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autolenaphilia · 10 months ago

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Some thoughts on The Coffin of Andy and Leyley

I found out about The Coffin of Andy and Leyley from an ”antiship” blog that I was on solely to block, because these people are always violent callout culture transmisogynists. Them getting very upset about this game having incest in it piqued my interest. The art looked interesting, and if these people hate it, it can’t be all bad.

(Case in point about the transmisogyny, from my understanding some people tried to dox the pseudonymous and secretive developer of this game, Nemlei. And the motivation was to prove the doxxer’s suspicion that Nemlei is a trans woman, because “only a trans woman could create such degeneracy.”)

Sure enough, TCOAAL is actually a nuanced and well-written psychological dark comedy /horror game. This is going to be more of a preliminary analysis than a review so full spoilers beyond this point. It’s by necessity preliminary since the game isn’t finished yet. My review is: go buy it if you are a fellow sicko who enjoys interesting stories about cannibalism and incest and like visual novels.

TCOAAL uses a trick from more transgressive forms of horror fiction, where the protagonists are not the heroes, but the villains, and the story is from their perspective. Andrew and Ashley Graves are murderers who kill people, sacrifice their souls to demons and cannibalize their bodies. They would be the villains of a more conventional horror story, their crimes investigated and thwarted by some heroic detective perhaps. But in this type of story, you are denied the comfort of heroes, or even innocent victims as you watch the protagonists twisted psychology lead them to commit terrible deeds.

The tone of the story mostly isn’t really horror, but very dark comedy, kinda Jhonen Vasquez-ish. The horrors are portrayed with a gleeful flippant tone, and cute appealing art. The tone mirrors how especially Ashley feels about her crimes. The game’s tone gets serious sometimes, going for straight horror occasionally, acknowledging how heartbreaking yet insane the Graves situation is, but there is a deep vein of the blackest humor.

Andrew and Ashley

Andy and Leyley themselves have this co-dependent toxic abusive sibling dynamic. Ashley is emotionally abusive, extremely possessive and manipulative towards Andrew. But her beloved Andy is the only person she actually cares about, and the rest she is able to kill with gleeful abandon in her heart.

Yet Andrew is not purely a victim. I’m going to talk at length about him, because the gap between how he describes himself and what the game shows is fascinating. I’m not the first to point this out. And it even extends to the game’s promotional material, like this official art on the game’s steam page is actually subverted by the game itself.

His character is not "doormat extraordinaire" who just "exists", the words "very not good, in fact very bad" apply to him too.

He is a victim, and loves to point at times how exploited, manipulated and abused he is by Ashley and he’s of course right. But he also uses that as an excuse for the horrific violence he commits, that he is just a doormat has been manipulated and corrupted by Ashley. “I was just being manipulated by Ashley to do it” is his variation on the old Nuremberg defense for his crimes. He has no sense of personal responsibility, no understanding that even if someone else tells you to do it, you are still responsible for your actions.

And the game itself proves that “it’s all Ashley” is not really true. A lot of the violence and murder are definitely on Andrew’s own initiative. He is violent towards Ashley too, the abuse is reciprocal. And he like Ashley doesn’t care much about other people. He gets distraught about killing people, but if you follow his dialogue, he is mostly freaked out about the consequences for himself. He is dependent on Ashley as someone who he can lay all the responsibility and blame for his own actions for. And of course, there is genuine affection there, because things are complex. He was parentified to take care of Ashley as a child and still has the drive to be her caretaker and protector.

It’s a fascinating pair of characters, and an interesting dynamic to observe.

“Der Mensch lebt nur von Missetat allein”

And the game’s writing is smart enough to have them not be an individualized evil, that came out of nowhere. Andrew and Ashley are the products of a neglectful and cold parents. Their mother made Andrew the favorite, but basically in order to parentize him to take care of his younger sister. And their dad can’t even remember the names of his kids. Not that the cycle of abuse starts with the parents, the mother had Andrew and Ashley when she was 15 and 17 respectively. But that doesn’t excuse how they ultimately, sell their kids’s lives for money to an organ harvesting scheme. This scheme is strongly implied to be part of an hilariously over-the-top soda company, toxisoda (it’s implied their soda is literally made from humans, so the company is doing the same thing that Ashley and Andy does, but on an industrial scale).

This is the situation that pushes Andy and Ashley to become evil murder-cannibals horror movie villains they become. They are deliberately being starved to death, and decide human meat is preferable to that. And the point here is obvious. To quote Brecht, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” or in english translation “Food is the first thing. Morals follow on.” Andy and Ashley are bad people who kill and eat other people, but they are the product of an evil society. A family system where children are property of their parents to be abused and sold. And ultimately a capitalist system which kills people to feed others, a societal and systematic version of what Andew’s and Ashley does. They literally become cannibals to escape becoming literally or essentially cannibalized themselves by the capitalist system. Capitalism is a system which works on prey and predator dynamics, and they just fought to became predator instead of prey. To further quote the same song by Brecht, in capitalism, “Der Mensch lebt nur von Missetat allein” or in english “mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.” And in that broader view, Andrew and Ashley’s small-scale evil is dwarfed by the system they are born into.

