Even Wounded Books Remain Complicit With Evil

Wounded Book XIII, Bullet Holes on vintage publication,
©mitrentse, courtesy Nadine Feront Gallery Brussels

There are many ways to display one's love of literature, but until I came across the very wonderful series of works entitled Wounded Books by Greek-born, London-based artist and bibliophile Christina Mitrentse, I must admit that the idea of shooting Penguin paperbacks with a rifle never occurred to me.

Initially produced in response to the bombing of a street in Baghdad famous for its bookshops, Miss Mitrentse has powerfully and yet rather poignantly emphasized the vulnerability of ideas and bodies of knowledge and, in more general terms, the fragility of material objects. Nothing serves better than a bullet hole, it seems, to remind us of this.

And yet, having said that, literature is certainly not innocent and whilst books can be subject to violence, so too can they often incite, sanction, and justify violence (often in the name of Love). Ultimately, books are as complicit with evil as any other assemblage of power-knowledge and we shouldn't revere them, accept their authority without question, or believe them to contain eternal truths.

And this is why I have trouble with Anna McNay's recent interpretation of Wounded Books, posted on her blog, art-Corpus, in which she reads the work in terms of religious metaphor to do with the incarnation of the holy spirit, thereby turning bullet holes into stigmata and the book into the body of Christ. It's a reading that is both unconvincing and peculiarly offensive in its theological musing and psycho-sexual idealism.

For books, being mortal things, are not without sin and, arguably, they have caused more suffering and death - precisely when accorded divine status as sacred works - than all the weapons in the world.

Indeed, I rather hope that Miss Mitrentse will one day dare to fire bullets through the Bible, the Quran and all the other founding texts which root themselves in our heads and in our hearts until we can no longer think or feel outside of the binary logic that is their spiritual reality. Shoot these root-books Christina and allow a little fresh air to circulate between their pages. You'll be doing us all a great service if you do.

Notes:

Those interested in the work of Christina Mitrentse should visit christinamitrentse.com
Those who want to read Anna McNay's post should go to http://art-corpus.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/christina-mitrentses-wounded-books

On the Art of Sensation

Natasha Gouveia: Ripped Canvas 1 (2011)  
natashagouveia.org

Just as it is mistaken to imagine that the whiteness of the canvas is a virgin surface, so too is it naive to think the blank page is a pure and empty space that a writer must only fill with words. Both surfaces are already invested (virtually) with all kinds of cliché and belief.

And this is why it's difficult to be a painter or a poet: one who knows how to wipe, to scrape, and even to shred the surface. For Lawrence, this requires a certain purity of spirit. By which he doesn't mean being moral in a conventional sense, but rather having the ability to release new forces and figures from old forms with violent delight.

If you don't know how to work with a certain innocent joy in destruction, then you'll never discover what Deleuze terms the logic of sensation: i.e., "the opposite of the facile and the ready-made, the cliché - but also of the 'sensational', the spontaneous, etc."       

The young Canadian artist Natasha Gouveia seems to understand this and I smile everytime she uses the word gouge in the title of one her works.

Something Fishy

Lawrence wrote a very lovely poem about fish to whom so little matters as they live their wave-thrilled but essentially loveless lives in oneness with the water, beyond knowledge, beyond touch, beyond humanity. For fish move in other circles to our own and we are but many-fingered horrors of daylight in their strangely staring eyes.

Brilliantly coloured tropical fish, taken from amongst the coral reefs, are particularly fragile and ill-suited to aquarium life; drifting joylessly in a few cubic centimetres of water around toy divers and other plastic ornaments.

Over twenty million of these little splinters of sheer loveliness are captured annually to supply a multi-million dollar pet trade. Collectors stun the fish by dousing coral beds with cyanide, thereby making it easier to grab hold of them. Many die in the process and up to 40% who survive being captured fail to make it to their final destination. The poison, of course, also damages and eventually kills the coral.

Now, you might imagine that someone who passionately loved the poetry of D. H. Lawrence and raged against anthropocentrism and the crime against nature, would have abhorred the exotic fish trade. What a shock to discover, therefore, that recently deceased critic and scholar Keith Sagar once edited The World Encyclopaedia of Tropical Fish and had a collection of his very own!

