Self portrait, Southsea, first half of 1980s....Palais Royal and Luxembourg Fountain

 Le Gibus, Paris...

 Bateman Street Oakland, ph Kristin Ross, 1985

Passage du Grand Cerf before rebuilding

Some queerish outcomes of archives....

Here I am just re-editing some photographs from an archive I used in Street Noises and commented at some length. In my view the archive - or at least these images - was first turned up to the light of day in the wonderful Cahiers gais, kitsch, camp, but appeared there without comment. 

I rediscovered them after what seemed like fruitless months in the Archives Nationales, remember, no digital catalogues, trying to make the words homosexual, invert, sailor, legionnaire rhyme and coincide. 

The outcome was this extraordinary record of the surveillance of homo sailors in Toulon and their friends, admirers and, sometimes, clients. Florence Tamagne rediscovered them again in her big book on Homosexuality, but without acknowledging either the Cahiers or me - (I often giggle at the provincialism of French scholarship....Anyway pics, then some pages from Street Noises.)

Entre temps, let me say, that these PERFORMANCES remind me why I never went with the Butlerian performative, that somehow, for me, traduced both J L Austin and gaiety..

The cover picture Hélène Hourmat gave me for Street Noises shares this poetic, uncannily, and that, if you like, is the pathos formel, an involuntary memory of an affect. It helped me to write, having this image in mind,

 www.helenehourmat.com

 So here are four pages from long-out-of-print SN on the sailors......... jpegs

More Images of the Paris Commune, an old exhibition

Here are some boards from the fifty or so that I made for an exhibition I made, in the very early 80s I think, for the Portsmouth City Gallery. It was an attempt to make a narrative out of image collage and juxtaposition, using as few words as possible, but plenty of written archive material, police reports and so forth, that normally remain the historian's secret. I wanted to dramatise the gestures of class struggle and social conflict and also to figure PARIS AS THE CITY ELECT OF URBAN MASSACRE, as well as most aspects of the Commune that were then historiographically current. 

This has much in common with the history from below movement in France and the work of Alain Dalotel and Jean-Claude Freiermuth, as well as, more ambivalently, Les Revoltes Logiques. Necessarily it was a bit more workerist than that and maybe more inspired by Lucien Descaves novel Philémon, vieux de la vieille. I'll scan some of these materials too in the near future.

All of this was made from my own slides, negatives or positives, often taken in quite perilous postures in archives and libraries and I printed all of it, apart from the small colour images, on different weights of Kentmere paper in the Fine Art Department darkroom. I loved this endless artisanal work and the rough feel of the display gave some sense of the difficult conditions of the survival of these bits of paper.  

The last two show some of the work of Gaillard and his son, with some pages from Gaillard's pamphlet on foot-shaped shoes, police reports and then, below, from shoes to Barricades, that Gaillard authored just as he had authored the gutta percha boot!

the enemies of the Republic, documents listing silver carried by Napoleon 111's defeated army and items from the Exposition... with satire, Victor Hugo

 

The Club movement of the late Second Empire and Commune, the upper image of the board immediately above is from a series of 16  unedited journalistic drawings in the BHVP, above Gaillard fils journal, see older posts on my blog for better definition.

 

 The image of the workers at the Exposition Universelle and as Criminals after the Commune

the Siege, famine, the middle class woman as christian charity

satires of priesthood

politics and photo-reportage

Petroleuses, club women, less than human, ready to die..

Death to, death of...

The Vendôme column, Courbet, Napoléon, Armould's signing of the decree of demolition

Thiers in three cartoons by Gaillard fils (my hero, if ever I were to queer the Commune it would start with him,,,,), below two more by him, Thiers and the Plutocracy, Thiers and Prussia

Aide memoir and repetition of images against rulers.. below, images of the end, the rag-picker as collector of the waste of the slaughter..

 

Here is a short note made fore a Centre Cath conference at Leeds some years ago where I opened for myself the question of queering the Commune, the lecture, in French, at the Centre Pompidou, where I do set out from the drop of cum can be found at, but no Commune Ha!

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xiwjl2_selon-patricia-falguieres-let-s-queer-art-history_creation#.UZS3xYKnTZo

it is the fourth, all worth watching:

Making do with power point, or the poetics techno-bêtises

Recently I have been working with almost extravagantly complicated power point presentations that, nonetheless, I hope, have little to do with multi-media or son et lumière or disco balls; rather attention, attending to, a co-attending of me and the listener viewer, speaking and hearing over and under, loosing control a bit. The idea - of course - is to build on the notion of the Mnemosyne atlas as a road map rather than as a prompter of voluntary or involuntary memory, maybe a map of future yellow bricks, with some kind of a surprise near the end, or just a predicted outcome that I have struggled to bring into visibility, or at least justify in its being seeable. 

Above you can see an overview of the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford, a museum of the iterable and infinitely differentiated samenesses of human gestures, pouring, blowing, scraping, squeezing, attending (to) and so forth. Next to it is a page from the Edgar WInd Archive, to be found in the basement of an adjoining building, part of his slide-lists for his last lectures on Botticelli's mysteries, given in 1965. The trace of a rhythm of slide and voice, clunking, fanning, speaking, as the pieces are shifted here and there in the arguments until a magical Botticelli appears, a man who believed in the equality of humans and angels. Oh, sublime heresy. In a way Wind adopted the posture not of his teacher and colleague, Aby Warburg, but that of the Pueblo Indians in Warburg's Serpent Ritual, who danced for rain --- When Wind danced, it poured, sympathetic magic and pragmatism flowed together.

