christoph /project
Embodiment, This Embodiment: The Cut-Ups of a Confessional Poet
Updated: 10/12/2009
- Example of the audio cutup with a rough draft of a cutup poem from Lady Lazarus and The Applicant,
here. - I'm considering calling the genre of my project a "performance" rather than a film since most of the constraint is as a result of my active performance of finding signs in London.
Narrative Biography (500, 100, 300)
Artist Statement (CV)
Christoph Girard is so detached to everything and everyone, that his own undertaking as a radical queer vegan straight edge iconoclast is very conventional. The way he labels himself within so many subcultures makes it ironic for me to take a stand against representation, but the fact that he is so disconnected allows him not to share a social identity but to embrace the systems as a dissident within labels. Anyone who meets him comprehends a fragmented part of himself and would have to conclude with a multifaceted interpretation of who he is because he is a contortionist in structural disguise.
He is fascinated by the shared and marginalized identities of others who are disconnected from life in ways he is not. Like the poet Clark Coolidge, who is interested in geological rock patterns, absorbing the population is how he connects with nature. he is interested in the chaos of communication as a journalist, artist and poet; and chooses to spend his free time as a recluse immersed in the bizarre psychodynamics of social interaction because he is better able to sort things out in his mind clearly while seeing how intricate and alive everything is. How identity works itself into technical poetics is hard to articulate yet he believes there is a parallel between the components of a marginalized identity and the poetics of fragmentation.
As a graduate student at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, he worked under the guidance of Paul Vangelisti, who actively translates and publishes Italian Futurist to Neo-Avant-Garde poetry. His first thesis addressed the obstruction of form through sound. He manipulates structures into a system of paradoxes in order to create lyric poetry through syntax, association and logic. A common thread in these disjointed texts is the way it can address detail and rhythm to ephemeral moments whose settings are unfamiliar, almost implausible to readers but still achieve a cadence within the realm of consciousness. These poems occupy a space between tangible and fantastic, commenting on lived life while simultaneously communicating how a transient existence can be experienced unexpectedly. His poetry won the 2006 Frances Jaffer Poetry Prize from the San Francisco State University Poetry Center.
His photography is a structural dialectic of two or four frames and has been exhibited at Magnolia Editions in Oakland, SFSU and coffee-shops. While he worked as an administrator for a commercial art gallery in Laguna Beach, he installed a large dialectical photo montage nearby at the former site of a Wyland mural on Pacific Coast Highway during Memorial Day weekend. The montage questioned the nature of exoticism as an idyllic holiday retreat with frames of a crooked sublime beach stacked on top and beside surreal shadows of palm trees. The giclée was reinstalled several times, as passersby moved the board; once to a garbage can. A coworker told him that a homeless person eventually sequestered the art.
Contextual Statement
To abolish the author's role in literature will in turn abolish self-referential subjects in literature by ceasing to reference specific excerpts that allude to the author. Authorship, as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault argue, becomes a hierarchical focal point to the written word. The role of the author must be subverted for the sustainability of the text in order for the reader to connect to the work in a more meaningful way with public discourse. The reader, in turn, reflects the anarchic struggle of disembodiment and separation by way of transgressing the author and paper-based media.
Some solutions should be expanded to the ideas presented in Foucault's What Is An Author? by and Barthes' Death of the Author by understanding how text could be disseminated and read by the public without the subservience of the author and his or her own book. Examples of ongoing discourse is found in anarchy's role of the historical construction of the avant-garde that comes from the resistance to representation and authorship. The struggle against the limits of symbolic representation in literature is parallel to the anarchist critique of political representation. There are thematic links between anarchy and the historical influences of literature that divert from the fragment.
Embodiment and disembodiment is explored through the minimal process of interaction by the movement of the body via a sensor connected to an arduino board connected to a Macbook Pro. The physical presence of writing reflects the existence of the active reader in a room who engages in plural interpretations of the spoken text by activating a sensor to switch on the sound and video. The active reader's resistance to central authorship is put forth by the poststructuralism and postmodernism movements. The reader's plurality of truth is perceived as an army of metaphors that determines the semantics of meaning. The death of the author in writing connects to readership through movements of the body that conditions its rhythm and cadence.
Bibliography
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Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader.
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Hayles, Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.
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Heibach, Christiane and Karin Wenz, eds. P0Es1S: The Aesthetics Of Digital Poetry.
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Middleton, Peter. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry.
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Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Nick Monfort, eds. The New Media Reader.
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