The boy had a butterfly on a string. He would bring it to class weighing down the end of the string under his stack of notes. It would flut around and then sit patiently on the back of an empty chair, honing its wings slow—the pace of breathing. There is no breathing in class so this was the class’s breath. Then at a moment when the boy picked up his notes to remind himself of something it would float up, pulling its string around the semicircle of chairs, leaving a loop in its slack around each student. By the time it came around, 8, 11 or 15 loops draping off each desk, lines over notebooks, across course-packets, a folded arm, a pen, in some places hanging down near the floor, in some places falling over a shoulder or missing a desk entirely and across two knees… By that time the end of the string would be clearly swept from the boy-teacher’s desk and the butterfly would settle down again on the back of the same chair, hone its wings and breathe again for the class. The students would take each loop of string and rest it on the crown of their head, so that when their heads would sway the butterfly would beat its wings a bit faster. At the end of the class the teacher would ask for the end of string back, collecting a loop from each student as they said farewell and with it all coiled in hand he would sit for a minute in the room alone with his butterfly, and breathe deep –glancing once more to the side to synchronize his breath with the butterfly’s— [51]
Really there coloured pencil on paper 24x32cm [52]
23.// DANIEL TAYLOR [53]
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24.// IMOGEN KWOK As someone who relies on using my hands for work and understands concepts best through tactile experience, these past months have made me acutely aware of my body and sense of touch. I mostly wrestle with cravings for closeness with other people and my physical surroundings as it is now discouraged and deemed unsafe. I revel in different textures and have to suppress the desire to constantly run my fingertips over things while outdoors, whether a smooth countertop, ribbed wallpaper or door handle. (no title) [55]
25.// MERVE ISERI Rider watercolour and ink on paper 22 x 28cm [56]
Good morning Alice, 26.// ALICE MINERVINI & GUY RONEN Your sentimental web has made me think about cruising, about my personal first cruisings, about the difference between cruising and scrolling, between bodily wander and the sacredness of synagogue scrolls with their stiff metal finger (in case you need some visual - https://www.google.com/ search?q=%D7%90%D7%A6%D7%- 91%D7%A2+%D7%91%D7%99%D7%AA+ %D7%9B%D7%A0%D7%A1%D7%AA&rlz =1CDGOYI_enIL591IL591&hl=en- US&prmd=imnv&source=lnms&tbm=is- ch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjkl9uC_pTpAhX- VD2MBHcMvDIgQ_A UoAXoECAwQA- Q&biw=375&bih=551&dpr=2#imgrc=0WS- 48bYlV8qJeM). Thinking about how I used to use the internet for questioning (but obvs also defining and circumscribing at the same time) my sexuality in dark forums, first time getting to know the language of ‘thick, 18 cm tool’, but within an architecture of questions and open and close windows and mouse and keyboard. How can we think again about this platform without the questions being immediately autocompleted? Please go through a news outlet, considering it a provider of news but also an abstract forum of answers to people’s speculations, and construct from it in any way you want a forum for the contemporary Alice. Try to use unconventional body parts for wandering through this news outlet and try to record your bodily wander. Choose some of your favourite answers and make sure they reach as far as they could, maybe finding their way back to other scrolls www.english.thekotel.org/kotel/send_ note/ [57]
03/05 Good morning my dear, Today I want you to explore the sound, the hello can u hear me? are u there? and the technical glitch of these days (or any other day before covid19), the robotic sounds of our devices and their unintentional humour. Try to record your interactions with tech from when you wake up until you fall asleep and how those sounds punctuate your day (like alarm, notifications and so on..). Try to change your habits slightly (does the sound change if u digit with other fingers respect the usual?). Record the systems error of your brain/tech interactions. Leave it there for now. Draw an human shape (in your mind, on paper, on paint www.jspaint.app/#local:f2d7179c71cf5 and invent futuristic extensions for our body parts, new technological accessories or the devices of your dreams. Maybe a finger vibrator? or x rays glasses? a ticking bra? Be as specific as you can and remember to focus on sounds too. Please explore the non-yet-existent and the stupid and the absurd. As conclusion of these explorations, I want you to record an audio piece. Try to include the sound of your voice, loops and ofc soundscapes of the existing and futuristic devices. When you’re done, set this track as your alarm for tomorrow and see if you’ll wake up and what it’ll make you feel like (hope you won’t hate me too much). If you don’t have an alarm in these days, set it as your alarm anyways. […] 12/05 Good morning Guy, Today let’s indulge in our excuses.. We’ve been giving ourselves absurd-no-sense-tasks for a while now, evaluate the trajectory of the tasks.. Did you surprise yourself or at least did u allow yourself to be surprised? Are we achieving bits of what we intended? What’s missing? Is there value on those failure? Try to reach out with feedbacks somehow if u feel like. What is the new ‘sorry miss my dog ate my homework’ ? What’s the new (zoom calls) hangover-school-outfit? What’s the apology of the web for all those glitch and frozen screens? It’s working even too much these days and with no-recognition.. All those poor cookies constantly everyday seeking for data… Will technology ever accomplish what it was made for? What the world would be with a no-screen day a week? Or if the internet collapsed with no notice? Poor influencers.. Vice article says their lives are already over due covid-19. It has nothing to do with that, but some genius (Italian design) created a page called: ‘Replacing Coelho quotes with Mark Fisher quotes under influencers’ pictures’. See attached. Everyone’s live and nobody’s watching.. How to escape? Is it maybe a form of strike? How do you celebrate failure and rejection of work without indulging in other work? Write a ballad in your mind or not at all 16/05 Goood morning Alice, Maybe our best excuse is that the algorithm ate our identity? Maybe we need to find a way to wander through the web with our own personal face disidentification mask? What would it mean to create a spontaneous choreography online now? How can we change our movement on this infrastructure? So - I want you to try and decide on a character you’re going to embody, will this character be your mum, dad, dog, Pasolini, or whoever you want. Write down attributes and tropes for this character- what is their homepage? What is their favourite search engine? Do they have social media accounts? Where do they spend their hours of being confined to the screen? Where do they shop emotionally online and what do they buy? Now use the web as this character. Try to create their online choreography - how do they scroll when they are excited? Do they move the mouse as they read? Try to create a virtual dance and record it. (These are excerpts from our shared web experiments, small daily quests for questioning ourselves in relation to the WorldWideWeb that we were written over the first lockdown between Florence, London and Tel-aviv. Alive Minervini & Guy Ronen) [58]
26.4 Good morning Alice, I hope you enjoyed your virtual night travel! For our first web experiment, and as it is incredibly sunny in here today, I thought we should start with something quite easy: 1 . Take your laptop and phone, and find a place from where Florence is visible 2. Open your browser and play the first youtube video that comes after searching florence (let it k eep on autoplay) 3. In a different window, open google maps and choose any place that takes you back to a child h ood spring 4 . If it has reviews, please copy them to another document and try to construct a poem out of them (you can translate them into english at any stage you want, however it is not necessary) 5 . Turn on the sound from the video, go into google street view, and please record with your p hone your virtual wander around the memory whilst reading out loud the poem 27.4 Good morning Guy, I don’t know if I was daydreaming or what. Apology for my early morning cruelty. 1. Close your eyes. Dance to whatever the algorithm gives you, including the ads. 2. Fall in love with an object, you can choose whether online or offline, and dance to conquest it (open your eyes at any point or not) 3. Write a sentence narrating your adventures using as many images/metaphors as you can. 4. Translate it into emoji only. 5. Now translate the emoji into text again. Write a love letter to your future self www.futureme.org/ from the perspective of the object (can be as long or as short as you want, but it must include your last translation). 30.04 Good morning Guy, fuck lameness, world’s already disappointing at moment, let’s make sentimentality great again. For your task I want you to write a computation poem (open to your interpretation what this is) about your early days on the internet. In which sites did you wander? What attracted you there? What feels like thinking about that now? I remember my parents bringing me to internet points during travels, or getting back home after holidays with hundreds notifications on facebook. Just found out that amazing www.blingee.com is still there and I can’t stop laughing. I don’t even remember where I would post those pics, even before facebook was there. Please do me a blingee to commemorate our old golden days, even if you never see amazing blingee before. Be sure it’s as trashy and nostalgic as you can. Sync in progress (especially on May 1st)... 02/05 [59]