 And here, above, a little icon suggesting the presence of Wind's voice in his Reith lectures (I will get all these things up in time), which can overlap with that of Richard Tauber and the strange, other exile of two gay boys in Buenos Aires at the beginning of Happy Together, and, in Pitt Rivers, our attending to history's sounding in the silent vitrine.

Here is a download from you tube, a fragment of Sally Potter's Tango Lesson, beautifully in Italian (oddio), which also entrains the juxtaposition of images in mimicry and invention: 

...... while here is a loop
of one of JS Bach's
canons on the left
hand of the opening
of the Goldberg Variations, which I take as a guide to action, if ever we thought going forward and backward were an easy thing to undertake.

 

This is what I mean by theory......... But now I am showing my shows like comic strips, and I stay silent.

Things are not what they used to be ....

Home Porn, early experiments, or who does not want to be an artist?

Strange effects of digital noise.

Getting going again

this is a pic of me, my most recent, taken just after Xmas by the tomb of Chateaubriand at St Malo, just to the left, the gloom is not due to the death of the great man some 2 centuries ago, but the gathering of a possible non hypothetical storm.....

I wanted for a moment to give a sense of onto-lourdeur!

so here is a link to an artist I like: very gay:


http://marcadelman.com/

and a link to a recent political argument about his work:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/artist-not-happy-after-jewish-museum-takes-down-his-work/

and here is one of my emblems called = in this case, 'what on earth did Saint Sebastian want, or beyond Derek Jarman:

Once again on Blasphemy

In the heat of the discussions, if that is what they are, around "The Innocence of Muslims' ( I have watched it on Youtube and it reminds me of 'The Life of Brian' in such a way that I wonder if that could now be made, just as I wonder if Jack Clayton's great work, 'The Innocents' could any longer survive its Jamesian finale of sexualised and evidently abuséd childhood. Actually it is gratuitously rude and the product of a provincial regression to adolescent fears and fantasies so extreme that it could only come from someone in the Tea Party or planning to give money to M Romney. It's a pity anyone has lost a life over it, dogend of yanqui imperialism.

Above is another cartoon by the great Pilotell, from the period of the Paris Commune, 'Les Amours de Prêtres', a series dealing with the much publicised discovery of a large number of female skeletons in the church of St Laurent - giving rise to the idea that for years the priests had been seducing and then killing nuns and novices - as fine an anticlerical fantasy as I know, and, as it happens, one that, even if it were not true of the time, was to be prophetic. The catholic church in Ireland, Australia, Italy, here in the UK, wherever, has acted out this 'insult' as if it were a prescription for future performance.

So it is just as well to recall the Woman taken in Adultery, the question of the first stone, and the rather wonderful art that this parable was to produce! Here is a Poussin for a start, so let's think, this is today's lesson, folk, that Poussin and Pilotell have more in common than you might have thought!

By the way, the writing in the dust is a red herring laid by Jesus in one of his more Pasolinian moments.

Too much money ... redistribution is the only way out .. On Anri Sala in the Pompidou

 

Any idiot, I'm sorry to be so blunt, should know that, in these days of Marx not being so out of date after all, crises like the current one are crises of overproduction, not just of goods, golf courses, ecologically ruinous seaside settlements all over the Med and the Mid West but of debt, induced dissatisfaction, ambitions and diverse forms of unfulfilled narcissism and so forth and so forth, and that the only true role models in this are not those delightful Olympic divers with their pretty tummies, but the currently much derided bankers and financiers and so forth and so forth to whom under the aegis of saving the economy the whole of the productive forces have been handed over under the guise of 'saving the banks'. Stuff the geese, then tear out their liver in the form of distraining the goods that have poisoned them, oh what a romantic anti-capitalist I sound, feed finance and you have a great scenario about laughing gas. I'd rather be that than, I'd rather be that, I'm not at all ashamed, I even agree with Zizek on Greece, or even he agrees with me for a change, the rattle of the fascist voice comes from the throats of the assembled capitaines and captains of the IMF, the EB and so forth and so forth.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with Anri Sala ?whose work, generally speaking, I like a lot. The Pompidou exhibition consisted of four film and sound pieces projected serially onto a number of immense hooded screens with ultra high quality sound diffusion as well, and the pieces were ones on which he had recently given a very good lecture at the AA in London. One could call this exhibition something like 'Seeing Sound' an extraordinarily beautiful and engrossing display of the phenomenology of being here and there, acoustically and visually all at one, of a certain split between seeing and hearing. But something made me uneasy about the way in which the very young crowd trailed from screen to screen as one or another seemed to predominate in the aspect of projection, although one could perfectly well stayed still and heard all of it as an achievement of what it has to offer. Like a flock. A flock of art lovers. Like a flock of art lovers, in fact, a bit like the way once I saw the Surrey brigade following Burgundian miniatures with magnifying glasses at the RA. In the end, engrossed though I was by Sala I decided to sit on one of the attendants chairs, we the public were offered some horrid rubberised cubes, and read my Kindle, The Magic Mountain - again - and it worked out very well. The more inattention you pay the better it gets. And you don't have to marvel at the far too much money of the installation, they way in which the already interesting enough artist is banked on as a spectacle. The effect of this is thoroughly weak, you forget it and half an hour after leaving the Pompidou I had muddled its pleasure with that of seeing Spider Man!! Bad redistribution if ever there was.