Boykoff last Thursday

As I get ready to meet up with Chris Mann, then hear him perform for our second PRESS event of the winter, I'm thinking about how amazing Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff were last week, and how grateful I am that they're in the region and doing what they are doing: finding new, rather exhilarating ways to intersect and collide oft-thought-of "political" and "aesthetic" spheres. 

Jules read first, all work from his new Hegemonic Love Potion (Factory School), which included lines from his cycle "Das Greenspan," such as:

"The kind of guy who's not afraid to bring an inflatable candy cane to 

to a trans-national stag party"

and other gems, including one of my favorite poems in this hyper-sonic collection, this auctioneering of warped eternal present faux recollections born of the latest capitalism money can't buy, "Notes from the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment."  The poem begins: "I was all jacked up on freedom juice again."  And moves on from there, multidirectionally, trying to capture but necessarily failing to capture, one's own--our own--market driven madness.

In contrast to Jules' work, which--besides being often devastating in its critique of itself as necessarily a product of the culture industry (its critique of us)--often feels to me like being jabbed in the ribs by a friend acting out the persona of the joke-teller, Kaia's work is quieter, raging from the inside out, its lyricism being one central point on a literal map that is her new work, Remember to Wave, around which these life-structures in Portland turn.  So many habitations are mapped out, their sociopolitical, their social grid lines mapped out not just by Kaia, but by what Kaia's research unearthed as document, as letter form, as well as her tour group's often startling observations.  These habitations are often the most occulted in this one area's history, where, for example, Kaia concentrated her reading last week very much on the section of Remember to Wave that charts out the internment of Japanese people at the Portland convention center's storage lockers, the lockers turned into "living quarters," i.e., "prisons."  One work from which Kaia read involved giving "voice" to silent archive home movie footage from (I think?) the 1960s, again charting this area of the Portland Convention Center in a different way, this long lyrical poem incredibly captivating, the large screen footage dividing our attention between the seen and the heard in ways not unlike Laura Elrick's work, on which Sand has written recently (see posts below on both Remember to Wave and Laura Elrick's Stalk, which has been fleshed out and lengthened as an essay forthcoming).

The two combined for a deeply engaging contrast, and as the gracious, committed activists they are, offered several plugs for CA Conrad's arrival in March.  As, for those of you familiar with Boykoff, Conrad, and Sand, the three are engaged in similar political enactments thru language, and are, as Boykoff spoke about during the discussion after the reading, part of a larger phenomenon of site-specific and sociopolitical spatial practices / concerns at work in contemporary poetry, "witness" post-Oppen, not dissimilar to the site-specific arguments and engagements in visual arts last decade, continuing to evolve currently (and inform poetry & poetics).  

I'll try to dig up photos of the event as well as quotes/images from Kaia's Remember to Wave (both, at the moment of this writing, are being circulated among Evergreen students who could not make the reading itself).  In the meantime, take a look at some posts below, and go here for a snapshot of Kaia's map-making (from Wheelhouse PRESS Anthology 2009), and head over to Factory School and Tinfish Press website for further ordering information.

PRESS 2009-2010: Composer/Poet Chris Mann

Please join us in welcoming composer and linguistic wizard Chris Mann

this Thursday for a reading and discussion of new work

Where: The Evergreen State College, Building Sem II, B1107

When: Thursday, 8pm

Mann is a composer working in Compositional Linguistics, whose work is mainly to do with the technology and philosophy of speech. Performer (voice), since 1989 with Machine for Making Sense and most recently Chris Mann and the Impediments. 1999 Artist in Residence, Harvestworks and RPI. His commissions include: Astra Choir, John Cage, Composers Forum, Paris Autumn Festival, Australian Biennale, Radio France, Ars Electronica, Radio Telefis Eirann, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, Revue Telematique d'Art Contemporain, Dance Works, Dance Exchange, Lingua, Art et Lectures, Abraxas, Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, la revue parlée, V2, Australian Network for Art and Technology,Goethe Institut, Shire of Healesville, Anzart, Christian Television Association, Commission for the Future, International Synergy, ABC Staff Union, Australia Council, Perth Institute for Contemporary Art, Festival de la Batie, Sprach Ton Art, Brisbane Biennial, BBC, Taklos Festival, ORF, Urban Aboriginal, American Society for Cybernetics, bobeobi, Adelaide Festival, Experimenta, Interpretations.

For more on his past appearances, see:

http://slought.org/content/11181/

And to listen to excerpts from "The Use," check out: 

http://www.lovely.com/titles/cd3091.html

http://theuse.info/