Incest

It’s with all this context the game’s treatment of incest must be understood. It’s a horror game, about two siblings with a fucked-up abusive relationship. Of course there is incest, it’s far from being the worst thing these two do. The game only gets more explicit about incest in one optional ending, but it’s there explicitly and subtextually from the very start. Ashley jokes about it repeatedly, it’s there in the possessive jealousy Ashley feels for any of Andrew’s girlfriends, it’s implied in the casual physical intimacy of the siblings. Like it’s very obvious that their fucked-up but close relationship can lead there right from the beginning of episode 1. It’s a very natural conclusion to their dynamic. And the characters know it, Ashley definitely knows it, and their own mother accuses them of it. Andrew denies his mother’s accusation of fucking Ashley, and he’s probably not lying at that moment, but his relationship with Ashley leading there make perfect sense and he is not just capable of admitting that. Anyone who claims to have played this game and then claims be shocked that there is an optional incestous ending can’t have been paying much attention. This is the incest cannibalism game.

The Graves siblings are heading towards committing more murder as long as they stay alive, and incest is a minor sin for them. And probably not even the unhealthiest way for their relationship to develop. It definitely won’t fix them, but I doubt it will make things much worse.

And condemning the game morally is just absurd. This is a horror game, and you are outraged about the incest and not the murder-cannibalism? The Graves siblings relationship is not portrayed as healthy and the incest is part of that.

In fact the game portrays this double-standard in the actual story. It’s the possibility of her kids committing incest that finally makes Mamma Graves admit she is “the worst mother ever”, and not the whole selling the lives of her kids for money thing.

Sure, there is a fair argument to make that the incest is romanticized and fetishized. Ashley and Andrew are certainly drawn as attractive, and even the abusive elements can be part of the fetish. But the thing is, Ashley and Andrew are not real people, it’s fiction, it’s not real incest, so if people get off to it, I have no reason to see it as a problem.

The antiship blogger was actually especially angery about this official art from a devlog and honestly after playing the game, it kinda sums up my feelings about the incest controversy:

#the coffin of andy and leyley #my writings #gravescest #kinda #also i had much fun quoting brecht here #the coffin of andy and leyley spoilers

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listen-to-the-inner-walrus · 2 years ago

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okay so after i saw the announcement of a stranger things animated show, i looked into it just for more context and found out that this year, a stranger things stage show opens in london, and as a british theatre nerd, i may have fell down a rabbit hole.

to preface, i have not studied drama since i was 16. i did not pursue further it as much as i wish i had. i have, however, seen many many plays and musicals, both amateur and professional. i know at least a little more than the average person.

so if youre remotely interested in hearing amateur analysis of what we know of stranger things: the last shadow, welcome:

"take theatrical storytelling and stagecraft to a whole new dimension"

so in one article, i found this quote. i couldnt find who said it exactly, just someone associated with the play.

i'm hoping, this is just marketing; i really hope its just marketing. because this feels a bit insulting to uh, a lot of people who came before. such as augusto boal who founded theatre of the oppressed or konstantin stanislavski or bertolt brecht or antonin artaud who founded theatre of cruelty.

i mention artaud because im expecting some elements from theatre of cruelty. if you look up any artaud plays or theatre of cruelty plays on youtube, youll probably get why.

but anyway, as you might have gathered, this hasnt inspired confidence in me. and i already wasnt confident because it is very difficult to translate film or tv to theatre, and vice versa. look at phantom 2004. i dont believe the duffers would be able to do this; this isnt even a knock on their writing, i dont think most writers could do this without practice.

and so i went to their website to see who else was involved

now is probably a great time to mention how inaccessible their website is. in the background of their website, there are small flashing lights all over the screen. theres no warning for this.

it literally triggered a migraine in me and i had to take my strongest medication for it. fuck you website designer.

(also, just gonna mention it here, i do like the poster and some of the website design, ignoring the stupid lights, but i cannot find the artist ANYWHERE on the website, which as an artist, fuck you)

anyway, first thing i did was look at who is writing it, and im in two minds about it. there are four writers credited: kate trefry, duffer brother 1, duffer brother 2, and jack thorne.

if you recognise jack thornes name, its probably because he wrote the awful harry potter play.

HOWEVER, hes actually quite a competent writer like 90% of the time. his plays tend to get at least 3 out of 5 stars. looking through the reviews, his best regarded plays are bunny, hope, solid life of sugar water, and his adaptation of let the right one in

that last one is very promising because he drew both on the book and film in adaptation. jack thorne does know how to adapt media into different mediums. he has also won an adaption award for his adaption of a christmas carol. his adaptation of the film after life has also be commended for being a good adaption.

this is not to say his work isnt without criticism. i mean, he wrote cursed child. he also has been criticised for slow pacing, shallow writing and one of his more recent plays, sunday, apparently had a "hello fellow kids" vibe. he is now in his 40s afterall.

so a bit of a mixed bag, but a good sign in terms of it not being simply terrible due to lack of understanding of medium.

i also have to mention that jack thorne is disabled and is an advocate for disabled folks in the dramatic arts. when he wrote the solid life of sugar water, he dictated that one character should always be played by a deaf actor. he does also write many disabled stories. his impact is a net positive.