Was he never tempted, like Lawrence, to ask his heart, who are these? and to admit that we can never know and thus never really own fish; even if we might catch them, kill them, or keep 'em in tanks - sulphurous sun-beasts of the upper-world that we are!

Panem et Pyrotechnics

To welcome in the new year, people all over the world like to watch fireworks, which, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, have one big advantage over the stars; namely, you always know precisely when they are going to appear in the sky.

But, having said that, public displays - no matter how spectacular - soon bore and disappoint and one can't help wondering at the politics of the event and the psychology of people who stand in the cold gazing upwards with their mouths open, fascinated by bright lights and loud bangs; content to obey their leaders for another twelve months thanks to the promise of panem et pyrotechnics.

New Year's Eve makes North Koreans of us all ... 

Happy New Year

In wishing for a happy new year I am hoping like Barthes for the absolutely new which disturbs and brings bliss; not for the mere stereotype of novelty.

The new is an escape route from the present into the future and a necessary precondition of jouissance. 

The stereotype that reigns triumphant within contemporary culture, is simply a form of humiliated repetition in which superficial forms are varied, but their meaning remains fixed and ever the same. In this manner, we are denied any chance of escape; robbed even of the possibility of dying. 

For me, Auld Lang Syne, sung at the stroke of midnight each and every new year's eve without enthusiasm or joy, is a form of curse via which we are once more burdened with bad conscience and memory of the past thereby undermining our resolve, shattering our dreams, denying our orgasm.    

Comrade Dawn

As day breaks, I often think of her ...

And as the moon flashes phosphorescent between night skies
I recall the whiteness of her flesh fitfully exposed between 
skirt and stocking-top. 

Stripped naked before the impersonal violence of the market place
whilst wearing a rubber crown of freedom, she succeeded only in 
becoming the favourite read of rapists.

Our God is Woman: Our Mission is Protest!

Many congratulations and all best wishes for the New Year to Josephine Witt, the courageous twenty year-old philosophy student and Femen activist who staged a one-woman protest at St. Peter's Cathedral in Cologne, briefly but beautifully disrupting a televised Christmas mass. 

Mounting the altar, wearing only a loin cloth in both imitation and mockery of Christ, her naked torso painted with the words I AM GOD, she looked powerful and vulnerable at the same moment; her exposed breasts challenging the authority and exposing the misogyny of a Church which continues to discriminate against women, whilst nonetheless believing it has every right to control their bodies.  

Her protest did not last long: half-a-dozen horrified clerics wearing an assortment of robes, quickly pulled Josephine from the altar, covered her up, bundled her out of the building, and handed her over to the secular forces of law and order. But such an action does not need to last long to be effective and the Femen message - that the Vatican needs to recognise that women are fully capable of making their own decisions over issues such as abortion and should have the right to do so without priestly interference or condemnation - was broadcast via the international media. 

To witness the protest go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjFlzRNkKDs or visit the Femen website: femen.org

The feminist group FEMEN crashed a Christmas service at the High Cathedral of St. Peter in Cologne, Germany, with a topless activist getting up on the altar exposing herself to the congregation with the words "I am God" written on her body.

The activist group, which says that it is based on "sextremism, atheism and feminism," was apparently trying to protest against patriarchy and the Vatican's pro-life views. According to EuroNews.com, the woman was identified as 20-year-old philosophy student Josephine Witt.
The incident, which has been captured on video, shows her running onto the altar in front of the large congregation, but clerics quickly surround her, cover her up and take her away.
FEMEN, which was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Paris, France, often participates in topless protests aimed at "fighting patriarchy in its three manifestations – sexual exploitation of women, dictatorship and religion." It demands "that the old people in the Vatican and their fanatical adepts bring their religious dogmas into compliance with the modern world and human rights."

Read more at http://global.christianpost.com/news/feminist-group-crashes-german-christmas-service-with-topless-i-am-god-protest-on-altar-111606/#ER6V3gwIxdco66sK.99

The feminist group FEMEN crashed a Christmas service at the High Cathedral of St. Peter in Cologne, Germany, with a topless activist getting up on the altar exposing herself to the congregation with the words "I am God" written on her body.

