David Berridge reviews 'Spit Temple'
Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña, edited and translated by Rosa Alcalá (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012).
Reviewed
by David Berridge
After
reading Spit Temple, I immediately
went back to some of Vicuña’s earlier books, her selected poems Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water,
and the writing-drawings of Instan.
In documenting a separate, performance-based part of Vicuña’s eclectic and
unified practice, Spit Temple also
illuminates how to read these other seemingly more page-centric publications.
Unravelling Words,
for example, whilst giving space to Vicuna’s installations and actions, is
often the conventional bi-lingual poetry collection, English (translation) and
Spanish (original) poems facing each other across recto and verso. Spit Temple makes apparent not only how
Vicuña herself moves between different languages, but how printed poems and
books are fluid, momentary constellations, ever liable to transformation,
within ongoing relationships of oral
and written that Vicuña describes variously here as “in tension like
lovemaking” and “war zone.”
Likewise,
Instan’s pencil writing-drawings
become elucidated by the reproduction in Spit
Temple of sheets of scribbled notes made in preparation for performances.
The pages in Instan are much more
finished, but both evidence a thought process seeking to “diagram” words, break
them into syllables and space, find new wor(l)ds through multiple versionings (Kenneth Sherwood’s term,
from his essay here) expressive of how “A poem only becomes poetry when its
structure/ is made not of words but forces.”
Edited
and translated by Rosa Alcalá, Spit
Temple gives transcripts or notes for nine “oral performances” that took
place between 1995 and 2002, alongside the editor’s critical introduction, an
autobiographical memoir by Vicuña, and a gathering of reports, responses, and
reflections by poets and scholars, that also offers a map of how her work has
come into a (primarily North American) English language context, part of the
1970s ethnopoetic explorations of
Denis Tedlock and Jerome Rothenberg, and, more recently, an engaged,
experimental poetics of Nada Gordon, Juliana Spahr, Edwin Torres, and Rodrigo
Toscano, amongst others.
Made
from video and audio recordings, the contexts vary from galleries, to
bookstores, to various university lecture halls, from short sets in events
framed as poetry readings, to longer gigs announced as performance-lectures.
The transcripts pay attention to environmental factors, noting, too, the
inaudibilities and failures of reproduction, less as unfortunate error than as
the inevitable ground of translation and mediation through which Vicuña’s work
comes to us, and with which it is itself consciously entwined.
The
transcripts also offer scenographic details, most usually about the beginning
of a performance, so that, for example, a 1995 performance at The Poetry
Project at St.Mark’s Church in New York City is described as commencing when:
A
woman introducing Vicuña walks away from the podium. The camera’s gaze is
directed towards an empty podium and microphone. Silence. Then, chant-like
sounds somewhere in the distance, out of frame. Frame opens and Vicuña
approaches, singing, her hands folded behind her back, clutching a manila
envelope. She sings.
If
the work in Spit Temple has taken a
decade to find book form, it does so at an apt moment. The book’s publishers,
Ugly Duckling Presse, have a book series on experimental performance scripts (Spit Temple, however, is part of their
eclectic and indispensable DOSSIER series, edited by Anna Moschovakis) and also
produce INDEX, an open submission performance annual. In the UK, John Lely and
James Saunders’ recent compendium Word
Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation, although more focused on musical
traditions than Vicuña’s work, gives critical and historical frameworks to what
until recently has been a little commented upon arena of endeavor.
Alcalá
notes that the typographical layout in Spit
Temple has been chosen to find a page equivalent for aspects of performance
evidence on the sound recordings. In this, as she acknowledges, Alcalá’s
approach broadly follows the techniques in Denis Tedlock’s essays of the 1970s
(many collected in The Spoken Word and
the Work of Interpretation, and further demonstrated in poetic texts such
as Jerome Rothenberg’s “The 17 Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell”). As Alcalá
writes in her introduction:
the
transcriptions here attempt a graphic representation of Vicuña’s shifts in
register and pauses by means of spacing, fonts, and size of type in order to
capture not just what the words say, but how they are being said. In this
graphic representation of register I do not differentiate between the spoken
languages; this isn’t meant to erase their difference, but to suggest fluidity
of movement between them, and to avoid the mark of otherness often suggested by
italics or quotation marks.
