dear all just watched Mark's film that he shared with us (thank you), and also saw Alan Sondheim's photograph, chasmb39.jpg, of a late wintry landscape, and pondering the layerings of Marks' film (the white sliver a gap, crack from the sky, distorting the/a view from above, rolling over the landscape at the edge of the sea?), I felt compelled to ask Mark to tell us a little more about what is meant by "decaying landscapes" and the reference to "Albion."
The reason for my interest is also connected to a small cultural and political inquiry, if I may bring it up very briefly, namely what some are now discussing vividly, the so-called "new materialism." I attended a roundtable on Thursday at U of Westminster in London, on NEW MATERIALISM: POLITICS, AESTHETICS, SCIENCE (https://www.westminster.ac.uk/events/new-materialism-politics-aesthetics-science), trying to lear more about the interest in 'vibrant matter.' There someone offered a talk that puzzled many, then energized and invited fervent debate. I mention it because last year, after Alan and I moderated a discussion on ISIS and absolute terror, Alan expressed at some point his horror at the destruction of the ancient Assyrian site of Nimrod, the pillage of historic monuments and artifacts. In light of Mark's film, I'd like to figure out what "Albion" here stands for, and whether, etymologically, there are some strange layers here going on not only in the film but the "patrimony" of the word or whatever [albu, elfydd/elbid, "earth, world, land, country, district" /other European and Mediterranean toponyms such as Alpes, Albania; *albho-, a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "white"? etc) the white cliffs and islands refer to........ And why is "landscape" decaying at all? is it really? or are the human built houses and bridges and architectures meant by that, are they crumbling? What I want to throw up here, for discussion, is what Ben Pitcher at Univ. of Westminster (its entrance in the building referencing king Edward VII) provocatively suggested in his talk on "Isis Iconoclasm and Rocks and Stones in Material Culture" -- he argued that rather than morally condemning ISIS and their iconoclasm at Nimrod, one could see such destruction as a creative act, and a touch (a haptic intervention) of stone and rock that does not reduce the object but modify and revivify something of a revelation (revealing the inside of the stone, and also, in the video/performance of the hammering down of the reliefs, drawing attention to a masonry quite common of the era and distributed widely in Iraq and the neighboring regions) Copies of copies. What Pitcher suggested is to look not at the destruction of an "original" (myth) or an order but compare that iconoclasm (ordered, as ISIS of course ideologically correctly argues, by the prophet) with the colonial regimes and their perverse upholding of their order (having "requisitioned" others' cultural patrimony or heritage for museums, in London, Berlin, Paris, New York, etc; forbidding touch/ 'do not touch the object') in the former west that extracted the artifacts and monu ments of Iraq and Egypt to transport reliefs/tombs to their museums onto their display of their power. What interests me here is the posturing of power, and the decay implicit in myths of cultural heritage anyway, and what is "preservation" standing in for? What chasms? regards Johannes Birringer dap lab ________________________________________ From: netbehaviour-boun...@netbehaviour.org [netbehaviour-boun...@netbehaviour.org] on behalf of Mark Hancock [mark.r.hanc...@gmail.com] A short video, filmed at Port Isaac in Cornwall (UK): Interspersed amongst the decaying landscapes of Albion https://vimeo.com/158726454 _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
