FIELD OF WEEDS: Acts of Art (Black Hole, White Wall)

How can the assemblage be refused the name it deserves, ‘desire’?
-Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet

With a weave of events working through the week: the unfoldings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its Winnipeg activities folded into the ongoing hardships and discrimination faced by Canada’s Aboriginal population, this thread taken up by The Memorial To Wilfred Laurier held a week ago by the leadership of the Secwepemc, Okanagan and Nlaka'pamux Nations at Spences Bridge http://rabble.ca/news/2010/06/century-broken-promises-memorial-wilfred-laurier; the ongoing gusher in the Gulf of Mexico receiving the attention that 50 years of devastation in the Niger Delta has never known (not that awareness and response is a zero-sum game, far from it!) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/world/africa/17nigeria.html; and the launch of the People’s Summit in Toronto next to Oxfam’s Gender Justice Summit http://www.oxfam.ca/what-we-do/campaigns/g8-g20-summits-2010/gender-justice-summit-2010/ ; I have been wondering how public art can work as a counterpoint to the enclosures and divisions and that abound. As well, I’ve been considering how my own art practice, heterogonous and sometimes collaborative, might link up in a larger way with other people’s practices and public space. What antidote is an assemblage of desire?

On Tuesday, I put the call out for art works (broken lines, experiments in space) and today I am excited to post the first responses. As you’ll see the strict 8/20 rule was broken by Ward McBurney’s Sestina (a form that calls for 39 lines) and the bp/BP duet (tho perhaps 2 voices get 40 lines??). Thanks to everyone involved so far! Keep the work coming. This is an ongoing and open invitation to send work and then to take it back out into the world. I look forward to many more voices!


SEAQUENCE &The Macando Blowout or bp/BP Duet


bp:
the sea
finds its way thru
into wells the farmer digs


BP: No comment.


bp: where
do
the walls
end
their movements
in doors


BP: No comment.

bp: in the middle
of wreckage

we
stripped it bare

BP: relatively tiny major spill in comparison with the size of the ocean

bp: empire
is where the umpire
assumes he’s more important than
the players

BP: very, very modest. We are taking full responsibility for the spill and…where people can present legitimate claims for damages we… are going to be very very aggressive in all of that

bp: i have said everything i can say having started out so sure i know there are times when words make sense times when all this talking seems necessary it doesnt now

--bpNichol & Wickipedia



ON THE BEACH AT IBENO


ongoing. r gest of_ shore.
lick fluctua covers a surface.
small children sWish in the lackened estuary.
immense underwater plumes.
of bird species leak barricades.
oil-black nets, fish ended.
mangroves’ bon[N]y light.
miles of crude pipes’spiel.

--Shannon Maguire




20 AFTER HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

1. Barrio Chino, Barcelona, Spain, 1933.


There is the picture of despair.
Despair itself, I think.
A basket of fruit, is that it? 8 or 20.
In the marketplace. Chalk on the wall.


There is no simple
this side of the security barrier.
Plan a few minutes more they say
to reach the opera. Onegin. Take public transit.




2. Liverpool, England, 1962.


Children and what remain brick walls.
The one War never mind the numbers.
The portions of the city that survived
could not withstand the economy of.


Now 60000 barrels per day and it's going to
Parasitoids, and extremely diverse in
The air is thick with unsolved city.
Helicopters as secure as last year's wasps.

--Ralph Kolewe



LAMENT FOR STREET FURNITURE

Where have all the trashcans gone?
Long time passing...
Where have all the trashcans gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the trashcans gone?
Garbage bin is not a bomb
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

(apologies to Pete Seeger)

--Alana Boltwood



OUR DUMB FRIENDS


Anything can happen at any time.
What does this mean? If you’re a police horse,
it means you get to stand there while bipeds –
who ought to know better, and do – make crime
sandwiches out of your neck and legs and arse;
it means going wherever it is you’re led

and taking it. They say you can lead
(you in this case means them) (time and time
again, I can’t decide which is worse:
our use of you, or abuse of you) a horse
to water, but you can’t make it rhyme
with everything that has been done or said

in the name of justice, or power. I read
the other day that you were said
to have charged some homeless people – crime
of the century – but when I read the fine
print, I noticed that it takes a horse
bundles of bounds to charge, and, worse,

they (the them, whoever they are) scarce
mentioned that they (I didn’t really read
this: it’s on film) threw fences at the horses
and cans full of bearings at their heads.
I wonder when some uber-god will fine
us with destruction for our crimes

against horses, against animals, against crime.
Until then, we will suffer worse and worse
things through others for the sake of fine
sentiment. I’ve lost my train of thought, and led
you to believe I think the heads
of state are smarter than a horse’s arse.

A politician, the Master said, is an arse
upon which everyone has sat, except a man.
Clear it up any? And in case you think my head
has been turned by pretty pictures, there are worse
things to lead your eye astray, like lead
bullets tracing out the sidelines

where horses ought to live. I think I’ll lead
my arse downtown next week and head
straight for the middle ground of crime.

--Ward McBurney