I want to stick with what I know, so this paper is
more about looking back than projecting ahead. Looking back, I characterize
the work I've done over the past two years as a biblical flood of
personal proportions, initiated by the thundercrack of She Plays With
Her Self. This installation in the A&C gallery at JFKU University,
consisting of large-scale paper cut-outs and papier-mâché
objects, relied heavily on spectacle and theatricality for its effect,
which was to overwhelm and dominate the viewer with my power to create
art and destroy myself. With only slightly more subtlety, I continued
along this trajectory until just a couple months ago, when I realized
I had at last succeeded. What's next will be for the next self to
determine, so first let me explain how I died.
In the process of making the work for She Plays With Her Self, I found
myself drawn more to the drop cloths and scraps than the already conceptualized
work I was constructing. This attraction to cast-off paper and utterly
unself-conscious swaths of stray brush-strokes informed the next phase
of my work: maniacally executed drawings with collage and paint on
found, torn, irregularly cut paper-whatever was at hand. Expressionistic
and emotional, I made this work at the edges of order where opposing
forces and emotions exist simultaneously: raw surfaces carried sophisticated
drawings, muddy, dark house paint and luminous pink oil paint joined
in formal cohesion, angst and humor, fury and tenderness, romance
and cynicism supported rather than contradicted each other. About
film footage of Jim Dine drawing madly on the gallery walls, Rebekah
Rutkoff says: "...in the shots of him making wall drawings, you're
watching an identity wonder if it has limits and finding out that
the answer is: 'no.'" It was like that. 1
At times, I stopped relying on my visceral response to the materials
at hand to guide my next move, and returned to working from a preconceived
idea, often illustrating a visual pun, a play with language, a philosophical
aphorism or an iconic image. In this more concept-driven mode of working,
I made a collection of altered objects consisting mainly of written
or drawn one-liner social or philosophical commentary on bits of cultural
detritus I'd picked up-snapshots, thrift store paintings, magazine
articles, faux stone linoleum, or objects of some cultural/historical
significance such as Tibetan prayer flags or a print-out of Manet's
Olympia. These pieces join in easily with my other work by virtue
of the "drawn" text, subtle color harmonics, and anarchic
sensibility.
I also made a few videos, which stylistically sync with the aesthetic
I'd been developing in my object making. My attraction to immediate,
raw materials, when translated into video, resulted in low resolution,
quickly-made, hardly-edited, low-tech movies. As with my other work,
this rawness was contained in a coherent narrative and cohesive formal
structure, again reflecting oppositions such as the spontaneous and
the considered, the childlike and the sophisticated, the horrific
and the lighthearted.
I should mention that from before the beginning of the work I'm describing
here, I was simultaneously creating hundreds of pages in my sketchbooks
which traverse across diaristic documentation, theoretical exploration,
philosophical pondering, violent emotional expression and mundane
observation expressed in a sketchbook Esperanto of images and text.
(A bound book of about 100 pages selected from these sketchbooks will
available for viewing during my review.)
Somewhere in the midst of making drawings, writings, and videos, and
working in my sketchbook, I drew some very small figures on the walls
of very big rooms "standing" on the same floor as the viewer.
These works recalled my interest in spacial contrasts between the
tiny and the vast and in the personalizing effects of site-specificity
explored in my show, She Plays With Her Self. However, this time the
viewer was allowed to be the biggest thing in the room (besides the
room itself, which is the big thing we are all in together.)
Most of the work just described-the works on paper and found objects,
some of the papier-mâché sculpture, the drawings on the
walls-benefitted from being presented in salon-style groupings. This
mode of display created the opportunity for the works to reflect each
other, contradict each other, and otherwise add up to a whole that
was greater than the sum of its parts.
Most recently, I attempted to make some paintings on a series of four
by four foot wood panels, with the intention that each piece would
be able to contain the depth-that is, the revelation of meaning over
time-that I had achieved by showing the previous work in clusters.
Disturbed by my waning interest in my work, I thought that I needed
to "go deeper" into myself in order to uncover a new wellspring
of creativity. Overall, the entire endeavor was miserable and deadening,
but worthwhile in that it proved to me that boredom, exhaustion, and
lack of stimulation cannot be treated with more art-making. After
two years of manic output, I think I just finally burned myself out.