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body glyph, scriptures 27.// ANASTASIA FREYGANG as i sat by the stove in the summer in this boat-a-shell it was freezing at night there was candle light and i had no company and started drawing more words: singulus enigmatica, dramatica. nautila luca com sombre pendant gavelin lofty anima espoirisima lenghi voce affiliarit tank i mare no title [61]
Made to be Loved [62]
28.// CECILIA DI PAOLO [63]
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AIDS Not Over! Original notes on AIDS and disability by Andrew Zealley AIDS NOT OVER a big part of disability politics around the HIV-positive body has to do w the ways that body is marked — politically marked, socially marked — as not being capable of X, as not being desirable to X. there’s the imposition of what is and what is not possible around HIV-positive bodies, such as criminalization in terms of disclosure which, in legal terms, defines my body as “other” — this immediately creates a psychic disability through containment by the State. this is not how we usually talk when we talk about disability. AIDS NOT OVER there is no singular meaning to HIV and disability — to answer the question requires opening it up and talking about it. AIDS NOT OVER medically-identified struggles within the body that HIV is the conduit for other conditions through different kinds of pharmaceutical regimes, different kinds of diet, aging w HIV. these medically-identified struggles can be read as disability in terms of people having full access to socio-economic and sociocultural advantages. HIV and disability is a proliferation of conditions, and that alone makes it impossible to know what “it” looks like. AIDS NOT OVER to move from a position, in the political sense and in the legislative sense, to claim disability status. HIV is often listed alongside heart disease and diabetes as a disability, and in that way HIV disability becomes discursive. AIDS NOT OVER HIV disability is morally regulated through the image of sodomy. sontag, “to test poz is to be revealed.” there is a moral demarcation set-up and regulated by the caretakers of “Man’s episteme,” where they can say “you’re disabled because of your actions; you’re disabled because of your sodomy.” AIDS NOT OVER when my body is on record. [68]
When my body is on record 28.// ANDREW ZEALLEY & ROBERT BOLTON Lyrics interpreted by Robert Bolton from Andrew’s notes It’s kind of soothing, when you find out you’re dead, and alive, with the body as a conduit; The epitaph written on my tomb said: “He was not prudent, but he was kind of cute.” When you’re not sure, but you’re positive, oddly, your ID is tied to it. You resign to it; you feel like, “screw it,” as you can’t unscrew, cancel, or silence it. When I’m turned on, there’s always that red light lit. When my body is on record. And it’s kind of beautiful, when you realize your weapon is inside. The body is a conduit. There’s a vibe to it. Ride ‘til you die like you’re Juliet. There’s certain music and science to it. When you’re not certain, but you’re positive, you might deny, try to hide, ’til you’re like “screw it,” because you can’t unscrew it, that’s part of your music. Put it into your body. Put your body into it. When I’m turned on, there’s always this red light lit. When my body is on record. It’s kind of cruel, when you find out you’re “it,” defined. And your body is a conduit for a virus, a sign, and some pharmaceuticals— markers of who’s undesirable to whom. When you’re not valid, but you’re positive, you resign to whatever’s been assigned to you. At my funeral I hope that someone said: “He was not prudent, but he was kinda cute.” It’s convoluted, when you find out you’ve been labeled a sodomite. The body is a conduit. You get called immoral, but you already knew that. So bundle it and glue it with bodily fluids. When you’re unpure, but you’re positive. When you know what you want and you honour it. If I’m cruising, I’m choosing. I’m fine with the risks. Put it in your body. Put your body into it. When my body is on record. [69]
Comments on their collaboration from Andrew Zealley and Robert Bolton: ZEALLEY I have a Jenny Holzer multiple/rubber stamp in my studio archives, one of her truisms: Words tend to be inadequate. AIDS is a word (an acronym, actually) and, far from inadequate, it remains a killer: individually, politically, socially. As a sound artist (living and aging with HIV) who spends most of their time in instrumental frameworks, Holzer’s truism has maintained a magical power over my understanding of and relation to language: the rubber stamp is a kind of talisman in my collection and my creative thinking. Through ten years of collaboration, I have developed a trust in Robert’s outstanding creative capacities with words. He breathes new life in (response) to my sounds and movements and explicit meanderings. When I was working through preliminary ideas for my dissertation audio intervention, I knew that Robert would—no, must—play a part. That impulse was spot on. My body is on record. I have