(hes also frank skinners brother-in-law which is fun)

now, the other three writers have never written for stage, which uh, yeah, no, that does the opposite of inspiring courage in me. it is a very different process than writing for films or tv, and none of them have any writing credits for stage work.

on the poster, kate trefry is credited as the main writer which could go either way. shes not written much for screen. she has at least written stranger things episodes so shes not going into it blind.

honestly, i just hope they use jack thorne and his expertise more than they need to. hes the wise old man in their group and i really hope they listen to him and dont just try and do it all themselves.

now onto the director: stephen daldry. ive never seen his work live, but when i was studying drama, i really wanted to.

to give you an idea as to why, when david hare was working on via dolorosa, he had daldry as a co-director and when daldry responded no to hare asking if something was over the top, hare said "your top is situated some hundred yards above everyone else. ive seen your productions."

do you get why i want to see one of his productions asdfdesd his work tends to be very expressionistic and vivid. his directing style has been described as consistent stylised helming. hes won a lot of awards and he tends to get 4/5 stars at the very least on his works.

hes also helped to adapt the billy elliot movie (which is both fantastic and directed by him) to stage and it was fantastic.

hes also gay <3

the set designer is miriam buether. ive never seen any of her work live so i cant speak for the atmosphere it creates, but her setwork looks fine. shes versatile and doesnt need to go over the top with spectacle for her sets to look good.

in particular, i really enjoy her sets for earthquakes in london. the colour work there is *chef's kiss*

unfortunately, theyve kept it all very under wraps as to the tone the stageshow is going to take so i dont know how either buethers set design of daldrys directing is going to translate.

by combining them, i would expect a very expressionistic, very brightly coloured show, which, theres some cognitive dissonance round the corner.

also the premise is about young!hopper, young!joyce, young!bob and henry creel, with some kind of mystery. id expect a more naturalistic approach with this premise, but daldry isnt exactly known for that. so im in two minds.

however, one of his best regarded shows is his adaption of an inspector calls. ive only seen a naturalistic version of that and it very much reads naturalistic. daldrys was the opposite, even going as far as swapping out the fancy dinner hall for the blitz. so if anyone is gonna make it work, it would be daldry.

in terms of light design, thats jon clark. once again, ive never seen any of his work in person so im going off of photos but oh my fucking god i love his work with shadows. hes won many awards and he fucking deserves them.

sound design is the same. ive never heard a paul arditti sound design show in person and bootlegs dont have the best audio. hes award-winning, however, so it seems like thats in good hands.

one thing i was very interested about was how they were going to translate the upside down and the monsters. the show relies on cgi which obviously, you cant really do cgi on a stage; it would just look kinda shit.

their solution seems to be hiring two illusion designers.

i couldnt find much on the first, chris fisher. hes a member of the magic circle and hes done a lot of work so he seems accomplished.

the second one, im honestly kind of excited about. the second is jamie harrison who is the co-artistic director for a company called vox motus WHO ARE SO FUCKING COOL.

there is no mention of his partner in vox motus, candice edmunds, but that could mean nothing.

instead of trying to explain what vox motus do, im just gonna copy two quotes from their website:

"ours is a theatre of story-telling visuals, transformational design, magic, comedy, music, physical performance, puppetry, multi-media and most importantly thrills."

"we are drawn to stories that explore extremes of behaviour and taboos in the contemporary world: often unbelievable true tales that delve into the bizarre, glorious, exhilarating and macabre."

look up their stuff, its so fucking cool. there is also definitely some elements of artaud in their work. it gives me a lot of confidence for the show being enjoyable even if the writing is bad, because spectacle can go a long way.

i genuinely kinda want to go see this show now because i really want to see their work, and id get a chance to see a daldry play.

so like a tl/dr for this part: im not confident in the writing but i dont necessarily think itll be bad. i think the worst itll be is sufficient and mediocre, if they listen to jack thorne. i do have a lot of confident in the visual aspects and spectacle; even if the writing is shit, it will look good.

now im going to be an annoying disabled person and point out some accessibility stuff:

as i mentioned before, the website has small flashing lights all over the background. theres no warning for this. it triggered a migraine for me which was the best three options considering they could have also triggered visual disturbances in my eyes (aka seeing things that arent there due to my iih) or epileptic symptoms due to brain damage.

the theatre itself does have wheelchair access at the side of the building it also has accessible toilets. there is no onsite parking which does make it more difficult for wheelchair users.

they have said they will present captioned, audio-described and british sign language performances, but the dates are not yet set. they instruct you to keep checking . im a little intrigued about this and a little concerned considering its currently may 9th and it opens 17th november.

if you need accessible tickets, you need to have atg access membership. this is a third party company. to have this, you have to show paperwork or documents to prove that you're disabled which is often not possible for many disabled folks. i dont have a written diagnosis for anything besides my adhd diagnosis because i was diagnosed in person or over the phone. luckily, i receive pip so i qualify but its a ridiculous standard.

in the faq, theres a question about being aware of any potential trigger warnings; the answer to this is copy and pasted from the question above which asked about age rating and parental guidance, apart from them adding that there will be flashing lights in the show.

and finally some extra details:

there is a £3.80 transaction charge on top of ticket purchases

you cannot book over the phone

they are all e-tickets

currently, you cannot buy group tickets or student tickets, and you can only purchase a max of 6 tickets.

they are planning a weekly-lottery for late-release tickets, and this will be announced closer to the first show

there is not a confirmed runtime

they have no current plans to move the show outside of london

the age rating is 12+. this means under 16s must be accompanied by adults and under 5s are just not allowed in. not entirely sure how it works if youre age 6 to 11.

the most common ticket price i saw was starting at £45 (about $57). the second most common was starting at £75 (about $95).

there were some tickets starting at £20 (about $25).

i might actually buy a ticket and see it. i would have to save for it but i could do it and then tell you if its shit or not lmao

#stranger things #stranger things the last shadow #long post #kai rambles

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grandhotelabyss · 3 years ago

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This is the public-facing rhetorical move par excellence of the radical academic theorist: revel in your radicalism in the seminar room and peer-reviewed journals, but describe your program in the most bland, banal, who-could-possibly-object way for general audiences. Did you know that Marxism is “a refusal to take things for granted”? Why not “follow your dreams” while we’re at it? Never mind the part where “[w]e shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you,” to quote a poem of Brecht’s. You see this today, too, with the left-identitarians, thinkers who have a nihilistically extensive critique of liberal society—who posit in fact the urgent need to destroy this society—and then, when queried by the public or its representatives, will reply that it’s just about treating people fairly, dude.

