One of the projects I've been working on this month has been a video collaboration (with the talented Izzie Klingels, who has a long history of making pretty amazing videos professionally, including producing visuals for music acts such as Death In Vegas) for the upcoming show at Ghost Gallery, which will open on July 8. I consider myself lucky to be included amongst the group of artists presenting new works there: Joseph Patrick Gray & Keith Tilford, Frank Correa & Nick Bartoletti, Tabor Robak, and DUMB EYES. I daresay this exhibit will be an eyeful for even the insatiable visual glutton.
The Klingels/Manitach video promises a buffet of 1920's porn, Brueghel-esque bon-bons, with a generous side of Fernando Arrabal, among other things....
stills from a video (investigating a cow's tongue)
Now what of the little girl, she who is, in Freudian terms, always already castrated, thus impervious to all threats of castration? How does she respond to the evidence of sexual difference, which entails or presupposes her inferiority? A careful reading of Freud's writings on female sexual development strongly suggests that many little and big girls are engaged in a rebellion against the "fact" of castration every bit as energetic as the fetishist's. Indeed, if one takes as one of the hallmarks of fetishism the split in the ego (Ichspaltung) to which the fetish bears testimony, then it becomes possible to speak...of female fetishism, for the little girl's ego can be split along the very same fault lines as the little boy's.
Naomi Schor "Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand"
Like Barthes's punctum or Lacan's point technique, the superfluous, perplexing, derailing detail operates as the object of one's love, apprehension, hunger, or repulsion. It is the detail that affords a point of entry into the aesthetics of textual appropriation, an aperture or rent proceeding from a small, fixed image. Spots, tattoos, bloodstains, stigmas, scars, abrasions, hairy patches, stained clothing, worn keepsakes, fingered relics--these emerge as those details that stand out as dark symbolic concentrates in the visual field of fetishistic description.
I posted photos of my little bibelot a few weeks ago, and finally edited some video fragments to share (filming by Damon Mori):
occasional notes written during the sewing:
The hemorrhaging of a ruffled muscle (and its protruding) out between the walls of the mouth:
The ruffled mouth
The ruffled effusion of sinews which stretch like pearlescent tissue between anchor points on the brown bone
(ectoplasm)
.
When I began, the tongue was plump and cold. To feel it warming between my fingers is to feel it gently decomposing, and across the span of days I can feel the tissue gradually weakening, as the frayed ends of my threads dissolve into invisible but still troubling knotted filliments, which cannot easily be traced let alone undone. I am sewing first of all clusters of nailheads, then slowly adding little starbursts, lozenges, pyramids, and hearts. Lots of little multi-faceted hearts of all sizes lacquering and twinkling and eventually obfuscating the mat of furry pearly papillae.
.
the tongue (lamb's tongue is a common flower name)
the tongue as symbol and center of speech, of sexual acts, of innocence (the lamb), of innocence dead (the butchered dinner), of symbol and/as language, of nourishment, of hysterical gesture (the tongue jutted out from the mouth spasmodically - contracture de la langue provoquee a l'etat de veille chez une hystérique par reflexe auriculaire), the Lamb of God, Mary's little lamb, the black sheep --- against positivist materialism and rational discourse and towards symbolic materialism and irrational discourse.
.
The week I turned thirteen I was in attendance at a religious camp where kids were taught to speak in tongues -- -- I felt the terrible flush of shame and disappointment at not being immediately gifted with this lavish proof of inhabitation at the first test, and then being instructed to open my mouth and move my tongue freely between the teeth, around the sweating walls of my mouth, to speak without making meaning, to take flight from reason or thought, I finally reached a climax of bodily dissolution that released the logorrhea I desperately desired.
If I now open my mouth to speak the blessed blue glossolalia (you could say: the purplest prose of all) I get syllables that read like a broken record, like con-oh-rosso-shana-la-ma-shee-kee-moh-da-da, which is redoubling with a hidden text which is a blaspheming of the Holy Spirit.
The speaker gifted with glossolalia is able to fill, simply and ineffably; this tongue, cut loose from its cerebral moorings, is the perfect beastly libertine, purely and perfectly filling, spilling over with gibberish excess, a nonsensical paroxysm of filling without being or meaning, this filling which is a hobbyhorse of grief, which would, if unbridled, drive all men mad into the ground, their inner thighs rubbed pink and blossoming and unfurling with a hundred hairy splinters, an ecstatic, childish, pullulating rash, which resembles in the hot brightness of its bloom the pink of a mouth from which nothing enters, nothing issues, its emptiness described by the absence of a tongue barbarically cut out, where everything is perfectly described in endless mystery languages.
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