I wonder also if the structure of a permanent, stable and "weighty"
substrate such as a square wood panel was perhaps unable to translate
my inner experience. Perhaps raw and irregular collections are necessary
to reflect a state of fragmentation, constant motion, simultaneous
emotions, and relational, perspectival and contextual meaning. I feel
no shame in allowing Antonin Artaud's description of his drawings
to speak for me as well:
"I have not tried to polish my work in them or my effects,
but to show certain truths, linear and manifest, that apply as well
in speech as in written sentences, graphics, and linear perspective.
That's why several drawings are mixtures of poems and portraits, written
remarks, plastic evocations of elements, materials, figures…These
drawings must be accepted with their roughness and disorder. There's
never been any attempt at art but at sincerity and spontaneity of
line…Woe to he who considers them as works of art, as works of
simulation, and the aesthetic of reality. None of them is, properly
speaking, a work of art. I mean they are probes, thrusts into every
channel of hazard, of possibility, of chance or destiny." 2
While my "whatever is at hand" philosophy for choosing
materials was partly due to my need to free myself from the historical
and psychological limitations that are so deeply embedded in "making
art," it was also a means to perform an encounter with the
material world that is fresh and unfettered by societal judgments.
I appreciate litter along the shores of the bay for its surprising
spots of color among the earth tones. By the same token, I like
to see a passage of luminous oil paint on dirty, cheap paper or
cast-off debris. By elevating junk linoleum to art status and reducing
oil paint to junk status, status itself is rendered inert. Equalizing
materials is a metaphor and an embodiment of the way I experience
the world before the overlay of meaning, value and judgment descends.
However, before I get too far into "philosophical intent,"
which is something of a falsehood, I want to relate an experience
that deeply informed how I think about art, intention, and meaning:
About a year ago, I was running along a trail out in the woods,
my mind working on my existential situation-that is, Why bother?
What's the point? Why not just quit everything and take up quilting
.Why not quit quilting? Is any of this really worth doing? Why not
just, "end it all?"-when I happened upon a boom box sitting
on the dirt in the middle of the trail. I stopped short, looked
around, saw no one. So I bent down and pressed Play. What came out
of the speakers was a recording of the sounds from the very place
I was standing. I heard the same near and far bird calls, the same
water noise from the creek that was, in real life, right next to
me. The recorded sounds and the immediate sounds played out simultaneously.
Through a simulation I was put in contact with the real. The presence
of the person who made the recording was with me in the witnessing
of this place, he in his time, me in mine, time converging in a
shared experience. I squatted there for awhile, crying in gratitude
for this experience and this person who had given me this gift of
presence and witness. I spelled out the words "Hear, Hear"
with some leaves, making a little textual Andy Goldsworthy piece
next to the boom box. My mind had its answer: Art is the answer.
Art is the reason. Art is the point. I ran on, and around the next
bend encountered a man standing there in the middle of the trail,
doing nothing. With the tears still in my eyes, I accosted him:
"Was that your boom box? Did you do that? Did you put that
recording on the trail?"
He backed away from me a little. "Uh, yeah. I'm a birdwatcher.
I use that to call to the birds."
"Oh… You mean you're not an artist? I thought it was an
Art piece. It's not ART?"
"Um, no. I'm a birdwatcher. I'm just watching for birds."
"Oh… I thought it was an Art piece about… oh nevermind."
Once again I ran on. This time I was laughing, my big clunky answer
annulled by the elegance of absurdity.
The point of this story is that Art is where you find it. The other
point of this story is that my "intentions" and my art's
"meaning" are actually quite unrelated when it comes before
a viewer, (and I include myself as a viewer of my own work.) In
fact, I have discovered that art-making happens best in the absence
of intention. When art-making is a means to achieve anything, it
becomes some other endeavor disguised as art-making. I used to think
art-making was to distract myself from boredom. The problem here
is that when art-making becomes boring, it is failing. Then I thought
art-making would help me find myself, but I've learned that, too,
is losing game. When you realize you are endless, you'll just as
easily find yourself in an ant, a gas station or a novel. At another
time I thought that art-making was about communication, until I
realized that communication actually happens in the physical presence
of the other, and requires the eyes, voice, body, and mind of more
than one person. To expect my art to speak for me, to me, about
me, or even to make it a gift (what if no one wants it?) is to make
art utilitarian. I have learned through failure after failure of
art-making to live up to its promises, that art is completely useless
and therefore completely free.