In
Spit Temple such typographic elements
are used sparingly. If, in transcripts of the shorter performances, such
devices did generate a sense of live performance, in the longer performance
lectures I found this sense less vivid, finding that as I read for longer the
conventions for depicting speech settled, perhaps inevitably, into being
techniques of writing and the page.
Take
these two extracts from a 1999 performance at the Krannert Art Center in
Illinois, both of which appear in the transcript as distinct sections,
separated by a line space from similarly laid out sections above and below:
Bill
McKibben I’m sure you know him
he
was telling a story
of
how in a place in Tibet
people
started planting trees
and
this had changed
the
speed of the wind
so
people instead of being attacked
by
a brutal wind
would
be
TOUCHED
by
a soft wind
stopped
by the trees
and
from later in the same piece, talking about the desert drawings at Paracas,
Nazca, in Peru:
And
you probably have heard
this
is a place
where
the people
created
these writings
or
drawings in the desert
that
are sooo huge
that
you cannot see them
when
you are next to them
you
have to either
fly
above them in a plane
which
means 2000 years
after
they were created
or
you have to climb
on
a mountain
and
see them
from
the distance
and
then they become
legible
readable
as
images
If
several elements sooo unmistakably
shift the text towards being understood as speech, by far the most dominant is
the use of the line, whose phrasal units and breaks create a rhythm that,
especially in the longer pieces, I experience as somewhere between the rhythm and performed idea of speech, as vocalised by some phantom speaker in
my mind (its line-based clarity more evident on the page than in recordings of
Vicuña’s performances I found online).
Given
Spit Temple roots Vicuña in a history
out of (often speech-based) New American Poetry, such debate is informed by
remembering the famous disagreement between Robert Creeley and William Carlos
Williams, the former seeing the later’s line breaks as score for reading aloud,
confounded to hear Williams run over them as if they were not there. Creeley
interpreted line endings as oral pause when reading aloud his own poetry.
In
Vicuña’s transcripts, this concern over speech is somewhat subsumed within a
larger nothingness. The full title of this section of the book is “The Quasars:
Selected Oral Performances (1995-2002).” As Vicuña defines the term: “I called the
performances quasars because they were quasi per, quasi form/ They were
nothingness itself in formation.”
So a performance begins with an empty podium, and the sound
of distant singing, or clapping that continues out of previous audience
applause, or a shaken gourd. The monologues that follow reference various
immediate contexts, noting the temperature in the room alongside descriptions
of newspaper stories, recent travels and dreams, details from anthropological
studies, an Egyptian prayer found in a tomb. These combine with Vicuña’s
handwritten notes and published books to form what Jena Osman calls a “momentary
system of connection.”
Osman is referring to a
1999 performance at Art in General, New York at which general atmospheric noise
- particularly highly creaky floors - became a key element of the system. The
opening minutes of Vicuña’s performance are transcribed over two
pages of Spit Temple, prefaced as “a
compendium of creaks and inaudibilities.” The balance is different to the other
transcripts, but this text illustrates a porosity that is evident and possible
throughout the work in Spit Temple.
Furthermore,
the traditions of ethnopoetic notation this book adds to have always
accommodated such lacunae - take, for example, Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets, large amounts of which, in
printed form, were given over to keyed graphic symbols for “untranslatable” and
“missing.”
All
this takes different form within the short prose vignettes comprising Vicuña’s
“Performing Memory: An Autobiography.” Each of the sixty-three entries -
suggestive of diary entries and postcards - document a particular moment in
Vicuña’s life and work, from childhood to adulthood, through Chile, London,
Columbia and New York. Each moment is titled, presented as both description and
insight, something making up the knot of Vicuña, the artist-person. So
“Speaking to the Signs, Bellavista, 1952” reads in its entirety:
My
mother recounts the day she found me “writing.” No one had taught me how to
write. “What are you doing, mijita?”
she asked. “I’m painting,” I told her, and went on speaking to the signs.
Such
private moments entwine with art movements, performances, books and
exhibitions. The spirit with which all of these are connected, is summed up by The No Manifesto of Tribu No, reprinted
here, which Vicuña composed with a group of friends in Santiago de Chile in 1967,
with its reminder that: “Tribu No’s campaigns are not highly clandestine, and
the only visible results for those of us who live-not the no-movement are our
stupid works.”
