Monthly Archives: January 2007

The art of stalking

In search of Sophie Calle, Vito Acconci and Christopher Nolan

Films such as Following by Christopher Nolan (whose 2006 film The Prestige is out now in Europe) and artworks such as Sophie Calle’s and Vito Acconci’s are about following perfect strangers for the kick of it. The art of stalking comes to mind.

The comparison of Calle with Acconci is inevitable:

The cultural and social question of who is using whom is always at issue in artwork that gives others a voice (Krzysztof Wodiczko’s enlistment of people with stories of cultural dislocation is one relevant example) or relies on their presence in some other way (the inevitable comparison, to Calle’s early work in particular, is Vito Acconci’s 1969 Following Piece) —Art in America, Sept, 2005 by Nancy Princenthal

For a picture of the Following Piece click here.

On Sophie Calle’s Address Book (1983):

One of Calle’s first projects to generate public controversy was Address Book (1983). The French daily newspaper Libération invited her to publish a series of 28 articles. Having recently found an address book on the street (which she photocopied and returned to its owner), she decided to call some of the telephone numbers in the book and speak with the people about its owner. To the transcripts of these conversations, Calle added photographs of the man’s favorite activities, creating a portrait of a man she never met, by way of his acquaintances. The articles were published, but upon discovering them, the owner of the address book, a documentary filmmaker named Pierre Baudry, threatened to sue the artist for invasion of privacy. As Calle reports, the owner discovered a nude photograph of her, and demanded the newspaper publish it, in retaliation for what he perceived to be an unwelcome intrusion into his private life.

On Following:

Following (1998) – Christopher Nolan
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Bill is a young, jobless aspiring writer. He tells a story about himself to a man, explaining how he began to follow random people on the street in an attempt to understand them. He sets up a number of rules to separate himself from the people he follows, but breaks them when he begins following a specific man, Cobb, day after day. Cobb wears a suit and leaves several different apartment buildings carrying a bag. He eventually confronts Bill at a diner and reveals that he is a burglar. Cobb invites Bill to accompany him on his next burglary.

On Following piece (1969) – Vito Acconci:

Following Piece is one of Vito Acconci’s early works. The underlying idea was to select a person from the passers-by who were by chance walking by and to follow the person until he or she disappeared into a private place where Acconci could not enter. The act of following could last a few minutes, if the person then got into a car, or four or five hours, if the person went to a cinema or restaurant. Acconci carried out this performance everyday for a month. And he typed up an account of each ‘pursuit’, sending it each time to a different member of the art community. —http://hosting.zkm.de/ctrlspace/d/texts/01?print-friendly=true [Mar 2005]

A fallacious catalogue

The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. Impardonable, therefore, are the omissions and additions perpetrated by Madame Henri Bachelier in a fallacious catalogue which a certain daily, whose Protestant tendency is no secret, has had the inconsideration to inflict upon its deplorable readers–though these be few and Calvinist, if not Masonic and circumcised. The true friends of Menard have viewed this catalogue with alarm and even with a certain melancholy. One might say that only yesterday we gathered before his final monument, amidst the lugubrious cypresses, and already Error tries to tarnish his Memory . . . Decidedly, a brief rectification is unavoidable. —source

So begins Borges’s Pierre Menard, a fine piece of false document-based appropriative writing which I acquired at Antwerp book store Demian today, inbetween a haircut and a philharmonic concert (Wagner’s Tannhäuser and G. Holst’s The Planets (whose Mars theme was used in British cult tv series The Quatermass Experiment).

The keyword that I find in many works by Borges is fallacious which translates in my Dutch version as bedrieglijk. Fallacious are concepts which are based on fallacies.

More on fiction within fiction:

Fictional books and authors figure prominently in several short stories by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. A few of Borges’s fictional creations include The Book of Sand, Herbert Quain (author of April March, The Secret Mirror, etc.), Ts’ui Pen (author of The Garden of Forking Paths), Mir Bahadur Ali (author of The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim), as well as the imaginary Encyclopædia Britannica of the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Borges’s most famous and beloved fictional book, however, is Don Quixote! This Don Quixote is written by the fictional symbolist poet Pierre Menard in Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In this story, Menard undertakes an independent word-by-word and line-by-line recreation of Cervantes‘s classic novel. The story itself takes the form of a review of Menard’s work for a literary journal; though Menard’s Quixote is still unfinished, the imaginary reviewer concludes that Menard’s circumstances and the intervening history between Cervantes’s 16th century Spain and Menard’s fictional present produce a Quixote that is more pleasurable to read and deeply richer in meaning: though Menard’s Quixote is identical on a word-for-word basis to Cervantes’s original, Menard’s is superior! This ironic conclusion is often read as a commentary on the nature of accurate translation, but more significantly as an illustration of the manner in which the meaning of a text is determined as much if not more by the reader than the author. –fictional books at Wikipedia

Of human hunting

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

The French title to the film adaptation was Les Chasses du comte Zaroff , as depicted here on the cover of French magazine Midi- Minuit Fantastique, issue 6 of June 1963

Excerpt from the story, where the protagonist finds out what general Zaroff actually means:

“I wanted the ideal animal to hunt,” explained the general. “So I said, `What are the attributes of an ideal quarry?’ And the answer was, of course, `It must have courage, cunning, and, above all, it must be able to reason.”‘

“But no animal can reason,” objected Rainsford.