William Wiley, husband of contemporary artist Mary Webster, says,
"One of art's great values is that it has no value."3
In a production-oriented culture where even time is money, this
non-intention becomes a subversive intention in itself. On an even
more basic level, this empty approach to art-making is an embrace
of the existential tension of action in spite or-or in response
to-meaninglessness.
That is the cosmic view of things-the view through the distancing
end of the binoculars-and a perspective that is never far from my
awareness. Turn the binoculars around, and I have plenty of thoughts
about what my art might mean and how its meaning relates to my ideas
about the possible functions art might serve. Keep in mind though,
that what I say about my art tells us more about me than it does
about my art, and what you say about my art tells us more about
you than it does about my art. My art just sits there, mute and
pointless as ever, except to spark some conversation, which might
be one of its points.
So the bird gets out of the cage. Where is he? He's in the house.
So someone leaves a window open. He is out of the house! He can
fly pretty much anywhere within the climatic range he's adapted
to, all over North America probably. Maybe he builds up tolerance
to extremes of temperature. He can fly anywhere! He can't get out
of the atmosphere, though. He still needs oxygen and gravity. Without
gravity and atmosphere I don't think the laws of physics would allow
him to fly at all. So this is what I've been coming to all along…
I want to be a comet, falling and burning.
I wrote this years ago and it continues to speak to my guiding
desire: I intend in my life and in my art to be free-of the limitations
of identity, culture, all that inhibits the free expression of my
unique vitality. The story speaks also to the impossibility of ever
achieving such freedom: without limitation, the meaning of freedom
evaporates. This paradox is at the heart of my work even as I continue
to move outward into more wide open cages. My ability to live with
this paradox is what saves me from becoming the comet, falling and
burning.
Cages take many forms, but I suspect they all begin with the same
prima materia: power. Here is Foucault: "…the major enemy...is
fascism…. And not only…the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini…but
also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior,
the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing
that dominates and exploits us." 4
Through art-making, I tracked my own desire for power while simultaneously
undermining this desire by playing with the constructs that house
this power: gender, language, art as cultural producer of meaning,
cultural narratives, and the personal narrative of my own identity
as it is shaped by all of the above. My single-minded and double-edged
aim was both to pursue and subvert the fascism in myself. I hope
the traces I left make it easier for others to join me in this project.
If we can relate outside of these power structures, there is the
possibility for a human connection based on authentic human desires
rather than handed-down ideologies and media-created desires. Although
my work is sometimes accused of being cynical or nihilistic, I am
actually quite idealistic. What I'm cynical about are superficial
prescriptions for cultural healing that never demand a rigorous
investigation into the shadows of the self.
Power isolates humans from one another through fear of domination.
(Dominators dominate not because they love power, but because they
are afraid of not having any.) So, in my work I attempt to start
conversations and create bonds centered around the great equalizing
subjects: mortality (with all of its corollaries) and the mundane.
I address these matters with a humor, ruefulness and self-revelation
that make it easy to engage with the work and with one another about
the things we all share: our desire for god, meaning, connection,
our wonderment about the way our shampoo bottles miraculously get
filled with water through the tiny hole in the flip spout. I personalize
"the big questions" to make them less abstract and subject
to ideological solutions and more available to inform the way we
live and interact. I offer a dialectic rather than an answer; as
soon as an answer is found, conversations end and wars begin. My
work offers an open way of talking, thinking and feeling that gathers,
rather than a system of belief that excludes.
Theodor Adorno, one of the Frankfurt school theorists, advanced
the notion in 1966 that late capitalism had secured the conditions
for its perpetual proliferation by successfully creating, through
media and popular culture, a population driven by false needs and
false desires for which the system could and would provide. Sexual
desire is perhaps the most basic desire to be appropriated and sold
back to us in a form that has little to do with its very real instinctual
components: the need for love, connection, transcendence. I try
to break the links between real desires and false promises as they
are encoded in gender.
Historically, women's bodies are coded as vehicles for male transcendence.
