Pierre Julien Fieux: Are You Human?

The humanoids of Pierre Julien Fieux’s Are You Human? (CAPTCHA) project are, by turns, stolid, startled, and contentious. They expect the question, or they do not, and sometimes it incites in them a terrible rage. They catapult it back to the site and source of its emission, where they hope it will be expected, or where it will startle, and perhaps enrage.

These creatures do not rest: they prod and pull on their own elastic flesh, to see if the resultant body will land them in humanity’s box. A head splices and the portions fly apart; they come back together, and the head becomes a cube, or a wedge, with sharp edges that jar against the roundness of simple bodies.

I’m always saying that I admire people who work in ink and in watercolor (especially those who do it well). Both media are unforgiving when it comes to mistakes, and—especially as the complexity of the work increases—require a level of forethought I've never been able to manage. In the CAPTCHA series, the artist negates any such requirement, and the willful bleed of ink on wet paper becomes the frenzy of its figure. Stolid or startled, body and mind rebel against the starting question. It reverberates through invisible bones, and makes invisible teeth ache.

Some of Fieux’s creatures emerge from a harsher geometry: a complex of vectors and fractals that expand and contract on their own, alluding to the strange intelligence of the computer which measures humanity, but has none of its own.

In the short, animated film that accompanies and prefaces Fieux’s ink drawings, we witness some faceless creature’s (inexplicable) failure of the computer’s humanity check, and her subsequent imprisonment in a transparent cell, where further tests are performed. The viewer is made to understand that proving or failing to prove that one is human is not enough and is, perhaps, impossible. Despite being impossible, it will be asked of her again and again, with the singular, unmistakable effect of her submission—in the matter of her humanity—to the authority of the computer which is distinctly inhuman.

Poetry Wednesday

Courses

The train derailed/ turned into a
tree.

There were lessons,
sensations, and soot,

And on the railway, a suited man said,
“I’m just passing through.”

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

The Sharks

by Denise Levertov

Well then, the last day the sharks appeared.

Dark fins appear, innocent

as if in fair warning. The sea becomes

sinister, are they everywhere?

I tell you, they break six feet of water.

Isn't it the same sea, and won't we

play in it any more?

I like it clear and not

too calm, enough waves

to fly in on. For the first time

I dared to swim out of my depth.

It was sundown when they came, the time

when a sheen of copper still the sea,

not dark enough for moonlight, clear enough

to see them easily. Dark

the sharp lift of the fins.

Summer's End

It's unfortunate that I've come to measure the usefulness of time spent strictly by CFPs answered and syllabuses tweaked. This summer has been productive in so many other ways, as I must remind myself. I did my fair share of work, but there was also...(drum roll)...painting!  Running and novel-reading! Cooking and music! Largely fruitless dissertation plotting! Swimming in the sea! A birthday! It was much like last summer....and that's alright by me.

On my last day by the ocean, a pair of little girls was watching me draw mermaids and dinosaurs and planets and sunflowers in the sand. They were too shy to come up to me, but as soon as I went back down to the water, they started to draw; first copies of my own scribbles, and then their own fantastic creations. It was one of my favorite moments of the summer, not only because I got to watch somebody very small create something very great, but also because it's been a while since I've had the pure pleasure of creating something lovely, or useful, or something that makes me feel productive in a way having nothing at all to do with scholarly texts, or dissertation chapters, or the perfect flow of a good syllabus.

It's a feeling I forget too easily once fall creeps up again. It's my last semester of coursework, however, so hopefully (despite the looming dissertation), more such moments and good feelings lie ahead.

Poetry Wednesday

The Jackal

The starving dog comes

Irregularly,
but always, she appears

at the delta end of this dead-end street, on
the last of the attic stairs

The jackal

who swallows universes
and chokes on the dust motes
in those vacuum spaces
of devouring, I

wish she would bite down on this,
would
show me the strength of her long jaw, but
she stands still with quick eyes and

I overbalance, I pitch and whine, I

cannot reconcile every explosion
with this welling.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

Untitled

by J. Bradley

I wanted to write “stay”
on your sides, surround
your bed with oceans
of salt. I hope he folds you
into a fox, loves you
like a splintered arrow,
brandishes the kill
of your lips. May the bouquet
of your hips wither.
May the wolves
forget your name.

