TOPOLOGYOFTHEIMPOSSIBLE.COM/BLOG

But I guess I haven’t updated that most of the stuff I had forthcoming is now available:

At PANK:
LOOP, in the Queer Issue,
and an interview with me about the text.

At Lamination Colony:
Drawers, a story that moves from image to image that I wrote thinking about comix by CF & Hans Rickheit and also the movie Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.

In Artifice Issue 02:
Architecture, Anamnesis, a story that I actually didn’t end up reading at all during the 5 stops of the Artifice Mag MADNESS MUCH Tour I was on with awesome dudes. But I will tell you that it is a story I wrote after drawing a building after becoming obsessed with the architect Emilio Ambasz.

Also I am a participant in the MLP Stamp Stories project, which is cool. It’ll be included in a book too, which is awesome. The sentence is a modification of a sentence from a collaboration I did with the painter Christian Campos. I sent the collab to a chapbook contest with a $15 entrance fee, maybe ill-advised, who knows.

I guess I could have just saved some space and been like “here I updated my C.V.” but whatever.

Here is a link to all my HTMLGIANT posts so far.

Currently, I am pretty obsessed with Jannis Kounellis.

Particularly, I think I am obsessed with intentionally mis-reading Jannis Kounellis. He was a Greek dude who left Greece and moved to Italy where he became “part” of Arte Povera, which is the former obsession that lead directly here. He posits himself halfway between Klein & Manzoni, but Klein is more interesting to me because Klein was batshit insane and loved the noun “void” as much as I do. The point is I like to pretend Kounellis’s works are weird metaphysical environments for crazy shit to happen. They’re still really cool. Whatever.

That reminds me of a hot summer night in New York during those years. I was on the twelfth floor with a young film actress, brunette and extremely attractive. The window was open, we’d smoked quite a lot of hash, we started to kiss–and she suddenly said to me, her eyes burning and empty, “Throw yourself out and see if it makes me come.” It wasn’t aggressive, it was more tender. To her disappointment, I led her back inside. She must have realised that I wasn’t attracted to her. Of course we didn’t see each other again. Such events are both serious and trivial, except when they become tragic, which can happen from time to time. Some of my friends “gave” themselves in such a way. Wrongly, it seems to me, since there is no reason to take such a dive in the name of a problematic female orgasm. Why imagine you need to be, so to speak, the plunging burden of love, or the one who comes to interrupt a bloodlust for the infinite? It’s better just to laugh.

–Philippe Sollers, in an essay on Francesca Woodman

Hello. Next week, I am going on tour with Artifice Magazine to help promote the second issue, which has graciously published me. I’m really excited, and if you live in or near any of the towns we are visiting you should totally come visit us! However, I’m way poor, and because of this, I am going to attempt to sell some stuff before I go for rock bottom prices to help raise funds to pay for gas & food along the way. So! Buy my stuff! If there is anything you are interested in, leave a comment here with your email address or email me directly at doctor (at) topologyoftheimpossible.com (though obviously replace the “(at)” with an actual “@”). I’d really appreciate it, and you could feel like you were doing a good deed, because you would be both supporting the arts & getting cool shit!

“I wish to abandon imitation and illusion and enter directly into the higher drama of: celluloid, two dimensional strips; individual rectangular frames; the nature of sprockets and emulsion; projector operations; the three dimensional reflective screen surface; the retinal screen; optic nerve and individual psycho-physical subjectivities of consciousness. In this cinematic drama, light is energy rather than a tool for the representation of non-filmic objects; light as energy is released to create its own objects , shapes and textures. Given the fact of retinal inertia and the flickering shutter mechanism of film projection, one may generate virtual forms, create actual motion (rather than illustrate it), build actual color-space (rather than picture it), and be involved in actual time (immediate presence).”

• I have spent most of this morning reading my Google Reader feed. I am “sort of” caught up on most of the 50+ blogs that I “follow.” I feel weird, like I should have maybe been reading one of the six books in my backpack instead.
• My desk is freezing. I drank a “venti” iced-americano from Starbucks and now I’m really jittery. But still cold.
• Araina Reines’s blog reminded me that After Dark is a completely terrific magazine and I made the periodicals people go grab me all the volumes we have (which is just 4 years worth, three volumes). This magazine is wonderful but it’s also maybe making me lonely.
• I think I just can’t must enough to care about current pop culture, which is why that sort of ‘brand’ of contemporary theory, that is probably actually really great and engaging and intelligent, falls on completely deaf ears. It’s also possibly why I haven’t bothered reading Zizek. I’m not sure, I just have this idea that that’s alot of Zizek’s praxis. I could be wrong, because like I said, I haven’t read Zizek. I have a book by him about Lacanian Theory through Hitchcock’s films, or something. I could probably read that.
  