not been prudent and I am kinda cute. Thank you for writing my (utopian) epitaph, Robert. You put my body into it. BOLTON Andrew and I have worked together on sound and music projects for over ten years; all of that collaboration now feels like a series of studies toward our current encounter. Last year, I received by email from Andrew an audio file, “AIDS Not Over” along with his notes on AIDS and disability which he’d intended as a creative catalyst for me to interpret as a vocal part. He’d also as I remember seeded the notion that the song could become, “the ballad of the bio-citizen.” The music and text felt powerful. For me, there was a deep sense of honour and responsibility in the task ahead. Before writing or recording anything, I spent some time with drafts of Andrew’s dissertation, Risky Beeswax: Artistic Responses to the Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS — within which this song would serve as part of a sonic intervention. I also immersed myself in his very personal and risky unpublished writings, Archiving Queer Desire (and other cruising stories). What followed was among most sublime/empathic writing experiences I’ve ever experienced. The body is a conduit. Any affective poignancy I accessed or fed back is testament to Andrew’s spiritual and academic work — reflecting, documenting, applying theory, writing, and creating. Though I arranged the words, they channel his courage, humour, and intellect. The completed song, AIDS Not Over! (My Body is On Record), will be included on Andrew’s forthcoming 2LP vinyl edition Soft Subversions, on Disco Hospital Books and Records, 2021 — distributed by Séance Centre. Andrew describes Soft Subversions as a timetravelling sound map of risk, art, sex and new sexual ecologies, HIV/AIDS intersectionality and its risky representations, desire, pleasure, and aesthetic self-creation. It also sets the score for Andrew’s new video work, Lucid Dreaming Ludic Waking. [70]
29.// PATI DE SOUZA 2020 Zoom [71]
Neutral Grains (Slow Contact), 2017, Wood, glue, wax, glass, tape and lilac essential oil. [72]
I want to sleep forever so I don’t have to be productive 28.// ALEX HEILBRON Sleep imagery, poses, attitudes, and mental states have been taken up by artists to emphasize the importance of rest as resistance in their practices and pieces. Sleep is a social condition. Sleep is a biological imperative. Sleep is now a political condition. In sleep we are able to “shut down” and “restart”. There is no progress in sleep. Sleep is a non-productive activity - a symbol and site of resistance. On September 27th 2017 I started to make images and write horizontally. I built myself a practical simple bed, out of wood, and lay down every day in the studio - performing the role of the sleeper and at the same time a maker. I imagined myself as a passive female body, as a lover, as a cadaver and fell into the horizon. In the horizontal position I became aware that it is vulnerable to lie down because this position promotes non-productivity. Non-productivity is viewed as the enemy of progress, even in an art practice. I learned that object-hood is safe, easy and sexy. I realized that objects are eating the body and its masters are demoting laziness. The horizon, the bed, and sleep have been and are used as symbols and metaphors for cultural and personal concerns ranging from queer identity to illness but all artists use these devices as a way to stand against a given norm. This essay is a personal exploration of artists who have employed these devices in the past 100 years in an attempt to understand what I was doing, who I was performing for, and to contemplate the importance of this position in today’s world. Sleep as horizontality interrupting the Y axis Unmoving we exist on two, two-dimensional lines - X and Y (axis). We can continue from this logical statement and assume that when we lie down and sleep we are on the X-axis (the horizontal). When we’re standing we are on the Y axis. When one begins to move in three-dimensional space, X and Y are intersected by Z (movement). In her book Formless, Rosalind Krauss writes about the horizontal: how artists have navigated this plane in relation to their erect bodies and then again in relation to the lines which run through our world - our axis, our matrix. She begins by quoting Walter Benjamin who makes a distinction between drawing and painting: “We should speak of two cuts through the world’s substance, the longitudinal cut of painting, and the transversal cut of certain graphic productions. The longitudinal cut seems to be that of representation, of a certain way it encloses things; the transversal cut is symbolic, it encloses signs.” Benjamin sees the longitude as painting. I will take that as the body, a representation of a solid, as a known thing; the transversal as a drawing or graphic. I will take that as representing signs (signals), as the unknown, as the horizon. As artists, when we lie our support down and make a “painting” we unconsciously perceive it as drawing (the horizon, the unknown). When we make a painting in an upright position, in front of our bodies, on a wall or an easel, we know it intimately because we relate it, unconsciously, to our body. Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings questioned this position. He lay his un-stretched canvas on the floor as he painted and made marks, gloopy drops. Did Pollock want to create a balance between the X and Y-axes by hanging his paintings made in the horizontal back on any vertical gallery wall? Perhaps his unconscious reasoning was that because he created these works while standing above them, he was looking at them with a vertical mind already, and they had no place on the ground. [73]