What
I found most instructive about Performing
Memory is not so much the particular moments - whose potency for Vicuña is
perhaps diminished through reading them as schematic fables for others - but
the model of the poet-artist that unfolds, necessarily attentive both to the
events around them and the impulses of their own making, following where those
lead, committed over many decades to the unfolding of a particular lexicon of
concern.
In
a launch event for Spit Temple -
available online - Vicuña comments how “what I do really
passes for nothing, it is nothing, it has always been regarded as nothing.”
This seems to add to the notion of quasar
an awareness of the artist’s career, its reception by professional apparatus of
critics, editors, and curators. Not totally ignorable, but the stories Vicuña
tells mostly affirm her priority of that more primary, metaphysical
nothing.
That
said, the materials made available in Spit
Temple, from an art history point of view, connect, for example, to the
recent focus on the work of Lucy Lippard, who appears several times in these
accounts, when Vicuña notes her membership of the Heresies Collective in New
York, and a performance:
Lucy
Lippard invited me to perform in Carnival
Knowledge, an exhibition at Franklin
Furnace. I sat on the floor and projected slides of the ancient erotic poetry
of the Moche in Peru, but my poems didn’t correspond with them. So, instead of
reading what I had written, I began to look for the missing lines. The absent
poem, the search for what was not there, became my guide. Imagining the poetry and vision of the ancient Mochican poet-priestesses, the work that history had erased, I improvised a verbal equivalent of the ceramics found in their
tombs.
The
final section of Spit Temple gathers
responses from contemporary poets and
scholars, whose reflections unfold from their attendance at a particular
performance. I was left wondering if this focus on the phenomenology of
performance, on theory and criticism deriving from chronicle, is something
specific to Vicuña’s work, or a more conscious intention of this generation of
poets to re-place the practice and criticism of poetry in sociality and the
event.
I
also puzzled over what exactly was their connection to Vicuña’s work. Looking
at the contributers own books - Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater, say, or Jena Osman’s The
Network - there seems little interest in Vicuña’s animism, her metaphors
drawn from indigenous crafts of weaving, her traditional styles of storytelling
and song, her often anecdotal sampling of diverse cultural practices, that
searching for a connection to some “ancient melodic matrix” that recurs across
her performances and texts.
Ethnopoetics
itself - as originally formulated by the likes of Rothenberg, Tedlock and
Schwerner - is also not something I have noticed being mentioned a lot by
contemporary poets. If there are ample dialogues with anthropology, these
engagements seem to emphasis documentary, investigative, essayistic aspects
over the original focus on ritual, performance, and shamanism (I’m thinking of
investigations such as Catherine Taylor’s Apart,
Jill Magi’s Slot, Kate Eichorn’s Field Notes: A Forensic).
Yet
connection there undoubtedly is, and like these poets I’m interested in how
Vicuña’s work resonates out of its difference. Toscano acknowledges this
contradiction when, after noting all the different poets who have turned out
for Vicuña’s performance at Brooklyn’s Pierogi Art Gallery in November 2002 -
“The typical schmoozy inattention to any one thing and everything all around” -
he writes of Vicuña’s performance:
Whatever
it is, it makes non-poets feel poetically able-to.
Whatever
it is, it makes poets supremely post-’poetically’ able-to.
Whatever
name befits Cecilia’s poetry
I
don’t know, or rather don’t remember...
But
somehow I remember something that’s
(if only slightly) ahead of me...
“but that’s impossible!” I say...
(me,
Mr. Railer, against so many a meta- and pata- physic)
assembled/ disassembled
The
success of Spit Temple - both
Vicuña’s individual contributions and Alcalá’s editorial concept of the whole -
is that it keeps all these themes in circulation, like the perpetual dialogue
of oral and written itself, both as lovemaking and war zone, that thanks to Spit Temple I can now also see at work
in those other books by Vicuña.
In the terms of
Vicuña’s own oft-repeated lexicon, this is the move from quasar/nothing into the precarious.
It is this precariousness - forming and formative of the “momentary system” of
the instan - that connects Vicuña to
many contemporary poets, along with her awareness - again in that online launch
video- that in the presence of an audience her work becomes “more loose, more
silly, more stupid... going any other way.” Which poses the further question why such a position should seem so much
our own.