  ]]> http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/some-more-things-mostly-lacking-substance/feed/ 4 brutalfuckingmurder http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/some-recent-and-upcoming-things/ http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/some-recent-and-upcoming-things/#comments Wed, 11 Aug 2010 02:57:11 +0000 M. Kitchell http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/?p=96 ]]>

  Until August 18th you can buy a copy of A MIKE KITCHELL READER from Legacy Pictures. It is a piece of conceptual writing. Here is the “press release”:

  For a limited time A MIKE KITCHELL READER is available from Legacy Pictures.

  Legacy Pictures is a new boutique house specializing in custom-run editions of fine writing.

  Please enjoy this release that relates to Niagara, Denton Welch, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Joan Didion, Todd Hido, and will find its way out of print and into the secondary market very soon.

  Also, this Saturday I’m doing a reading for the UNCALLED FOR READINGS series at the Rough House Theater in Chicago. Click this link for some details. This will be the first reading I have done outside of DeKalb. I have no idea what I will be reading at it yet, but I will be figuring that out soon enough.

  
  ]]> http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/some-recent-and-upcoming-things/feed/ 0 brutalfuckingmurder http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/traces-of-light-an-interview-with-theirry-kuntzel/ http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/traces-of-light-an-interview-with-theirry-kuntzel/#comments Wed, 04 Aug 2010 20:27:26 +0000 M. Kitchell http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/?p=90 ]]> I requested this article through interlibrary loan, and the PDF they sent me was almost impossible to read, so I retyped the whole thing for posterity. I thought I would post it here. From ARTLINK, Volume 10 No 4 Summer 1990-91, p. 60-61

  ---

  “The slide from film to video may perhaps one day be compared to the move away from the alexandrine and toward free verse poetry- out of this there emerged a reflection of the literary fate of language, and the same is happening today for the image”.
  –Raymond Bellour

  Bellour’s words were written nine years ago. Today they resonate with tremendous force. Anyone who has been aware of the recent renaissance in the electronic arts, particularly video, will appreciate Bellour’s prophetic voice. Video has been, during the last two decades, expanding at a phenomenal rate in Europe and America. Locally video has been developing with a similar sense of experimental excitement-but only more recently-say during the last decade. Today our local funding and educational institutions are prepared to support the new dynamic forms and styles of electronic image-making

  Bellour’s words are more prophetic when we consider that they were written in reference to one of video’s truly poetic and inventive originators, Thierry Kuntzel. Kuntzel’s videography has been criminally overlooked by Anglo-American commentators till today. Unless I am mistaken, aside from Bellour’s excellent essay, I can’t think of one article that has been written in English on this important voyager of electronic image-making.

  You may ask why is Kuntzel’s art so central to today’s electronic arts? Why do his entrancing wordless tapes with their fluid dream-like abstractions of perception and hallucination, appearance and disappearance, remembering and forgetting and the impossibility of, to use Bellour’s helpful expression, “representing the unrepresentable” matter? Briefly put, Kuntzel’s extremely precise and delicately orchestrated videos constitute, in my mind, one of the most relentlessly inventive and sublime oeuvres of the artform today. This is not the place to spell out why I think this is so. Let us say that the following brief interview (perhaps the first in English?) should be seen as a useful introductory point of entry into his revolutionary thinking about images and what lies between them.

  What interests me about Kuntzel’s work is his uncompromising search to find a singularly expressive and mobile form of electronic writing. His contemplative minimalist videos represent in their introspective authorial fluidity a “video-stylo” writing (to borrow Alexandre Astrud’s term of ‘camera-stylo’) in that they are concerned with the aesthetic and epistemological exploration of “the time time takes to pass” (Kuntzel). Primarily his videos manifest an exquisitely delicate unfolding of colour, time, form and light that denote a highly suggestive (almost painterly) calligraphy searching for new ideas and forms illustrating Kuntzel’s precarious quest to ‘make light visible’. In other words, what we are witnessing here is the creation of video as ‘fiction-reflection’ (Bellour), video as writing, video as a necessary reply to the artist’s previous significant work in film theory. Kuntzel’s videography can be read as a path-blazing aesthetic and theoretical adventure that was initiated by and went beyond his research interests in the filmic apparatus, the idea of ‘another film’ lurking inside the classical film text.

  Sitting in Kuntzel’s apartment during the interview, it slowly dawned on me that his early videos were shot inside his apartment. The fireplace was familiar, the faded pastel colours of his apartment walls became familiar as well. Kuntzel’s profoundly thoughtful and subtle videos were and are forged in a creative complex solitude. A solitude that relates to his pressing imperative to find new ways of articulating the invisible. There is almost a Wittgensteinian quality to his luminous art. Bellour refers correctly to an amalgam of Freud and Mallarme in Kuntzel’s work. It is precisely this fecund combination of experimental interests that lies at the heart of Kuntzel’s fragile penetrating thirst to make videos that speak of the birth of the image.

