I wish I was there to witness it... I think collective catharsis could be the very foundation of the political community of citizens.
On Oct 4, 2012, at 1:51 PM, Ana Valdés wrote: > For me the lament is a kind of collective catharsis, as the mourning > itself. I has been in Palestine several times and see and listened to > the collective mourning of the women when some of their relatives or > friends are killed or buried, a kind of powerful roaring, not the > claiming not the whinning but the power of a repressed cry or > shouting. > Ana > > On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Johannes Birringer > <johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk> wrote: >> >> which "Lamentations" are you refering to? >> (not Martha Graham's Lamentation?) The lament of nation-building >> >> I'd be interested in this idea of the critique of the ritual and the >> community self-restitution, >> and also in a review how lament becomes a gesture (in performance and >> film/filmed performance/then in stilled photograph) >> of witnessing and what Monika describes as "witnessing and enunciation .... >> sequenced to non-linear time....[with] compose[d] sound from testimonies, >> recitations, laments, the environment..." >> I was interested in the staging of lament, Monika, and how it loses all aura >> (in Benjamin's writing on something that may have been originary or >> original) thereby, or retains some?, and how people today, >> perhaps, are divesting themselves of having to witness ageing, decrepitude, >> decay, catatonia, living absence, death. >> >> Not sure, i know many folks, in the old village, who are care takers and who >> are >> witnessing the disappearance of loved ones, the sliding away, in pain or >> tranced, stilled pain (medicated), but Yoko Ishiguro, a Japanese performance >> artist who studied at my school, recently staged >> her symbolic passing outside the library, had herself placed and buried in a >> coffin and transmitted all that action through the network to test whether >> the net would be a kind or tomb archive for later generations to look back >> to Yoko's death at the foot of the library and how would the data be >> preserved? Yoko told me she was reacting to the crass commodification of >> death she observed, with funeral trade shows and, for example, the Japanese >> cyber-burial companies which invite the dead to be "buried" on the website >> so that you can visit there online.........She saw this commodification in >> the Benjamin sense of raising questions about "work: (art) in the era of >> technical reproducibility. >> >> So my question (this is before Alan and Sandy's dense textdialiogue about >> the signifier of pain arrived, which i have not been able to translate) was >> still to Monika to try to describe how she sees her work function, and what >> effect is produced, and how the audience is drawn into the long circle or >> not. And can there ever be audience in lamentation/mourning? >> >> >> (PS. i personally have no problems with weeds (as weeds), i love them in my >> garden and tend to them, and they are migrants too, some weeds have travel >> from far but i didn't know there were weeds, some one has to point out. that >> must be the signifier. I had never thought of them in the sense of homo >> sacer. This astonished me, Monika, that you mention Agamben, after >> "Nowoczesność i Zaglada". thank you for responding to my query, and in >> think Alan's answer is not quite responding to Bauman's critical analysis of >> the garden society, and what the writing may also have to tell us about >> politics of integration or assimilation of impairment, otherness. >> >> respectfully >> Johannes Birringer >> >> >> Alan schreibt: >> >> >> public lament and gardening >> >> On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote: >> >>> Is there then (I'm sort of assuming the answer is yes, but asking anyway in >>> order to make it part of the fabric of the conversation) a way in which >>> lamentation is also critique as well as community self-constitution, as in >>> Lamentations? >>> >> >> Maria, I wonder what sort of critique would be possible? Lamentations >> seems to bridge the political and the obdurate. When pain becomes >> overwhelming, silence is at the core and the signifier dissolves; I think >> this is also the core of anguish. One is left speechless. On the other >> hand, how much clarity is necessary for political or 'rational' thought? >> In an odd way this also brings up mathematical thinking - which, from an >> outsider point-of-view, seems based on the manipulation of symbols, but >> from within is much more of clouded movements with indeterminate focus >> (see Jacques Hadamard). Thinking itself, in other words, may well have >> less content than its representations, and certainly its representations >> in virtual worlds, where everything, one way or another, is determinate >> and rationalized on a pixel-by-pixel level. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> empyre forum >> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre > > > > -- > http://writings-escrituras.tumblr.com/ > http://maraya.tumblr.com/ > http://www.twitter.com/caravia158 > http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ > http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia > http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ > http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ > http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ > http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 > http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ > > cell Sweden +4670-3213370 > cell Uruguay +598-99470758 > > > "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth > with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you > will always long to return. > -- Leonardo da Vinci > _______________________________________________ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre M o n i k a W e i s s S t u d i o 456 Broome Street, 4 New York, NY 10013 Phone: 212-226-6736 Mobile: 646-660-2809 www.monika-weiss.com gnie...@monika-weiss.com M o n i k a W e i s s Assistant Professor Graduate School of Art & Hybrid Media Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 1031 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130 mwe...@samfox.wustl.edu http://samfoxschool.wustl.edu/portfolios/faculty/monika_weiss
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