But to give the formulation its due, if you truly take nothing for granted, if you never silence the critical intellect, you will in your own mind delegitimize your state and every state, the lives of your neighbors and then your very own life, and you will shoot yourself in the head, as in the aforementioned fictional case of Leo Naphta and the nonfictional one of Mitchell Heisman, possibly after you’ve shot some others à la Brecht or Naptha’s model Lukács, because the critical intellect left to its own devices will annul first the world and then itself. Which is why the profoundest thinkers, i.e., novelists and poets and playwrights, have always suggested a plunge into contact with reality to arrest deconstructive thought processes, from Hamlet to Herzog. Make art, make crafts, have sex, have a child, take a walk, take a drink, dig a garden, plant a tree, get revenge, get a cat—anything at all to remind you that the critical intellect allows itself to be annihilatingly disappointed at the world’s corruption only because it has lost touch with it, literally, and that criticism’s proper service to humanity is as guide and guardrail to action, not as universal solvent.

(Note the details of Hamlet’s example: he only had to kill one person, but deconstructive thought processes made him responsible in whole or part for at least four other deaths and made him suicidal as well; only when he resolved to “let be” could he strike his sole legitimate target, but by then the collateral damage was so great that he forfeited his own life and his country was conquered. A parable for the would-be revolutionary.)

Deconstruction at its best reminded us of these truths, as implied by the quotation from Montaigne that introduces Derrida’s epochal essay on “Structure, Sign, and Play,” but because it was premised on the very purity it set out to debunk—the centered structure organized by neat binary oppositions—it became a very purist argument for impurity. There’s always another binary to undermine over the horizon, always something else and more you could be doing to decenter; so deconstruction finally lent itself to the deranged purity spirals that have marred intellectual life recently. What deconstruction says about strong texts’ essential non-essentialism is basically right, but strong texts achieve this irreducible complexity on tides of emotion that criticism of all sorts has always been bad at capturing, making them elements of reality as well as interpretations of it.

I append all of the above to Leo Robson’s excellent essay-obituary for J. Hillis Miller, from which I draw the opening quotation. This witty catalogue is my favorite paragraph in the piece:

You might say that the effect of deconstruction, in its literary-critical mode, was to augment a presiding canon of largely B-writers (Baudelaire, Benjamin, Borges, Blanchot, etc) with a group of H-figures (Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger, Hopkins, to some degree Hawthorne and Hardy), and to replace a set of keywords beginning ‘s’ – structure, sign, signifier, signified, semiotics, the Symbolic, syntagm, Saussure – with a vocabulary based around the letter ‘d’: decentring, displacement, dislocation, discontinuity, dedoublement, dissemination, difference and deferral (Derrida’s coinage ‘différance’ being intended to encompass both). And there was also a growing role for ‘r’: Rousseau, rhetoric, Romanticism (one of de Man’s books was The Rhetoric of Romanticism), Rilke, and above all reading, a word that appeared, as noun and participle, in titles of books by de Man, Hartman, and most prominently Miller: The Ethics of Reading, Reading Narrative, Reading for Our Time, Reading Conrad.

Also this fun fact: “as late as 2012, [Miller] had never read anything by Samuel Richardson.” I am always fascinated by the gaps in brilliant scholars’ reading, and the more time I spent in academe the more I noticed how large the gaps really were. A generalist-dilettante, I try to read a little bit of everything and am consequently bad at being a completist of any one subject or author that a scholar necessarily is. I’ve read Pamela but not Clarissa; for that matter, I’ve read around in Derrida and De Man but, except for his rather psychedelic 2002 primer On Literature, not so much in the late and lamented J. Hillis Miller.

Further reading: my short story, “White Girl,” a dramatization of deconstructive thought processes in action, partially inspired by what I was seeing right here on Tumblr a little less than a decade ago.

#j. hillis miller #literary theory #literary criticism #literature #leo robson #deconstruction #marxism

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neighbourskid · 4 years ago

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Goodbye 2015! You sucked.

(original date: 29 December 2015)

Ah, it is that time of the year again. Christmas is over, the year slowly but surely coming to an end....

And yes, we are doing it again. Looking back on the year, seeing all that wasn't good, everything that sucked. We see it everywhere.

January: 2015 will be my year, I can feel it!

December: Oh, nevermind....

It's all over the social media. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr... we see it everywhere, from everybody.

But this year you will not hear it from me. I do, of course, agree. This year sucked. Most of it really. There were so many shitty things this year. All the killings of black people, the wars all over the world, the incidents in Paris... you name it, it probably happened.

But, as I said, you will not hear any complaining from me. No. I will look back at all the good things that happened this year. And now I should probably stop rambling about what I could do and get started. So, without further ado: My year in, well, I guess, numbers.

2015 in Movies

As you, my dear readers, have without doubt noticed, I have watched a few movies this year. Well, a few is quite understated. All in all I have been to the cinema 30 times since last December. Which, for most people, is a lot. At least most of my friends told me that I was, and I quote here, bonkers, out of my mind, crazy.. you get the feeling. A few also said they could not afford such extravagances. My answer was mostly, "me neither". But I did go, still.