  JOHN CONOMOS: So when did you start making video, in the mid-seventies, or late seventies?

  THIERRY KUNTZEL: I started in seventy nine.

  And what led you to go into video, what was your motivation?

  I don’t know, I was involved in theory for a long time – film theory, the theory of cinema, but I didn’t want to work within the film field because I was trying to find something beyond the film. It was always my problem with theory, to find something within the film, or beyond the film, or –

  What an absence? Something not in the film?

  Yes, or something not visible which was working underneath. So it was my problem with theory for a long time and I didn’t want to work in film, with film, because I didn’t know, it wasn’t he material I wanted. And I had suddenly the possibility to work with video. A studio was available and I told the people I was working on a project (it wasn’t true), ‘I have a project and I will give it to you tomorrow.’ And I did. And it was very linked to theory at this time. This was INA.

  So you met Robert Cahen then, in 1979-80? Was he at INA then?

  Oh, I think I met him before.

  So your first video was theory based?

  Yes, the first thing I made was Nostos I (1979).

  Your first video!

  Yes, it was the first. And I wanted to work on something, I suppose, which wasn’t thought of in cinema, it was a sort of repetition. For me, it was linked to repetitive music, for example, with elements coming back. It was very linked to video because you can repeat very simply in video, you can repeat the same and the same. And change it a little bit, a little bit. And so I worked on this idea which was a theoretical idea in the very beginning. It was something working in films, in all films, even Hollywood films, but in Hollywood films it wouldn’t be shown as such because you need narrative. But it was working nevertheless. And so I wanted to do it without narrative or with a certain kind of narrative, a very special narrative, playing precisely on this return – on this strong memory. And so I worked on that. Plus in video besides repetition what was interesting for me was the ability to explore the representation of space and the in between. That is to show traces, as such.

  Like smoke, like vapour. And this was one of the principles that guided your early video work?

  Yes, yes, it was very linked. I don’t know – yes, the idea in the very beginning was the psychic apparatus linked to Freud and traces and repetition of traces and the link from one trace to another one – because you could recognise or not recognise – that was this idea. But at the same time it was linked to painting and in my idea at this time it was very – and I didn’t change in fact – it was very linked to painting, for examples, to the last Matisse, papier de coupe. But papier de coupe in time and – you know – in time, with changes. And so video was something that could do that. It was the only way to do that.

  So would you say video as an expressive medium allows you to do this kind of research into repetition, memory, the dialectics between disappearance and appearance, that video has the spatial and temporal properties, to allow you to think in those terms? What about cinema, do you think in the cinema you can do that kind of research of images and sound?

  It is – I love cinema but what I tried to find in cinema was a different film underneath all the time. And I love a lot of – even Hollywood films – but it was always something -.

  That impulse for underneath, for finding some reality underneath, is it applicable to video the same? If you look at video now, do you still have the impulse to go underneath the video to find another video within video?

  No, because video – what is wonderful with video is you can use the part of the image you want. A part flatness or not flatness, an impression of depth or not, it’s completely elastic and you don’t have that in film. Because you have an image or it’s a very long process of – a very, very long process and that’s one of the reasons I love experimental independent films, American or Canadian, like Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, all these people. I’ve worked a lot on these films. But I thought it was too long, too difficult and not appropriate. That’s the point. I can say that now, but I was sure when I discovered video, I was sure it was exactly the point I wanted to be in.

  And did other people in the late seventies have similar enthusiasm as film theorists? Who went to video? Were you (ever) the only one who moved from French film theory to video? Or did other people follow?

  No, I think I was the only one.

  Now, with video when you say it’s elastic and it gives you the opportunity to explore so many different images and sounds, what about installation video, does that give you other opportunities that you don’t find in video tape? New opportunities to research philosophical ideas or?

  I think I’m more and more becoming involved with installations because that’s precisely the space which is completely new, has little to do with sculpture, painting, and film. It’s completely different and I’m sure that there’s something involving the viewer in a very disturbing position of not knowing the elements around him and that’s something I tried to welcome for a long time. That is, one day even if you work on repetition and process and very difficult things to recognise or not to recognise, there is an entry, a path. So even if it’s not simple at all to recognise it, you can go through and when you have the different elements in space, for example, in the last installation I’ve made, you can’t see the two elements of the installation at the same time. But you know they are completely related and they happen at the same time. And so, what is important in the installation is the images – it does not matter, they can be beautiful, and I hope they are beautiful, but the problem is the subject inside the viewer in the installation.