The activist group, which says that it is based on "sextremism, atheism and feminism," was apparently trying to protest against patriarchy and the Vatican's pro-life views. According to EuroNews.com, the woman was identified as 20-year-old philosophy student Josephine Witt.
The incident, which has been captured on video, shows her running onto the altar in front of the large congregation, but clerics quickly surround her, cover her up and take her away.
FEMEN, which was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Paris, France, often participates in topless protests aimed at "fighting patriarchy in its three manifestations – sexual exploitation of women, dictatorship and religion." It demands "that the old people in the Vatican and their fanatical adepts bring their religious dogmas into compliance with the modern world and human rights."

Read more at http://global.christianpost.com/news/feminist-group-crashes-german-christmas-service-with-topless-i-am-god-protest-on-altar-111606/#ER6V3gwIxdco66sK.99

It's My Name Day (And I'll Decry If I Want To)

St. Stephen: first Christian martyr 
and anti-Semite

As Maria is keen to remind me, today is my name day [ονομαστική εορτή]: a traditional form of celebration in Greece, as in other Orthodox and Catholic countries where the veneration of saints is a popular practice, but which doesn't mean a great deal to me - particularly as I don't even seem to get a cake out of it. 

As for the saint to whom I am connected by name, what do I know of him? 

St. Stephen was a Greek-speaking Jew who made the fatal mistake of outraging the members of numerous synagogues by his unorthodox teachings inspired by Jesus. Accused of blasphemy and perverting Mosaic Law, he didn't help matters by making a long speech at his trial in which he denounced the authorities who were sitting in judgement upon him whilst keeping a holier-than-thou and supercilious expression on his face; a speech which concludes with the following slur which would resonate to murderous effect through the ages:

"You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One, whom you also betrayed and murdered; you who received the law as delivered by angels, but did not keep it." [Acts 7: 51-53] 

This so infuriated members of the Sanhedrin and the people who had gathered to witness the proceedings, that they rushed upon him, dragged him outside, and then stoned him to death; thus making Stephen the first Christian martyr and an inspiration to anti-Semites keen to hold the Jews guilty of deicide.  

Imitating Christ to the last, Stephen asked that God forgive those who were about to slay him (they know not what they do). More interestingly, sparks were said to fly off his body every time he was struck by a stone; sparks that his later Christian admirers would insist were not of anger, but of love, and which ignited the hearts of those who witnessed his death; sparks which we now know actually helped ignite the Auschwitz crematoria.     

An Atheist Responds to Pope Francis

Well, there you go: I've just been insulted by Pope Francis in his first Christmas Day message to the faithful!

Speaking to a crowd of 70,000 people from the balcony of St Peter's, he called on even atheists to share in the desire for peace that fills the hearts of all true believers in God.

I mean, really, it's a bit much, no?  

Even atheists - as if we were the scum of the earth who knew only of hatred and were filled with a lust for violence. I might remind His Holiness that it is invariably religion that proliferates and intensifies tribal, racial, and sectarian conflict in this world: witness what is happening presently in the Middle East and in Africa.   

For ultimately, despite all their talk about desiring peace and being happy to receive their rewards in the next world, the leaders and followers of the great religions want power in this world and will slaughter anyone who might stand in their way - not least of all those who subscribe to a different faith, or to no faith.   

And with that I have done and pronounce my judgement: religion has left nothing untouched by its depravity. I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind ...  

- Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

And so this is Christmas ...

Feigning joy and surprise at the gifts we despise 

over mulled wine with you

  

If there has ever been a better opening line to a Christmas song than this sung by Justin Hawkins of The Darkness, then I'd like to hear it.  

For there is something despicable at the commercial heart of Xmas and something increasingly desperate about our compulsion to celebrate it and insist that everyone enters into the spirit of the season lest they be branded a killjoy. Or a Scrooge. Or in someway suspect (not one of us).

Well, I'm sorry, but like Charlie Brown this time of year always makes me depressed: and a little ashamed. I don't want the bells to end; but I'd like for the tills to stop ringing and for people to not be bullied. And not be afraid.