So, here are the numbers. Since last December, I have-

been to the movies 30 times

seen 26 different movies

seen one movie 4 and another 2 times

seen 3 movies in one afternoon & 4 in one week

been to the movies with 14 different people

been to the movies 12 times on my own

been to 16 different cinemas

And those, my dear readers, are the movies I've seen:

It was a good year of cinema, I tell you. Very excited for next year. Can't wait to try beating my record. And I tell you, I will try. I will also try and watch the Award ceremonies. And watch the nominated movies beforehand. At least that is the plan.

But enough of movies and cinema now. Let's move on to the next category. Because besides sitting in cinemas all year, I have also read a couple of books. You who read my blog have, of course, noticed that.

2015 in Books

At the beginning of this year I planned to read 50 books for the '2015 Reading Challenge', but I guess I failed.

But I did read, mind you. A lot. For school mostly, but right after I graduated I started reading the books I actually wanted to read, the books I had at home for a long time but never read. I read novels, memoirs, short stories, biographies.. I read a lot. But I think I bought even more.

So I guess, these are my numbers for books. In 2015 I've read-

21 books

around 4.5k pages

13 books for school

7 German ones

11 English ones

3 French ones

This here are the books I've read:

I mostly enjoyed reading the books I read on my own terms. But 'Frankenstein', 'The Hitchhiker's Guide' and 'The Hound of Baskervilles', which I all read for school, were brilliant as well. I loved reading them. They were the most interesting ones I read for school.

'Die Macht der Drei' was honestly one of the worst books I've ever read. While discussing it with my teacher for the presentation I had to have about it, we mostly laughed about how bad it was. The story would have potential, mind you, but it was so badly written. It was horrible to read.

The French ones were acceptable, but I barely understood a thing.

Right now I'm still reading 'The Sherlockian' by Graham Moore (the great chap who wrote the academy award-winning screenplay for "The Imitation Game"), which is a brilliant book as well.

I'm hoping to read more in 2016, trying the challenge again, probably.

Mooooving on now. What else happened in 2015? Humm..... My shitty memory is quite challenging when it comes to such things. Well, how about a top ten of good things that happened? Yeah, sound like a good enough idea.

Top 10 Things of 2015

10. Getting my teeth. It should probably be further up the list, but idk. It was painful getting them, but it was worth it. I have them now, which is all that counts.

09. Watching the Oscars all alone in my bed, all night long and then going to school without having slept a second. It was a great night. I enjoyed that and I will be doing that again next year. The ceremony really touched me somehow. I loved it.

08. The summer camp "Connected" I helped organizing this year. It was amazing, we had a great time. And if you wanna know more about it, read the blog post I made about it.

07. Having made sure that my friend and I can go to San Diego next summer, around time for Comic-Con. I feel like this should be way up the list, but it's just the planning. I know that if I make a list at the end of 2016 it will grace the top of the list. It will probably be the list. But the planning alone is already motivating me like nothing else.

06. Probably graduating from my school? Like, that I made it, that I did not fail. It wasn't a particularly nice event, but hey, it happened. So the three years of, well, suffering, were worth it. I had fun at some of the exams, but that was an exception.

05. I went to the Europa Park in Germany with my friend and we had the best time ever. It was so much fun, I tell you. It was great being away from everything for two days and just enjoying the moment, being there without having to please any people, being able to just be ourselves. Sigh, I miss it.

04. The week me and my classmates spent in Calella, Spain the week after graduation. We had an amazing time there. It was a beautiful goodbye to these people. I really enjoyed myself there. It was great.

03. Going to the Cinema so much...I think. Yeah. It was great. I really liked that. I love the feeling of sitting among strangers, experiencing the same thing for 2.5 hours and then leaving. Not alone. But somehow as a group. It inspires me. Really does.

02. I will put 'Warner Bros. Studio Tour: The Making of Harry Potter' on this place, because as much as it hurt my heart being there, as much as the nostalgic feeling was killing me inside...it was a truly amazing experience and I loved every second of it. It showed me what a tremendous impact Harry Potter had on my life, my childhood. J.K. Rowling formed so much of my life with her books. And I am very grateful for that. I nearly broke down into tears in the café of the studio, but it was....sigh, amazing. Truly was.

01. I knoooooooow it sound incredibly cheesy to put this on my place 1 of the top ten things that happened this year....but it was kinda the highlight. It really was. So, as you know, I've been to London this fall to watch Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet. And as brilliant as the play was (AND IT WAS ASTONISHING), my highlight happened three days later, when I went back to the Barbican, stood in the cold for what felt like forever to meet Benedict. And having this incredible man stand an arm's length away from me, smiling and looking at me was most definitely the best thing that happened this year.

Now that I have rambled on for, like, forever I will end this looking back post, with looking forward. Because that is something we all should do: Look forward. Not back. Don't dwell on past things. Don't drag yourself down for something that didn't work out the way you planned it. Look to the future. Keep moving forward!

The things I look forward to in 2016 are quite a few, I tell you. And I'd rather think about them, than about all the bad things that happened in 2015.

In 2016 I look forward to going to Letters Live! in March with a few of my friends. I look forward to maybe visiting my grandma's hometown in Italy. I look forward to our team weekend in February, our teenager party in April. I look forward to the two weeks my friend and I will be spending in San Diego next July. I look forward to meeting Zachary Levi. I look forward to starting my studies next Fall. I look forward to... 2016. And hopefully it will be a good year. Hopefully our world will come to good terms with itself. Hopefully some wars will end. Hopefully the refugee crisis will get a good solution. Hopefully, we can all be the best versions of ourselves. Hopefully we get to fulfil our dreams. Hopefully this will be our year!