Without an actual female body around, pure corporeal male power
á la Abstract Expressionism is explosive enough to break
free of existential isolation. As post-modern girls who are well
aware of the performative layer of our identities, we often experience
ourselves as driverless vehicles circling around and around an empty
spot where our bodies should be. This wild goose chase is an old
track I try to interrupt through parodying and satirizing cultural
constructions of masculinity and femininity as they are represented
and performed by the body. For example, the ridiculous, protruding
breasts that hang off the awkward bodies of my ubiquitous, naked
female figures point to the absurdity of desiring a symbol. I don't
think that people necessarily understand on a conscious level the
cultural implications of my boob drawings, but I do think they short
circuit the gaze for a moment, causing a subtle alert that maybe
what you thought you wanted is not what you really want, or what
you thought you wanted may not be found where you thought, or what
you thought you were may not really be what you are. If my representation
of the female seems vulgar, it is the vulgarity of idealization
that I am expressing. If there is a whiff of misogyny in my work,
I can only say that I am a product of my culture. Chris Kraus, writer
and Semiotext(e) editor asks: "Why does everybody think that
women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our
own debasement? Why do women always have to come off clean?"5
The gender construct consists not only of the represented body,
but also a complex set of behaviors, gestures, and attitudes performed
by people in real life. In my work I try to express my personal
experience in the kind of detail that individualizes and humanizes
my story, often in ways that subvert, contradict, ridicule or parody
the performance of "femininity."
Chris Kraus, again: "I think the sheer fact of women talking,
being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above
all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world."6
I agree: very often work that presents a subjectivity not expressed
within dominant culture is accused of being narcissistic. I suspect
that this reading of the work points more to the narcissism of the
viewer than the art. Instead of looking into the experience of the
other, he searches for his own reflection, and not finding it, concludes
the work is narcissistic when perhaps what he has really come face
to face with is his own narcissism, unable to find meaning where
he does not find his own reflection. I purposefully make my work
highly self-revelatory without fear of being "too personal."
The personal and the cultural are inextricable once you understand
that repression and oppression are both means to control the subject.
The only difference is the agent of control.
So I am all for telling it like I experience it, but in doing so,
another layer of entrapment is quickly revealed: the language with
which I so freely communicate is constructed by the same materials
of the cage I just squirmed out of. Why does the phrase "getting
fucked" mean losing power? I used that phrase in a piece, and
the meaning of the entire narrative was tipped in a direction that
was only true because of the gendered power dynamics embedded in
the language. (This piece can be seen at www.catewhite.com/MartBartCheap/MARTBARTCHEAPmain.htm).
My desire to make language operate outside of its own limitations
often pushes my visual art into the realm of writing. I don't presume
that I have the ahistorical omniscience to lift the veil of language
to reveal something I miraculously know, so I'm not interested in
making work that is somehow supposed to leave language behind. Instead,
I play with words, mixing meanings, splitting signs and signifiers,
loosening language's hold on meaning, and remodeling Heidegger's
"house of being."
Language is mutable. The meaning of the phrase "colored people"
has changed since the 1950s and means something else to a child
who doesn't yet know about racism. My work is rife with aphorisms
that have the paradoxical ability to be both trite cliché
and timeless truth depending on the viewers own psychological depth;
after you've really looked everywhere, the proof really is in the
pudding.
Word play is exhilarating in its power to take us to the edges of
thought and identity. When language slips, belief, ideology, conditioning,
Adorno's identity thinking, are all on shaky ground. I want the
ground to shake just enough for us to realize that nothing is solid-a
major biblical earthquake is probably unnecessary. We can't function
without some stability and order and that is why, despite post-modern
rhetoric, our cultural narratives remain intact.
Engaging these narratives-the Judeo-Christian religion, the art-historical
and literary canons, new-age spirituality, etc.-is central to my
work. Treating them as more "material at hand," I tease
their authority with a mostly gentle humor, which acknowledges that
these stories, as infected as they are, are an inevitable layer
of our communal experience. If we don't believe in them, they can
actually reveal some truth to us. I lovingly tease Jesus, not to
piss anyone off, but to help humanize him. Like my play with language,
I make room for a fresh, individualized interpretation that has
the ability to retain a connection to the tribe while simultaneously
allowing for more personal freedom.
In visual language, narratives are told through symbols. I began,
back with She Plays With Her Self, to explore multiple permutations
of related forms in order to disrupt the hegemony of a symbolic
order, whether it's a micro symbolic order that I've initiated,
or the cultural icons and symbols that represent our cultural narratives.
I am a descendent of Bataille with his interchangeable eggs/testicles/eyes,
but with less modernist brutality and more post-modern playfulness,
like what if Newton dropped the apple on Eve's head?