“My dear fellow,” said the general, “there is one that can.”

“But you can’t mean–” gasped Rainsford.

“And why not?”

“I can’t believe you are serious, General Zaroff. This is a grisly joke.”

“Why should I not be serious? I am speaking of hunting.”

  —–The Most Dangerous Game (1924) is a famous short story by Richard Connell

 

See also: human hunting

Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive

Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (Youtube)

Bipolar(previously known as manic depression) (Jahsonic)

BBC entry

… following his highly publicised nervous breakdown in 1995, which was attributed at the time to bad reviews … Fry was suffering from serious clinical depression at the time as a result of his as-yet undiagnosed cyclothymia, a form of bipolar disorder (formerly known as manic depression). He subsequently walked out of the production, prompting its early closure … Fry subsequently was unaccounted for for several days, during which period he contemplated suicide.

Stephen Fry (V for Vendetta, 2006) has since spoken publicly about living with a bipolar disorder, and in 2006 made a two-part documentary about his experiences, Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic-Depressive. In it, he interviews celebrities (such as Robbie Williams, Rick Stein, Carrie Fisher, Richard Dreyfuss (Inserts, 1975) , and Tony Slattery) and non-famous persons, all of whom also suffer from the illness. The programme was broadcast BBC Two on September 19 and September 26, 2006.

I can’t see Borges yet

That Donald Cammell has been influenced by Borges may be further illustrated by two more examples. His 1977 film Demon Seed – a visionary but unsettling work where an AI named Proteus attempts to conceive a child with a human woman – contains a scene where a programmer discusses the paradox of Shi Huang Ti, as related by Borges in The Wall and the Books. The second example is more grim, as it involves Cammell’s suicide. After shooting himself in the head with a shotgun, he remarked to his wife that he “couldn’t see Borges yet.” He died a few moments later, with the ambulance on its way to his home. —themodernworld.com

Borges and film (also at themodernworld)

Highest rated films based on stories by Borges (IMDb)

A great deal of highfalutin American and European writers left little or no impression on him

Borges largely preferred genre fiction to literary fiction:

André Maurois … wrote, “His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges had read everything, and especially what nobody reads anymore[emphasis mine]: the Kabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound — he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas — but it is vast.” Maurois was mostly correct; Borges read everything, but there was a lot he didn’t finish, including “The Brothers Karamazov,” “Madame Bovary,” Proust and Thomas Mann. A great deal of highfalutin American and European writers left little or no impression on him (the major exception being the French symbolist poets, especially Paul Valéry). The last great modernist of 20th century literature drew his primary inspiration not from other modernists but from styles and modes of literature (fables, folk tales, ancient epics) that had become proud words on dusty shelves and from writers of prose and poetry such as H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton (particularly the Father Brown mysteries), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the Irish fabulist Lord Dunsany, and Argentine “gaucho” poets, writers who, for one reason or another, Western literature had relegated to the twilight realm of the praised but unread. He preferred genre literature to the deep-dish classics. –“Borges: A Life” by Edwin Williamson via http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2004/08/27/borges/index_np.html?pn=3 [Jan 2007]

Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) – Marquis de Sade

Related: French literature – novel – Marquis de Sade – 1790s

Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) – Marquis de Sade
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
A new edition with a cover by Tomer Hanuka (Google gallery)

Philosophy in the Bedroom (La Philosophie Dans le Boudoir) is a play written by the Marquis de Sade in 1795 in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Depending on one’s point of view, it is either a philosophical work laced with erotica, or just pornography.

Engaging, titillating, disturbing, and startlingly confessional

Tracey Emin (2006) – Tracey Emin
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The most highly publicized of the infamous Young British Artists, Emin has stirred as much controversy as she has acclaim, being both highly personal and extremely original in her art. Emin’s work is engaging, titillating, disturbing, and startlingly confessional. One of her most famous pieces is Everyone I Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a tent appliquéd with names. Another notorious work, My Bed—the scene where she spent four days contemplating suicide—was exhibited at Tate Britain when the artist was short-listed for the Turner prize in 1999. Though denounced by conservative critics at the outset, Emin’s work has attracted serious critical attention for more than a decade. In the words of Art in America, “What brought Emin to prominence was shock value, but what keeps her work powerful as she continues is the strength and nuance of its form and content.” Compiled in close collaboration with the artist herself—and unprecedented in its scope—this is the definitive book on Emin, featuring drawings, paintings, sculptures, appliqués and embroideries, neon and video stills as well as her own writing. –from the publisher

See also: contemporary art – British art