And with that, my dear friends and readers, I wish you all a happy new year. I hope it will indeed be a happy new year for you.

With love,

Alex

#blog post #import from old blog #long post #2015 #end of year #movies #books #highligths

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nofomoartworld · 8 years ago

Text

Thinks: Simon Anderson

Through Either Side: Interview with Simon Anderson

Keeley Haftner: So Simon, this will be somewhat of a traditional interview, but punctuated with my mention of selections from George Brecht’s Water Yam for you to respond to. Sound good?

Simon Anderson: Okay!

KH: Let’s begin with:

TWO DURATIONS

red

green

SA: Brecht was a scientist, so he kept good notes and drawings. He begins by playing with electric lights for different durations. Around this time he’s in a class with John Cage, where they work very closely and developed a bond. Cage kind of allows him to relax a little and open up his work. So, after all of his experiments engaging the complexity of electronics, he just goes with two durations: red and green, which I think is a lovely piece. I’ve done it myself and seen it done in many ways. Of all of them I think my favourite is eating the green salad and drinking the red wine – a most excellent version! A Japanese artist called Takehisa Kosugi first performed it this way England in the 1970s, and it was Kosugi who did the drinking and eating. I performed it this way for a conference where I was asked to think of a reason why this work was valid, and I realized that what he’s simply doing is asking you to pay attention to different lengths of time. Because that’s mostly what Brecht does – he asks you to pay attention. In class I’ve done it on a chalkboard with red and green chalk, which is the hardest to got off and therefore the most annoying. [Laughs] This is what Fluxus does; it asks you to think of something through a particular lens and then you can start to apply it all over the place. Two Durations crops up as a motorist or pedestrian in Chicago, for example. You get these incredible avenues of red changing to green as you wait. One can’t but help but think of this in terms of George Brecht!

KH: Brecht’s obituary in New York Times described his efforts to ensure that “the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed.” What might you say is the importance of this concept today? Has it become more or less important over time?

SA: Heavy! One of the things that is very instructive for me is to look at Brecht’s history and position and learn from that. His “event-scores” came right out of music scores. I’ve got a little piece of evidence here that I want to show you. [Opens package] This is a facsimile reproduction of his notebooks to the John Cage class in the 1950s. In this first class, “Experimental Compositions” with John Cage, he makes a note about “events in sound space.” He’s already thinking in terms of events and what an event actually is. He saw events as things that happen around you, where the event-score operates like the musical score by giving you permission to listen. Like the musical score, you read the crotchets and quavers and all of that, which that brings you in tune with the instrument. The event score is five-dimensional permission to notice the things that he’s noted, and of course, very easily from that, everything else. I think everyone notices everything today. Perhaps too much. [Laughs]

KH: So after our lessons from Fluxus artists, perhaps we should attempt to notice less?

SA: I think it’s quite complicated. Luckily, because that’s what keeps it interesting! Of course both Brecht and Fluxus weren’t alone in their concentration on the everyday in the 1950s and 1960s. But Brecht had a particular aesthetic and he was also, like, really concentrating. In the stories one hears about him, he was all about virtuosity and paid a great deal of attention to detail. He took conceptual care in building things. I guess we’re all infatuated with the everyday today, and Brecht is a great saint in the panoply somehow.

THREE CHAIR EVENTS

Sitting on a black chair

Yellow chair. (Occurance.)

On (or near) a white chair.

SA: Chairs were big for Brecht. He sat down, a lot, presumably. [Laughs] The point of the chair for him is that it’s everyday and has many functions that operate as gateways to other things. I can sit down and have a cup of tea. I can sit down and think. I can sit down to have an interview. A chair is just one of those things that permeates the everyday, and unless you’re Gerrit Rietveld or someone, you don’t pay attention to the chair. There were other artist’s working with chairs, like Scott Burton and Richard Artschwager, but they were very sculptural and quoting the minimal or post-minimal. Brecht’s chairs were pre-minimal. And they were for you to sit on. That’s what people loved about them – it was the art life dichotomy that everyone was talking about, solved.

KH: It actually reminds me a lot of Lawrence Weiner’s conceptualist children’s book about the table, Something to Put Something On. That book really rocked my world!

SA: Sure, and I also want to say that contemporaneously with Brecht: Ben Vautier the French Fluxus artist was performing pieces where he would sit in public places and just hold a sign that said ‘to look at me is enough’: “Regardez moi cela suffit,” There are some great movies of him just sitting there with all the people watching him, and it is enough! Viewers are spending as long looking at that as they are when the shuffle in front of the famous work of art in the Louvre.

KH: The artist is present, as it were… [Laughs] So with regard to Brecht’s event-scores, he is quoted as having said they were “like little enlightenments” he wanted to communicate to his friends who would know what to do with them. Were you one of those friends, and would you say that you know what to do with them?

SA: [Laughs] – I wrote to a lot of Fluxus artists when I was an undergraduate student, simply because I wanted to know a little bit more about what they were doing. Brecht was one of the people who wrote me back. So in that sense, I may not be a friend, but rather someone who he has helped with some advice. First of all, he said, “Fluxus is a blue peanut.” Okay, thank you very much; what do I do with that? And then, he said, “as for what you should do, I’d suggest research on the spot.” I’ve taken that advice. There’s nothing like trying to find out what’s going on right now where you are in order to understand what’s going on with other people where they are. So that was a hook.

KH: In a previous interview you mentioned that back in the 1970s you were drawn to mail art because there wasn’t much responsibility involved. Why are you drawn to things that lack responsibility?

