DISTURBANCE by IVY ALVAREZ

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

Disturbance by Ivy Alvarez 

(Seren Books, Bridgend, 2013)

“Death is not an event in life: … What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” 

            -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

1.

Disturbance is an almost novel-like book. Rashomon-like, it tells the story of what has become known as a “domestic tragedy”: a man kills most of his family then turns the gun on himself. My “It tells the story” is actually a misleading locution. Because that is exactly what Disturbance doesn’t do. Because it can’t be done. All that can be done is to talk around it. So, it tells a story. About the attempt to speak what cannot be spoken. It tells all that can be known, which in the end is nothing. See Wittgenstein, above.

2.

That doesn’t mean we don’t learn a lot about the surrounding circumstances. We have statements from many people, which range from witness accounts to the thoughts of the surviving daughter to shopping lists to the (imagined?) thoughts of the husband. We learn that the husband murderer gave his mother the creeps (his unending neediness), abused his wife (abused? What a euphemism, he beat the shit out of her), we learn that the wife had her own set of problems, we learn many things. But what we mainly learn, what I mainly learned, that in the end this event (which is itself, as well as a stand-in for so many others) contains a core of incomprehensibility, and that tho we can’t stop talking about it, we can’t get near that core.

3.

One of the signs that we can’t get near the core is how cliché-ridden the various speakers are. In “A Neighbouring Farmer”: “I don’t know what could have set him off.” This is the farmer, clearly, and not Alvarez; her deployment of cliché is evidence of her art (proved, perhaps by the fact that this line is followed by “then again / I cannon understand / how cows know / to chew in unison”). I don’t blame any of the speakers for resorting to cliché; who hasn’t been there, who hasn’t said to some bereaved or other, “I don’t know what to say … but …”?

4.

One speaker strikes me as slightly different from the others: the journalist. For a reason I can’t put my finger on, I am convinced that (in some respects, at least) the journalist stands in for Alvarez herself, and that she knows that whatever she provides her readers, it will only be to “mar the glass / jar the faces”, to tell a tale (“a fictitious or true narrative or story, especially one that is imaginatively recounted”). It is no coincidence, I think, that when the journalist comes to tell the story, it is titled “The Journalist’s tale” (nor do I think it is coincidence that this is the only poem in the book set in two columns, the way that certain editions of The Canterbury Tales are set …)

5.

None of these considerations, that add up to what “really” happened can’t be spoken, in any way lessen the horror. The book is suffused with pathos and horror.

6.

I am reminded of two other books here, Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, but that’s more a formal matter than a significant one, and, more importantly, Vanessa Place’s Tragoedia. I like the way the Place and the Alvarez work together, and tell things about each other. Tragoedia is made up of legal documents, which allow us the fiction of believing that what can’t be spoken, can. Disturbance reveals that fiction, that the legal form is really make-believe. Contrarily, Tragoedia shows how, without that formal make-believe, all we are left to fall back  are who-knows-how-relevant details, e.g. the wife Jane’s “re-stock fridge”. Who know’s how relevant is not meant to say irrelevant, it’s meant to say we don’t know what we need to know when an event such as that recounted here occurs, so all we can do is fall back on what comes to hand. It is possible that all these who-knows are the only life-raft we have, outside the fiction of forms such as the justice system and the documents it produces.

7.

Leaving all the above aside, for a moment, I do want to add that these Alvarez’s considerable skills are on display here, so that there is some pleasure amid the, well, the everything else. I mentioned “re-stock fridge”, above. That reads in whole:

raspberry ripple ice-cream

blood on skin

dried grape juice

an older bruise

blueberry stain

shoulder sprain

the door’s sharp edge

fed to my face

you deserve it

he said

It strikes me as remarkable that such ugliness can co-exist with “the dance of the syllables.”

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman has about a year and a half to go on In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam. The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making (Leafe Press, 2007), and Flux, Clot & Froth (Meritage Press 2010). In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, the main other thing on his plate right now is an anthology which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg, titled Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Anthology of Outside & Subterranean Poetry, due out from Black Widow Press, Autumn 014. He's also learning to play the viola and he blogs at www.johnbr.com (Zeitgeist Spam).    