The Photography of Bridget Collins

I can’t dig up much about this photographer, other than that she’s Minneapolis-born, and Brooklyn-based. Her work is simple and surreal, and sometimes just pretty. One of her photo series’ is titled Yin and Yang, and I like the idea that she’s searching out balance in compositions and objects, as well as creating it through careful set-up.

Enjoy!

Summer Playlist

The Lumineers.................................Stubborn Love

Ramona Falls...................................Spore

Wild Belle........................................Keep You

Jamie N Commons...........................Lead Me Home

The Boom Circuits...................Everything and Nothing

Joseph Arthur..................................Invisible Hands

Lana Del Rey...................................Ride

Wye Oak.........................................I Hope You Die

Daughter (Covering Daft Punk)........Get Lucky

Of Monsters and Men......................King and Lionheart

Foxes/Kid Kudi Mash-up................Home at Night

Woodkid.........................................I Love You

The Last Bison (Covering M83)......Midnight City

Running Wild

I’d like to believe that my mind never needs to pause, that there’s a constant stream of fascinating people and things and ideas in the world, and so my consideration of those things should, likewise, be constant. But my mind has been (more or less) OFF for the past two months and DAMN if it didn't feel good. I almost don’t even feel guilty about it. We get so tired, sometimes, that the gorgeous, glittering moments of search and understanding that make us love learning begin lose their luster. Sleep, I say! Sleep and run and swim in the sea and—when it strikes your fancy—read a book! A novel, even! Go positively wild.

And then you’ll be inspired again. KaBOOM!

On Holiday

Poetry Wednesday

Molt

My mariner,
in sum loveliness
and piecemeal disappointment:
I have been finding your baked-clay-coat,
powder-fine,
crushed into the carpet.

It will not come loose
for me:
I lick my palms, I bow low to it;
After the harvest, I wet it down.
I try to make something sea-worthy.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

Untitled poem from The Western Borders

by Susan Howe

To Travel Alone: The Photography of Ryan Hancock

A few months ago, I saw one of Ryan Hancock's photographs--the one of the three glowing Magi lighting up a Berber carpet and Pepto walls--and I hated it. But it's also kind of a fantastic picture, and so I looked him up. I hated a lot of his images, but there were a few that I'm warming to, that do something interesting with multiples (or, conversely, with objects or creatures in isolation).

Hancock did an interview in 2011 that I also hate and love in equal measure. He praised the mid-century painter Giorgio Morandi who, he claims,

manages, in just a small arrangement of two or three objects, to show the predicament of something infinite being bound up in something temporal. His paintings flicker between being a particular group of objects, during particular hours of daylight, and through the artists’ translation into paint, of being terrifying reminders of the incredible vastness of non-existence surrounding us. Reminders how much easier it is simply not to be, and the grace by which anything actually exists. I’d love to do something similar in a photograph. I’m always trying to solve that problem.. how to address what I feel are the biggest and most basic issues (why and how do we exist, rather than not exist) without becoming heavy and boring and cliched and precious and… any other of the infinity of ways any work of art can fail. In fact, I’d say my relationship to my images is to give up hope of succeeding in a way I’d like, and then shooting it anyway.

The vast majority of his pictures seem, to me, exactly cliched and precious: Twelve peaches in a porcelain sink crowned artfully by a bunch of green leaves; two dozen firecracker nubs, burned-out and scattered in an oil stain. Is this a failing?

Hancock seems to appreciate things in bunches, or as nebula. Even when a single subject draws our attention, there is something multiple in the picture (and it's probably more interesting). There is a naked and moon-pale man wading in a goldfish pond, but I can't stop looking at the tree whose reflection he has entered and split, separating its highest and lowest branches.

I'm put off by the romanticism with which he describes his background and practice. Speaking of the trees he slept in while growing up in Flintstone, Georgia, he sounds like a prose poet, or a scholar writing on Gordon Matta-Clark. Describing early adventures, he becomes Dean Moriarty, watered down and lukewarm:

When I was 18 or 19 I packed my Civic Hatchback full of rice and beans and a small propane stove and drove all over the country one summer. I slept in hotel parking lots and saw all but three states. This was before cell phones, when you could actually feel alone, and I've never been more lonely in my life. It was such an essential experience. I generally like to travel alone, maybe because of that trip.