SA: That’s a deep one, isn’t it! After a while one develops one’s aesthetic; you realize what you’re interested in and what you’re not. I’m not interested in making big statements or professing anything too rigidly. Because I change my mind, like everyone. I like the freedom that not having or taking responsibility gives to you. Mail art was great because they said, no jury, no returns, no fee. I was unemployed, I never did well in selection, and I liked that you never had to see the thing again. One could feel abstractly that you were part of something but it didn’t weigh on you. And, you got stuff back. Some artists cared deeply and spent hours making delicious collages for people, but others it would fart in an envelope and seal it, like “here it is; have fun with it.” [Laughs] It was very empowering and relaxing.

WORD EVENT

Exit

SA: Brecht was one of those people who early on showed the fun and possibility of art through the mail. It was part of The Yam Festival that he and Robert Watts organized. They did this thing called delivery event. You would send them a certain amount of money ranging from about $1 to $20, and they would send you something in return. And one of the things Brecht would often send was an exit sign. What is powerful I think about Word Event is that people are exiting the world all the time. It’s pretty profound. Everyone has to do it. No one can avoid doing that piece. And can you do it badly? Is there a bad exit?

KH: Perhaps you can claim Britain’s most recent exit as your own interpretation of Brecht’s piece. (Laughs)

SA: I actually did do an interpretation of that work in a similar context! There is a photo of me in a crowd at the Tate Turbine Hall from a concert I conducted there in May of 2008, where I am carrying a red EXIT protest sign, well before Brexit.

KH: Fantastic!

SA: A moving exit is a nice… This prompts me to think of what has happened to Fluxus now, how the work has been inflated and solidified in museums, sometimes for good and sometimes maybe not so. Who knows? That’s its fate. And that again circles back to the weirdness of the everyday being paramount.

KH: For me, perhaps the most powerful component of happenings like that of Brecht’s event-scores is that the work never ceases. It has the potential to be reimagined endlessly in new sites and contexts, and in that way, perhaps optimistically, can be seen as endlessly relevant, endlessly capable of recontextualisation and renegotiation. Is this too optimistic?

SA: Well, I think that the artists themselves loved reinterpretation. They reproduced each other’s work over and over, until eventually it would be claimed as one of their own. It happened most famously with Nam June Paik who did La Monte Young’s score Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, which became Zen for Head. Every decade or so someone will say, “do you mean to say that nowadays Fluxus is anything you want?” To which we say, yes, still is. [Laughs] I don’t think they would care about ownership, except maybe when they’re old and crotchety and need dental care. Generally I think they didn’t care to think about monetising their work, or trying to put a barrier around it. Brecht was famous for that. Like, ‘relax, kids. Fluxus is a Latin word that George Maciunas dug up. I never studied Latin.’ Not exactly true you see, because in his book he’s written multum in parvo, which is Latin tag meaning “much in little.” Key to the whole minimalist thing, I think. And then later on he says “Marcel Duchamp plays chess, I play pick up sticks”. Fluxus is just a word someone thought up; consider opposing it.

KH: The way that you’re talking about this, commodities aside, I’m wondering… and this might be an inane question, but…

SA: …Oh, there are no inane questions!

KH: …Would you make a distinction between the way the artist interprets their own work and the way that the audience interprets it as instructions, or do you find them to be the one in the same?

SA: It’s far from an inane question – it’s one I’ve obsessed over for a long time. For me that’s where things get a bit interesting. I’ve been talking so loosely about music and sculptures and happenings, as if the intermediate air we breathe is natural, but it’s not. Music has a tradition, art has a tradition, and in this case they collide to a certain extent. Where would we be if we believed that Haydyn had to play his own piano pieces to you? You’d be like, “oh, I bet they were good!” [Laughs] And so it’s a different tradition and it comes with the permission to redo. And that permission is limited and hedged around allegro ma non troppo [fast but not too much]. One of the things that Cage and Brecht were trying to do was make music that wasn’t hedged in by all of that. They wanted to free it.

KH: If we could pretend that it doesn’t matter whether the work is the original or an interpretation, than I’m wondering: when the objects in an event-score obsolesce, do you feel that perhaps the work should be laid to rest, or that the work should be reinterpreted with existing objects and ideas?

SA: Another very difficult question. I mean, there are whole conferences about exactly this stuff. Down at the University of Chicago they’ve got this big concrete thing they’ve had to conserve…

KH: …Oh, the Wolf Vostell?

SA: ….Yes, the Vostell. And so this question is uppermost in everyone’s mind. One of my favourite pieces is a piece by George Maciunas. It’s called In Memoriam to Adriano Olivetti. Adriano Olivetti was a great mind who designed the famous portable typewriter, and this beautiful adding machine. The machine used adding machine rolls, which became the score. When was the last time you saw an adding machine? For a while I had people in the office collect the rolls for me. But I have to use them really quickly because the ink is different and it fades. I got my store out the other day to do this piece and it was a blank roll!

KH: That’s kind of beautiful though…

SA: Yes, it’s great! So, you know sometimes it’s ridiculous to try and conserve the thing. Fluxus is named after change and flow; you’ve got to accept that you can’t step into the same river twice.

THREE TELEPHONE EVENTS

When the telephone rings, it is allowed to continue to ringing, until it stops.

When the telephone rings, the receiver is lifted, then replaced.

When the telephone rings, it is answered.