FOURTH INTERNATIONAL TEXT FESTIVAL

MARTON KOPPANY Engages

Fourth International Text Festival, Curated by Tony Trehy, Philip Davenport, Susan Lord, Diana Hamilton and KFS Press

(Bury, U.K., 2014)

PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH

Fourth International Text Festival, Bury, UK, 2014. Curated by Tony Trehy (also founder of the Festival, director of the Bury Art Museum), Philip Davenport (also editor of The Dark Would anthology), Susan Lord, Diana Hamilton and the KFS Press.

The fourth incarnation of the Text Festival, which I was lucky to attend, is an exciting constellation of exhibits and performances commenting on each other. These are just brief footnotes to a few miraculous things I saw less than a week ago. (But see also my other review in this issue of Galatea Resurrects about the photo-documentation of an earlierperformance which was repeated at the Festival.) Deeper analyses will need more time and a better chronicler. Some of the events I’ll mention concentrated on the first three days, but the exhibitions will be open through early July, and new events are in the making, so it is well worth a visit.

Some examples:

I enter the beautiful building of neo-classical reminescences. (They will continue in the  sculptures and paintings of the permanent collection.) Ian Hamilton Finlay would probably be pleased to be exhibited here. And indeed, on the second level, behind the columns of the circular gallery (and behind Barney’s), there’s an I.A. Finlay on the wall, part of a small exhibit of “political texts”.

I enter the main room of the permanent exhibition (or something that looks like that) and run into Steve Giasson’s titles of artwork, which look like ordinary titles, and are fastened on the wall or the pedestals exactly like those. They are written in Latin (and perhaps translated from ancient Greek). If we need the English versions, we can pick up their printed lists in the middle of the room. Thanks to Latin, we read the twofold (or threefold) punned titles with a delay in the English translation, which makes a difference. Generally speaking: this clown won’t give the first laugh, we’ll have to figure out for ourselves when to laugh and when to cry.

DESISTE TE LUDERE TANTUM DE DELICIIS ET MORTE COGITAS (Stop Kidding Yourself, You Only Think About Sex and Death) – photo by Philip Davenport

CREDEBAM LEONARDUM DICAPRIO FUISSE HOMINEM QUI MONAM LISAM PINXIT (I Used To Think That Leonardo Dicaprio Was The Guy Who Painted The Mona Lisa) – photo by MK

“Please do not touch.” The warnings on the wall look like Steve’s titles, which look like ordinary titles. They are now part of the installation. It is sad that we are not allowed to touch the artworks. And the sculptures are sad, too, no doubt. They don’t like to be alone. They don’t like to be copies of another “–ism”, called classicism. Deep inside they are original. That is their secret. “But how could we touch anything which is ‘just’ an idea,” the installation asks. On the other hand, good ideas are touching, and the sculptures are saved for the moment.

(And there are points of time in vynil on the floor saying how far I am from a Victorian painting of Orpheus, taming the animals… And the huge painting, one of the many in the room,  spoke to me through its title: MIHI NON AMICIS OPUS EST SED SECTATORIBUS. /I Don’t Need Friends, I Need Followers/.  “As everything could now be done openly he ran because of curiosity and the wish to get it over with long flying leaps towards the pulpit.”, I thought.)

On Sunday morning, a group of moaning and crying and praying and yawning zombies invaded the rooms of the museum, both the permanent and the temporary exhibitions because for them, there’s no difference between the two.They were identified by those who hadn’t been pulled at once into their group (and forced to behave like them) as the (brilliant) Juxtavoices “anti-choir”. They seemed to be equally bored of (or angry at) (or sorrowful for) the neo-classical clichés and the daring novelties of, say, The Language of Lists. When they withdrew at last, nothing remained behind them but a gentle breeze: surviving museum goers and surviving artworks united in a momentary relief of just being.

