Some rehearsing: A bit (not) to taste

While taking notes on the essays in Appropriation (I worked from later sections to earlier sections in reverse order), I came across an image in Breton and Eluard's essay The Object of a ball.

"Objects with symbolic functions were envisaged following the mobile and silent objects: Giacometti's suspended ball which reunited all the essential principles of the preceding definition, but still retained the methods proper to sculpture." (A, 31).

I have been thinking about mouths open and closed, and ways they might be forcefully opened or closed, as a central image for my routine. The image of Giacometti's ball made me think of ball gags, which are an intense way for mouths to be forcefully open and yet blocked. The item is question can help elicit many different moods- it can be used to make a scene tragic, dangerous, sexy or comedic. 

Image from t-shirt found online of ball gag and a slogan of sorts.

More often than not images of ball gags are used for comedic effect. Episodes of the recently canceled Ugly Betty had a "love dungeon" stocked with clothing and sex toys associated with S&M sex culture. Paddles, whips, ball gags are all props that poke fun at the excesses of two magazine tycoons, Fay Summers and Bradford Meade. The audience is supposed to find this funny because Fay and Bradford are powerful and because they were old and still "getting it" on this non-normative way. Part of the humor comes from the transgressions of implied "shoulds." The powerful should be in more control of themselves (S&M despite being all about control tends to symbolize lack of control/excess when used comedically). The old should not be getting it on.   I think this is similar to how fat people are used in our popular media- they are often used for comedic effect, and it involves all sorts of shoulds.

This is important because our policy issues boil down to arguments about what we should and shouldn't do. 

Giacometti's ball lead to me to ball gags. The image of the mouth forced open but blocked is potent. I began searching for images of ball gags. I specifically wanted images of men's mouths opened and blocked with the ball gag. It is surprising to me, especially considering the ration of submissive men in S&M culture, that a Google image search did not turn up many images of men with ball gags in their mouths in the first few pages- and I was specifically querying "men with ball gags in their mouths." But it did turn op the image of the t-shirt that I inserted above (I'm not sure if every one will see this as I laid it out due to folks email programs).

And it turned up an image labeled "The Fat Man's Ball."

I decided to try to put them together in some way. The Fat Daddy Capitalists- here a figure of satire- with the sly, slightly witty slogan professing membership in a S&M sex culture. But first I wanted to be about both food and speech.

And then I wanted the slogan to be like a cummerbund on one of the "fat daddy" figures which I made into a melting mass- sort of a homage to Cadmus's images of Gluttony. Obviously, my photoshop skills are limited, but it gets a bit of the effect I want. 

A short post on Appropriation

Some quotes that I find interesting.


Richard Prince: you have to play the picture, you can't play yourself.


Kruger: I am prone to a kind of lascivious optimism. I want to question the notions of heroism and skew the conventions which loiter around depiction. 


Yve Lomax as quoted by Tickner: she knocked some metaphors off the table.


Stezaker: What is hidden in that surplus, that excess [of images], is what interested me, because it's clear that it is the tension between the world of excess and the world of everyday reality governed by its rationalist forces


Aragon quoting Ducasse: a maxim does not need to be corrected. It needs to be developed.


Debord and Wolman: Detournement is less effective the more it approaches rational reply.  


Duchamp: use a Rembrandt as an ironing board. 


Warhol: when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect


Retort: Empire and "Jihad", two virulent mutations of the Right.

Unhinging productivity

Barbara Kruger in interview tells us, "I think the 'C word' [criticism] can still be operational, can still work to put into place certain procedures and ways of looking, which have a tumultuously unhinging relationship to the etiquettes of power" (A, 115).

We should be unhinged, productively. I propose a Mad Hatter move in which as we rehearse our routines we remember that "detournment is less effective the more it approaches rationale reply" (A, 35). The "plane of immanence . . . implies a groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rationale or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess" (WIP?, 41). We are to give, for our own work, "witness to the abrupt coming together of unrelated, even incoherent thoughts" and "shameless transgression" (M, 130 and 131) "Proper grammar and syntax have nothing with making a joke funny" or a joke-machine run (SUC, 60).

I thought I wanted to use the understated overstatement as the tone for the voice of my stand up conceptual persona. My obsession with the idea of restraint (rules, norms, systems to pull meaning out of chaos) in the texts leads to its opposite. I do not wire my jaw shut to lose weight. 

To create meaty work, worth its weight, as I weigh these matters, as I am way laid by my manners, I, as the mad fool, have to unhinge my jaw. I gorge and vomit. 

I will be The Biggest Loser. To lose the weight, to lose my way, to lose my preconceptions, to loose my trek. 

This is in the mode of the Brazilian film/literature/art that uses anthropophagy as a tactic. (http://www.lorenzogunn.com/tropicalia.pdf). I try to ingest and transform some of the power of, take the strength of theory and popular culture.  

And to bring it back to image, we should let our images consume us. To quote Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, "It is the image that devours the spectator." I want to unhinge the jaws of my images so they eat my thinking, digest and transform it. 

bit=byte=bite

routine=diet (die it, dye it, dial it, deal it)

twist=unhinge