SA: The very case in point! Telephones don’t ring anymore; they have tones. When that was written 1961, the telephone was a place. We got our first telephone when I was in my early teens and it was at the bottom of the stairs. Why? Because it was huge! No answering machine. So, you could just leave it ringing, and it would probably carry on ringing forever if the caller didn’t hang up. Pick it up and put it down? Well there are a million excuses for that today, right? Keep it ringing? It’s going to voice mail anyway: who cares, I didn’t really want to talk to you. So everything’s different, everything’s the same. What does it mean to perform this when the phone is no longer a place but a person? I’m not calling home; I’m calling you. It’s a pain when have to carry your place around with you and you can’t escape it! But we’ll develop decorum, I’m sure. I think Brecht would get a kick out of that change.

KH: My own perspective your character as an instructor seems to be that of the provoker or trickster. What would you say is your relationship to instigation and defiance, particularly as it relates to working within a bureaucratic institution?

SA: Well, as you know, I’ve been teaching for a long time. I was taught a lot about teaching from these characters. Brecht, along with Bob Watts and Allan Kaprow, put together a proposal for new teaching methods in the early 1960s. They put a grant forward for which they never got the money, but they went on to teach in quite unconventional ways and to help people be unconventional as artists because of that. My education is through that experience. I consider myself privileged because I also got to see a lot of the original people perform their own pieces, and learn how they did or what they thought was important. Going to the dinner before the concert while they’re planning the concert – that is so informative!

So, let’s pretend we want to look at and think about Caravaggio here [gestures to poster on the wall of Caravaggio’s Boy with Basket of Fruit]. What do we do? We go and stand in front of the painting. We maybe go to the house where it was exhibited; we might read about Caravaggio; we might even watch the wretched films about Caravaggio depending on what our level of interest was. If you’ve never seen Water Yam performed, or if you’ve only see it in a vitrine or whatever, how do you learn about it? I’m interested in is things that are by their nature fugitive, but yet they can be recreated. As an art historian I’m interested in explaining infrastructure that surrounded that creative moment as closely as I can. It’s essentially what we all do when we think about all artworks. We are all intuitively recreating them all the time. Some of them you have to go to Italy to see. Some of them you can get in the plastic box. And I like the plastic box thing. [Laughs] I want what I’m interested in to remain open. Or at least, I don’t want to take responsibility for closing it.

IMPOSSIBLE EFFORT

Do 1.

Do 2.

SA: Eric Anderson is a Danish Fluxus artist who will be in the Fluxus and Film Symposium on May 5th and 6th at University of Chicago, so head’s up there. He used to have a button piece that said “if you’ve only done it once you haven’t done it at all.” Brecht was very interested in randomness. He worked harder than most people I know to achieve it. This is pre-computer, when it was quite difficult. He actually had a copy of the book, A Million Random Digits, published homonymically enough by the RAND Corporation. But in the end he realized that searching for randomness is like writing stuff down: you lose the thing in the excitement of the chase. So just try doing it again, and you’ll realize that you’ve done something different. And if you thought the first time you did it was impossible, is the second time you do it more impossible or less impossible? These are very interesting questions because they’ve already chipped away at the idea of possibility. In the 1990s they called these ideas “thought experiments,” and then they became terribly unpopular because the secretary of defense at the time started using them to justify war. These characters as I mentioned were not full-time artists, and they often came from different backgrounds, technical scientific engineering. They just thought about art in a different way.

KH: Brecht was a chemist, also, working for Johnson & Johnson, Mobil Oil, among others. I’m interested in this overlapping of art and science in a more personal way, but also it seems somewhat in fashion today. Do you see Brecht’s chemistry background as having an influence on his work, or being in direct relation to it in some way?

SA: I see it being integral. And let’s not forget that all these folks had been in the military, because it was the 1950s and there was still the draft for Second World War. So these people were used to dealing with institutions – they knew how the machine worked. Anyone interested in science at this time knew about the future and the possibilities that were on the horizon. People had worked in radar and knew that television was on the way. The famous 1968 exhibition Some More Beginnings: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) had a lot of Fluxus artists in the show and featured in the catalogue. So Brecht is certainly not alone; even into the late 1960s Fluxus artists were still thinking about science and applying it in art.

THREE AQUEOUS EVENTS

ice

water

steam

SA: I had a student once do a fabulous interpretation of this on a stage with an electric clothes iron and an ice cube. They held the clothes iron upside down horizontal, put the ice cube on it, and just waited.

KH: That’s very nice…

SA: It is very nice! It’s about matter and form changing and staying the same. What are we actually witnessing when we instigate a state change? We’re not just making iced tea into hot tea. We’re witnessing this real thing that is vital to our existence, and we’re also witnessing something that is almost magic – almost alchemy. We have the solid turn into the liquid and then turn into the air itself. The question of quality and quantity was big for those artists – when quantity brings about a change in a quality. It’s a Hegelian question, essentially, but also a scientific one. I could get very boring that one… Better to have the cup of tea!

KH: Anything you’d like to say to close?

SA: Maybe we’ll let chance have a say. [Draws an event-score from Water Yam] Oh yes, here’s a nice one:

KEYHOLE

Through either side

…That’s very Brechtian. He gives you a statement and asks you to consider opposing it. To look at things through either side.

KH: That’s a lovely place to end!

SA: And we just picked it out at random, very good.

Simon Anderson is a British-born-and-educated cultural historian and Associate Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute. You can find his complete bio here.

EDITION #26

The Rise of the Performance Art Festival in the USA

How We Work: An Interview With Sara Drake

Recoloring Queer and Transgender Performance Art: Reflections on Recent Performance Panels

ANNOUNCEMENT! Changes… oh my.

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