What would a Jackson Pollock drip painting look like where he didn’t stand above the surface but had made them completely horizontally? Painter Michelle Grabner makes her Untitled series of round, minimal, dark paintings with her body horizontally on the ground. Flipping around her canvases, she draws with long marks on her surfaces: only as wide as her body can reach. The marks are muted, less violent or theatrical than Pollocks, more meditative and less chaotic. Even though she is flat while making these paintings, in a position that is the horizontal body, she hangs her work on the Y: on the wall. Why would these artists hang their work vertically? For pride, for the preservation of the body and self- awareness? Our inert understanding of the horizon as low, and low as low-value, needs to be un-understood unconsciously. We need to take the horizon and make it as culturally and politically important as the vertical. Then, the body, self, ego (painting) could be un-seen as a Y and perceived as X. When I go to sleep tonight I am taking a painting with me in order for it to become part of the horizon. Sleep as non-productivity and resistance Actions performed in bed are private but when these private events are transmitted or presented to a public they become political. Mladen Stilinovic, a Croatian artist critical of both dominant political systems of his time (capitalism and socialism), made a work titled Artist at Work, which displayed his distaste for the socially and culturally implemented ideology in eastern Europe. This series is of 8 black and white photographs depicts the long-haired artist lying in his bed. The camera captures him from above, in a bed that is tucked into the corner of a white walled room. In each frame he is neither asleep nor active. In one image all we can see of him is the back of his head. In the next one his arm is draped over his head with the other passively resting by his face. He stares at the ceiling. In the next his eyes are closed with his arms under his mismatched bedsheets. This progression of tossing and turning continues over the eight images. In his essay, “The Praise of Laziness”, Mladen wrote: “People are scared of laziness and persecute those who accept it…it has been branded as the mother of all vices, but it is in fact the mother of life…I want to remove the brand of shame from laziness and to pronounce it not the mother of all vices, but the mother of perfection.” This work resists the notion of our usefulness. By presenting laziness as work - something quietly productive - Stilinovic reverses our acceptance of inactivity, that it can be useful. The necessity of sleep (it’s a biological requirement) and the inability to mine value from it is perhaps Stilinovic’s point - to be asleep is really the most political act because nothing of value exists there. The Artist at Work is a call for us to take the horizontal position and resist expected progress and productivity. Sleep as a forbidden romantic bed In it’s quiet fury, Bed, by Robert Rauschenberg, is first a statement against the hetero-masculine movement of accepted avant-garde art of its time. It is a declaration of a silent, unconfirmed intimacy with his at the time partner Jasper Johns, their relationship displayed in this most intimate object: the bed. Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed represents desperation and desire - unspoken, forbidden romance. Bed is an early example of a typical Rauschenberg combine, which is a half painting, half sculpture. The combine was an invention and a way for Rauschenberg to represent his distaste for the strict conventions displayed in the attitude and concepts of Abstract Expressionism. The members of this avant-garde movement believed in the triumph of materials over representation. This movement of New York artists was hyper masculine. Women stayed at home while the men went to the bar. Rauschenberg was cognizant of his position in this movement - he could navigate through it because of his charisma, but his queerness was probably never fully accepted by all of its members. Rauschenberg combined the two important components of this movement (painting and sculpture): he took paint and lowered the source of sculptural materials, sourcing them from the everyday. [74]