The artist becomes the "eye in the sky" whose height allows him to observe the bunches (and the nebula), and to draw meaning (or perhaps make it?) from their arrangement. When the subject is singular, its framing becomes a confrontation, and multiplicity happens between the viewer/artist and it. We are drawn into the nebula, and it is left to some higher eye to draw meaning.

Poetry Wednesday

The May Bed

First was a blue bed, earned and made
and framing both
with fingertips matched overhead, and morning
glories growing
Offering not shade, but sustenance,
satisfying something in me, impossibly,
with hunger, making me
unashamed.

I cannot explain this adequately;
I cannot tell this to you if you do not already know it.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

(Back to) Life Updates

Hello little houses! It's been too long, but I'm done with my penultimate semester of PhD coursework, and human upkeep type things (grocery shopping, sleep, exercise, hugs, etc.) are reentering my life. Hooray! 

Expect new posts soon!

Poetry Wednesday

The Wreck 

I named the brown-small ghost of my childhood love
after a flower, a matted stray and
I would have married this, pulled from my
pockets the soft baleen,
drawn across the edge of things to the hoary limit
where we gather ourselves to gather
(debris and the sight of things)

Pinioned by the mast you look
like a child, and your hair
is curlier than I have ever seen it.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

Red Cloth

by Jean Valentine

Red cloth 

I lie on the ground 

otherwise nothing could hold 

I put my hand on the ground 

the membrane is gone 

and nothing does hold 

your place in the ground 

is all of it 

and it is breathing

"I wanted to kiss you hello."

This is truly inspiring. Here is the kind of love we should all be building:

Eleven Years Later

Last week Annie McClanahan came to the UofR to give her a talk based on her current book project, "Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture”, which, according to her website, “explores how cultural texts have been compelled to account for the expansion and collapse of a financialized credit economy.” Analyzing foreclosure photos and horror films like Drag Me to Hell (2009) and Dream Home (2010)—both which center on the housing market--

Normally, deciding whether or not I want to hear a talk is simple, depending exclusively on my interest and availability. Other factors were at play for me with this particular talk, however. Having experienced foreclosure at twelve years old, it’s hard to imagine anyone explaining or intellectualizing that which, for me, will always be duly ineradicable and impossible. And mine.

McClanahan gave an excellent talk and, I think, an important one. But I’m full of anger when I think about photographs of my old home enlarged and projected for the scrutiny of graduate students and educators. There were moments in the talk when McClanahan quickly showed stills from Dream Home, apologizing for their gruesomeness before moving onto a more pleasant picture. But she lingered over the photographs of gutted and vandalized interior spaces, remarking during the question and answer session that those responsible for the damage must have been “incredibly angry” about their eviction to have acted so destructively.

For me, the foreclosure photographs were infinitely more traumatic than those film stills of spilled intestines and blood-spattered floors. In fact, they might be quite similar, showing, as they do, different forms of absolute carnage. I’m not sure someone who hasn’t experienced the incredible anger of foreclosure can experience its photographs as truly traumatic—and experience their anger again as a result.

It’s strange to be reminded of the ways in which my past will reappear and challenge me in my academic life.

Poetry Wednesday

White and Other Things

Snow makes its minimal monument:

The shape of what was done to me, but not its color

(remains, still) Recognizable

to me, underneath

an impermanent pigment

that will alter as it rests/

weighs upon and wets

//corrosive, I point and

point again

to the blooming salt crystals.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

Water
by Pablo Neruda

Everything on the earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
nibbled away, the petal fell, falling
until the only flower was the falling itself.
Water is another matter,
has no direction but its own bright grace,
runs through all imaginable colors,
takes limpid lessons
from stone,
and in those functionings plays out
the unrealized ambitions of the foam.

Poetry Wednesday

Wash 

Imagine the ocean, raised
and growing porous.
Abandoning the fishes,
to sputter and dry at sea bottom, like
dregs.

I can inhabit this tender colloid,
such a distance from all things.
I know of and fear no ledge;
only dissipation and an emerging
World. A panic of brightness where,
beyond this safe field, color shines
and wants only to shine.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

(Ok, technically this is an instructional performance piece, but it reads beautifully as a poem, and maybe it can be a poem too)