I continue to engage with these stories, because it is not enough
to believe that since we call our era, "post-modern,"
we are all suddenly free of centuries of thinking, believing, acting,
loving, hating. The failure to apply theory to our selves, the individual
components that create monolithic power structures, is most maddeningly
evident in the artworld's ideological stance that claims to embrace,
"difference," and "the other," while its very
structure is hierarchical, elitist, and defended against uncontrollable
subjects (like John Rapko!). It is this hypocrisy, in me as well
as our culture, that fuels my ongoing project to turn myself inside
out, and it is because I care about this world and want it to work
out OK for us that I do this publicly. There are pockets of history
in me (in everyone) that inhibit the free flow of vitality. Art,
when made and looked at by people of great compassion and great
courage, has the ability to empty these pockets and reveal a new
way to be, see, feel. Then the pockets are filled up again, but
that's the way it goes. There's always something for the next generation
to do.
I don't consider myself to be a revolutionary; that is, someone
who believes so blindly in her own ideas that she seeks to overthrow
the dominators so that "good" (her good) may prevail.
Nor do I consider myself to be an iconoclast who believes that "lifting
the veil" will reveal God's true face. I'm more of an iconoswitch.
I believe in telling stories, playing with identities, rearranging
symbols, mixing the simulated with the real. The veil is all we
have-it's how we see each other-but once it is shown to be interchangeable,
we have seen God's true face.
What saves my art and me from Apollonian, post-modern nihilism,
is my natural engagement with strong emotion. Chris Kraus writes,
"Accepting contradictions means not believing anymore in the
primacy of "true feeling." Everything is true and simultaneously."7
With my wildly fluctuating and disconnected emotional states, I
have never believed in the primacy of "true feeling."
So, if true belief is based on true feeling (and I suspect it is),
I believe that my mercurial nature has deposited me permanently
in a position of no position. This is not a dry, nihilistic place.
From where I drift, Save the Whales-type positions capsize and I
feel myself a whale in need of saving.
While it is emotion that saves me from nihilism, it is probably
my nihilism-also known as healthy ironic detachment-that allows
me to survive my emotion. While many contemporary artists reflect
this detached perspective on the self by forgoing emotion altogether
in favor of a depersonalized formal refinement, I try to champion
a very human and possibly subversive emotionality. I am afraid that
Foucault's portrayal of a populace of efficiently self-controlling
subjects carrying out the social project of maintaining ordered
power is accurate. Strong emotion unleashes the anarchic power of
the Dionysian. Fortunately I'm not completely alone in this opinion.
Here is Dodie Bellamy, a New Narrative writer:
"Passion is underrated. I think we should all produce work
with the urgency of outsider artists, panting and jerking off to
our kinky private obsessions. Sophistication is conformist, deadening.
Let's get rid of it."8
What updates my passion from the modernist emotionality of Van
Gogh, Artaud and Pollock is my ever-present humor, self-irony, and
the sheer range of opposing emotions I cover in a single showing
or even a single piece. I make use of simulated emotion-sentiment,
melodrama-as an avenue to real feeling. My figures are expressive
cartoons; caricatures of feeling that elicit real emotion by catching
the viewer off guard, unserious, able to contact a place of innocence
in him/herself. I intentionally do not use earnest figuration that
would point to a real belief in the importance, permanence, even
essential quality of these emotions. No one buys this anymore, including
me. The simulated and the real are united in the post-modern consciousness,
and the fact that my figures are cartoons and more than cartoons
at the same time reflects this. Charlie Brown is only a cartoon,
a symbol. He is not drawn so much as stamped. My line, a reification
as well as a description of a feeling, is what differentiates my
rendering from the Sunday funnies.
If all this deconstructive emotionality sounds like a lot of work,
it was. I feel like I've spent the last two years performing surgery
on myself, excising cultural forces that played off my deepest desires
and fueled my most visceral fears. These operations left me weakened,
but freer than I was before. What I will do with this freedom is
the next question. I may not even continue making art.
Although I now like to think of the art I made as a map of my escape
route, available for others to study, my motivation for making that
art was very much about being seen, being heard, being noticed,
being applauded (a great lesson in how following your most juvenile
instincts frees you from them.) If the true artist is the one who
goes on talking after her own need to be heard has been transcended,
I guess now we'll see if I'm a "true artist."
An artist named John Keith Kessel wrote these instructions for How
to be an Artist: 1) Don't define art. 2) Don't define yourself.
