Thursday, July 28, 2011

Radical Poetics and Secular Judaism?

Solanas, Valerie. S.C.U.M. Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men). 1968. Web.

"The farthest-out male is the drag queen, be he, although different from most men, is exactly like all other drag queens...insecure about being sufficiently female, he conforms compulsively to the man-made feminism stereotype, ending up as nothing but a bundle of stilted mannerisms (S.C.U.M. qtd, by Carolee Schneemann in "Solanas in a Sea of Men" pp 90-93 in her book Imaging Her Erotics)"

Also from Schneeman's book: "Assimilating the Unassimilable: Carolee Schneemann in Relation to Antonin Artaud" pp 226-233 [Originally from Parket 50-51 (1997) pp.224-39]

"Artaud's cries for a 'true body' or 'body without organs' have new resonance as artists grapple with the implications of the virtual or electronic body in cyberspace, but in an art-world environment that often revels in eliding differences between high and low culture, and in its complicity with the fashion and entertainment industries, Artaud's search for a primordial language of pure signs is inescapably, quintessentially modernist. Schneemann's assertions of female power and sexual pleasure, often based on an archetypal feminine, have an overwhelming positivity compared to the works of may young feminist artists who engage an erotic ambivalence that frequently and aggressively invites the abject. For these artists, as well as for feminist art in a more general sense, Schneemann remains a problematic pioneer" (228 Imaging).

"...like Artaud, Schneemann seeks the blurring of boundaries between the graphic and the performative, between art and life. In taking and enlarging archetypal strokes from Cezanne and de Kooning, she activates a living environment, a 'body collage' in a numbed sensorium. Artaud, too, said that he was 'not sure of the limits at which the body of the human self can stop,' and produced drawings that 'are mixtures of poems and portraits, of written interjections and plastic invocations of elements, of materials, of personages, of men and animals' concerned, above all, with the sincerity and spontaneity of the line" (230 Imaging).

"As Hors Limites demonstrated, after about 1968 getting to know the body increasingly meant to abolish it, cut it up, subject it to endurance tests--a process Meredieu calls a 'theatricalization' or 'miming' of castraction and death that relied on real pain in places like Auschwitz, Chiles, or El Salvador to make its point" (231 Imaging).

"With Artaud the body from its inception is already myth and symbol: 'Because reality is terribly superior to all history, to all fable, to all divinity, to all surreality'" (231 Imaging).

"Artaud is such a terrifying 'black sun' because the notion of artistic activity as product cannot be further volcanic, self consuming furor, what Meredieu called his 'creative self-cannibalization' in a body which 'ceasleessly makes and unmakes itself'" (231 Imaging).

Schneemann, Carolee. "Vulva's Morphia" Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects." Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002. pp 299-307. Print.

#Also tag the NYS's influence on contemporary poetry

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