Singer from Juxtavoices “anti-choir” at Bury Art Museum – photo by Philip Davenport

The physical reality of Matt Dalby’s video, titled Long Lankin, is a labyrinth-like barcode in the vicinity of Dante Meditating the Episode of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta by Sir Joseph Noel Paton, in a corridor hosting The Dark Would exhibition. (It is the continuation of a project, therefore it is “Dark Would No. 3”.)

“Long Lankin” is based on a British folk ballad about a motiveless murder; more closely on a song, especially as it was performed by a singer in the sixties; and on Matt’s previous short videos. Matt recites the song (in several voices), and the monotonous rhythm of the simple song gives threathening coherence to the “story”, which otherwise consists of flashing images of streets, cars, a blooming tree, and beyond them fallen leaves, discarded toys, dying fish, fences, a microwave, a feather, twigs in the water, segments of the of sky, unpaired shoes, petals. Each image is a different goodbye. Matt keeps moving (we don’t see him, only what his camera sees), and at the end of the video when he fights his way through the bushes, we don’t know: is he escaping an unnamable danger or is he the danger himself? In this state of hypnotized concentration everything has a dream-like logic, but nothing can be predicted, judged or even named. Only the permanence of the danger is real – although not more real at all than the image of a feather caught on a branch.

Liz Collini – photo by MK

The Text Festival is about different kinds of writing and our ability to read. In the Lawrence Weiner show we experience how objects become words and words become objects. Poems can be based on the simple gesture of moving from one page to the next, and they can be found, like in the case of several pieces in the rich and diverse Language of Lists group exhibition. They can absorb time and radiate it like in Liz Collini’s beautiful, memorable work made on the spot during the three opening days of the festival. They can be inclined toward minimalism – or be as comprehensive as Caroline Bergvall’s breathtaking multimedia performance, one of the most outstanding events of the Festival, where Gesamtkunstwerk was perfectly functional, and typography served the highest purposes of a myth without intervening gods. It is a song on isolation and compassion, ending in between, but leading to catharsis.

Caroline Bergvall – photo by Philip Davenport

Visual poetry per se (for me simply one of the names for the “same” open field, but a name I know more closely), was represented, too, although to a lesser extent than in 2011. I met a lot of wonderful artists this year as well – and I missed a lot some of my visual poet friends who I’d met the previous time.

Tony Trehy and Philip Davenport put together valuable works and events belonging to very different genres and coming from very different traditions (also from “outsiders”). They looked behind labels and saw them as simply constructions. As we walk around the exhibitions and move from one event to the next one, we must learn to read again and again – and that’s a great pleasure.


Rachel Defay-Liautard - photo by MK

…Finally I arrive at Rachel Defay-Liautard’s performance (it actually happened one day before the Juxtavoices), held with good reason in one of the rooms for The Language of Lists. During the whole time of the performance Rachel (blindfolded with a black cloth covering her eyes, leashed on the cord of the microphone she held in her hand and followed by her shadow on the screen), repeated the same formula, the title of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay:  The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility. She kept moving, but her motion was clumsy because she entangled again and again in the cord. She felt her way reaching the microphone toward us as if searching for contact. And indeed, she came closer to us, repeating the formula in different languages, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and apparently waiting for a response, for some kind of participation. And it is not by chance that I use the word “formula”, because step by step, the text lost its meaning and became almost a chant. Before the performance Rachel had asked me to intervene in case the spectators were too polite to eliminate the distance. At a certain point I went to the microphone and repeated the title in Hungarian. Then others joined me, and the participation became almost continuous and multilingual. It wasn’t until the performance ended and I came out of the room that I realized (and I might have been wrong), that Rachel might have wanted us to say something else.

-May 11, 2014

*****

Marton Koppany lives in Budapest, Hungary. He has been dealing with visual poetry, language art, intermedia etc. since the beginning of the 80's. His latest book in print is Addenda (Otoliths, 2012). His new ebook, Hungarian LangArt, can be downloaded here: http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/pdfs/HungarianLangArt.pdf