3) Keep busy.9 Over the next couple years and beyond, I plan to
keep busy. One project that might keep me busy is the creation of
a website to which viewers will be directed by advertisements applied
to empty space I purchase on panhandler's cardboard signs. (Think,
the outsider's version of the Chuck Close/Kiki Smith--Gap partnership.)
I'm considering giving the panhandlers five minutes of fame to say
whatever it is they'd like to say in short videos on the website.
That is, give them a chance to put their boom boxes on the trail.
I'd like to put my art on the site as well and available for purchase
through Paypal, asking for a handout like the panhandler on the
street. I'm not sure how to conceptually link their videos and my
art for sale, but I'm not interested in giving the underrepresented
a voice unless I get to be one of the underrepresented, too. If
done on a large enough scale (lots of panhandlers in the major cities)
the project could spark a pretty lively conversation involving issues
of exploitation, commodification, visibility/invisibility, insider/outsider
status as related to the flow of capital and cultural production,
the place of the individual's story within the cultural narrative,
and probably some ideas I haven't considered.
My recent departure into painting on the wood panels may have been
an exercise in self-torture, but the one so-so painting I managed
to squeeze out points to a long-lost tenderness that didn't survive
my adolescence and early adulthood. Carl Jung spoke to this rebalancing
I am experiencing: "Where love rules, there is no will to power;
and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is
the shadow of the other." If/when I make some art, I imagine
my reawakened open-heartedness will be reflected in the work. The
proof, though, will be in the pudding.
My biggest challenge, I think, is to balance my binoculars so as
not to remain looking through one end for so long that I lose a
balanced perspective. Too much through the distancing lens and I
want to become that comet, falling and burning. Too much through
the magnification lens and the world becomes so dense with meaning
that a terrible isolation overtakes me. The loneliness of spending
time alone is fine. The loneliness of realizing that no one sees
the world the way you do is a bit harder to take.
My other biggest challenge, then, is to find others who see the
world like I do. My art exists on many edges: too punk to be formalist,
too intellectual to be underground, and too…something-naive?
childlike? genuine?-to fit with cousins like punk, feminist artists
such as the ones associated with the New Narrative movement. This
hard-to-define quality is what I suspect sets me apart from much
contemporary cultural production. Tav Falco, a Southern musician
of the late punk era, touches on what I mean when he talks about
a quality that distinguishes the expression of marginal Southern
bluesmen:
"Whereas the awareness of Bataille, Genet, and Artaud was self-conscious,
erudite, spewing, disassociated, psychoanalytic, subversive-involving
a perception of the so-called natural order of things from an inverted,
convoluted and irrationally angular view, …the rants…and
the nature of most of these Southern musicians and bluesmen was
essentially agrarian. As… much as their tolerances warped once
transplanted to the cities, whatever complexities, anxieties, and
uncertainties they underwent, they all possessed a thread to an
inner peace, an inner clear spot or memory of it; a pastoral, numinous,
beatific oneness that infused the lives of those who lived or had
once lived in the country. The poetry they created, however dark
or haunted, was always composed as a measure of their inherent connection
to universal mysteries, but expressed in compelling everyday barnyard
terms and metaphors."10
My childhood and adolescence in the woods binds me to a perspective
that prevents me from situating myself comfortably among the liberal
elite or the urban underground. I feel physically displaced, and
I am always on the verge of moving back to country to become a farmer.
It's interesting that this alienating and painful split in me mirrors
the sociological urban-rural split in our country. So, as an artist
reflecting my times, I'm probably right where I should be.
Notes
1. Rebekah Rutkoff, "Studio: Transcript of an Un-made Video,"
Animal Shelter: Sex, Art, Literature 1 (Fall 2008): 133.
2. Transcribed from the film, "Artaud: My Life and Times with
Antonin Artaud," directed by Gérard Mordillat, 1995.
3. William T. Wiley, http://www.williamtwiley.com/words_by_me.html
4. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia preface by Michel Foucault (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 1983), xiii.
5. Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2006),
211.
6. Ibid., 210
7. Ibid., 87
8. Dodie Bellamy, Barf Manifesto (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008), 18.
9. From a conversation with the author with Bob Comings, 2001. More
information about John Keith Kessel available at http://www.spyrock.com/nadafarm/html/jkk-main.html
10. Erik Morse, "Tav Falco by Eric Morse," Bomb Magazine
103 (Spring 2008): 84.
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