from the series Testament, 2009
bookchin.net/projects/testament.html“Testament is an ongoing series of video installations made from fragments from online video diaries, or “vlogs” that explores contemporary expressions of self and the stories we currently tell online about our lives and our circumstances. Clips are edited and sequenced like streams and patterns of self-revelation and narrative that flow and dissipate over space and time. As in a Greek chorus, individuals echo, respond to, contradict, add refrains, iterations, and variations, join in, and complete solo narrations. The project reflects on the peculiar blend of intimacy and anonymity, of simultaneous connectivity and isolation that characterizes social relations today.”
What I want to say is that we’re getting in on the ground floor of something, but isn’t that always the way? What I want to say is everything new is older than you think, but it’s the same from down the ages:
All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
What I want to say is that James Bridle is behind The New Aesthetic. I’ve quoted him often, these recent months. Only just now I realized that he’s also behind Bookkake, a publishing outfit with a questionably silly name, who, nevertheless, published the edition of Venus in Furs I keep among my reference books. I didn’t expect to find him there, though I likely should have. Perverts have been the vanguard of understanding media since Ballard, since the Marquis de Sade. Perverts are always the vanguard.
What I want to say is something about time, about storytelling, just I don’t know how to, yet. I can only gesture wildly, point at something like this, above and ask you to pay attention.
That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been…
Don’t think it’s a whim the project is called “Testament.” Here’s an essay about Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, long transcripts of courtroom proceedings that the poet turned, almost verbatim, into free verse.
“…The short vignette that concludes Testimony (1934) could serve as an emblem for the entire book:
As the case was turned over upon the wharf, a rattling was heard inside. The looking-glass was broken. The pieces were wedge-shaped; the cracks radiated from a center, as if the glass had been struck by a pointed instrument.
The looking glass, instrument for bringing the distant close, is broken; attention is drawn to the glass of which it is made, the design of cracks radiating from a center, the ‘pointed instrument’ necessary to break it. Although the looking glass could serve as a metaphor for Reznikoff’s interest in precision and focus, in this context it is a commodity, found in a packing case on a wharf, damaged in some kind of shipping or storage accident. As such, it is linked to the stories of trade and shipping that make up the second half of the volume. The lack of any reference to context—who caused the accident, the intended use for the glass—removes the instrument from its instrumental purpose, defamiliarizes the commodity from its purveyors and purchasers. Since this prose fragment is contained in a larger section called ‘Depression,’ the radiating fissures of shattered glass extend into the economic hard times of the 1930s.”
Here’s another:
“Derrida writes…that testimony relates the shareable and unshareable secret, the ‘secret of what happened to me, to me, to me alone, the absolute secret of what I was in a position to live, see, hear, touch, sense and feel’. The presentation of these secrets is a choking, a compromise and a release. It’s a release of forces because, in giving witness, the past is borne.”
…Threads knitting themselves into a new aesthetic, which isn’t really so new.
(via notational)