Bed was created in a studio in the same building as Jasper Johns studio.These two men also lived in the same building, Rauschenberg in the apartment above and Johns in the apartment below, and they most likely shared a bed. Their relationship occurred during a time in which homosexuality was an affront to the nuclear American family. It was not socially acceptable or lawful to be out as a gay man. This inability to publicly show their desire for each other was probably stifling. We desire what we cannot have. We hide money in the mattress if we desire wealth. If we desire an object intently we lie awake at night contemplating our emotions and actions toward it. When our desire leads to love and it is not reciprocated we cry into our sheets. If our desire must be suppressed and we cannot outwardly show a connection that we so desperately want to celebrate, acts of desperate explosive resistance ensue: writing names on the wall, sending secret messages, destroying the very relationship we thought we would do anything for. Sleep as the female identifying sick bed The bed is a private place and an important part of our lives. We each sleep - alone or with others - on some sort of bed: mats, floors, ground, a mattress held up by a frame, sometimes expensive, sometimes cheap, often handed down from one person to the next. A bed is also a place: the origin of life through consummation, birth, and where we pass from this existence to the next thing. We often hide the visibly ill in institutions, away from those who are embarrassed to see bodies that have betrayed their masters. Away from our beds and the beds of others we must be seen as useful in public. We present our bodies as healthy and happy and match our attitudes accordingly. My Bed, by Tracey Emin, famously depicted the antithesis of these conventions in a confessional work. My Bed is a chaotic proxy for a hysterical woman and the detritus that has sustained it through a depressive period. The sheets and pillows are numerous, dirt tinged with cigarette ash, shoe dirt, tear gunk. At the end of the bed a pair of used pantyhose lie with an old crusty towel. Did the inhabiter try and raise herself from the bed and fail? The only source of direct light is a candle, untouched, on the bedside table which is surrounded by self-portraits taken by the artist with a polaroid camera (moments of clarity), a used disposable razor, a pregnancy test, an empty bottle of vodka, a lip balm. The bedside table, which spills onto the floor – acting as extensions of the bed and by extension, the body - is the detritus or representational skin of the body of the artist. We are disgusted by this skin. This bed, this body, drank that vodka and sweat it out while it slept. When the public views anything that represents how the non-working and the non-productive, as the ill often are, exist in private spaces, they see the abject. Then, the not-normal and the resistant will further sink into beds, like digging in the heels - because in the horizontal position passive resistance is the norm. Sleeping as The Slow Contract I knew I had to break the idea of my own productivity through understanding what it meant to be horizontal, because horizontality leads to sleep which leads to a resistance against non-productivity. So I decided: I will make slow images and make slow decisions which reproduce this slowness found in sleep and horizontality. In order for these two to flesh out I knew I needed to know both language and deceleration. I am breaking the horizon by looking slowly, observing softly and resisting immediacy. I will break it by closing my eyes and sleeping forever so I don’t have to be productive. [75]
Bed, Robert Rauschenberg 1955, Oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports. Artist at Work, Mladen Stilinović 1978, Digital print. [76]
My Bed, Tracey Emin 1998 Box frame, mattress, linens, pillows and various objects. [77]
Leith, Edinburgh, 2019 [78]
28.// DANIEL THOMAS WILLIAMS Looking North. Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, 2019 [79]
Leith, Edinburgh, 2019 [80]
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low theory low theory is a bi-annual collaborative journal and curatorial project. Borrowing the term from cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, Jack Halberstam uses the concept of low theory as a way to undermine heteronormative definitions of success, and to argue that failure to live up to societal standards can open up more creative ways of thinking and being. Though less focused on the concept of failure, this digital publication is interested in alternative, unconventional and therefore radical ways of thinking and making as part of decolonial and emancipatory praxis. low theory is focused on bringing together a multiplicity of makers who, through their creative output, seek out new forms of knowledge and interdependent ways of being. low theory is a not-for-profit project and each issue fundraises for a charity organization. https://linktr.ee/lowtheory @low_theory
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