  And do you think video installations give artists a new opportunity to present new kinds of knowledge? You talk about the artist as the spectator who is enveloped by all these disparate images and sounds. In cinema, it’s all linear, linear causality, in installation it’s omni-directional, it’s everywhere, it’s a new kind of audio-visual synaesthesia. It’s a new kind of knowledge. To you as an artist is this an important opportunity?

  That is. That’s what I say. For me in a certain way even if I think the image must be beautiful, interesting – but this is not the problem. For example, in my last installation, there are two images you can’t see at the same time but you know they are absolutely related, there is a point in the installation – a focus – which is the viewer. And the viewer is the only receptor, that is, in a certain way the images are absent. He sees one, he sees the other and he does the work and the work is inside him. And I think it’s very much related to problems, for examples, of conceptual art but in a very different way.

  Is Cubist Painting the only videotape where you have collaborated with someone else (ie Philippe Grandrieux)?

  Yes. It was made for TV, it was commissioned and it was a challenge for me because I didn’t want to work for TV, but I told myself, maybe you can do something for TV in a very different way. And so it’s almost silent.

  Are most of your videos silent?

  Yes. Most of them.

  Why is that?

  Because – no, I don’t want to conceptualise. No, it’s very linked to a sort of secret, – the ability and inability to verbalise things. It’s very linked to melancholic perception.

  The impossibility to verbalise, but the possibility to visualise…

  Yes… but it’s very different. That is, there is no absolute meaning for the viewer.

  It’s like it disappears in smoke.

  But, I don’t think know how to say that. Because it’s – for me, I think all the time I’m shooting, I’m thinking of a project. I’m shooting, I think of sound and I have a lot of sounds and music and at the end there is nothing. I love this idea because that’s my own perception, that’s my perception of the world.

  Sure, I understand.I saw your videos and I think of German cinema, I think of Murnau…

  Yes, yes. I love this cinema. I’m very linked to the beginning of cinema.

  But I see Murnau, the iris, the patina, the images that come and flow in and out all the time – beautiful majesty, silent majesty in your images. The difficulty of speaking the invisible…

  That’s the point. That’s the point. How could I – after that – I told you, all the time I have – I think there is a meaning which is not obvious but the feeling – I don’t know how to say it – but if I would put sound on it, music, words, it would be very – poof!

  Dead?

  Yes. So I don’t have the feeling, it’s without words. It’s very linked to literature or -

  Or to dialogue?

  Yes. Absolutely, but I don’t want to make it

  Heavy?

  Heavy. That’s all

  —
  1. Raymond Bellour, “Thierry Kuntzel and the Return of Writing,” Camera Obscura, No 11 Fall 1983, p. 30
  2. INA (L’INSTITUT NATIONAL DE LA COMMUNICATION AUDIVISUELLE) has been since 1975 France’s foremost archival/research and production sentre concerned with experimental film, tv and video art.
  3. Robert Cahen (like Thierry Kuntzel) is one of France’s most prominent videomakers and is in need of critical recognition beyond the boundaries of his country.

  (Thanks to Christine Van Assche and Jean-Paul Fargier for their kind assistance in arranging the interview which took place last January. Thanks, also, to Martha Ansara and David Haines for additional help)

  
  ]]> http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/traces-of-light-an-interview-with-theirry-kuntzel/feed/ 0 brutalfuckingmurder http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/midnight-in-the-garden-of-my-bedroom-awake-not-sleeping-staring-at-my-computer/ http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/midnight-in-the-garden-of-my-bedroom-awake-not-sleeping-staring-at-my-computer/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 05:21:36 +0000 M. Kitchell http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/?p=86 ]]> I have only slept, maybe, 10 hours total in the last three days. I just drank a can of Coke which is like making a promise to my body to not go to sleep until 4am for no reason. I took the day off work tomorrow because having longer weekends than work-weeks makes living easier.

  My plan was to watch movies until my eyes Would Not Stay Open but I can’t figure out what to watch. This is the problem I have, I always know what I want a movie to make me feel like but you can’t type feelings into search engines and expect results. I have seen or heard of everything probably, I wish this weren’t true honestly come on 1978-1983 give me something new.

  Instead of looking through movies I have that I haven’t watched I have kind of been staring at my computer screen, a blank browser window, hoping that maybe something will happen, while listening to the 1982 Alan Parsons Project album Eye in the Sky. The first four tracks are pretty much perfect. I’m up to track six now, and tracks five and six have not been as good, I’m a little sad about that.

  Before I listened to this I listened to Meredith Monk’s Turtle Dreams which was actually completely perfect and I don’t really know why I’m not just listening to that again right now. There is a 3 minute or so sample from the titular track on UBU web from some comp, and I have listened to that probably 200 times without ever considering that the entire song (yet alone album) that the track is from would be something easily accessible.

  Allmusic.com just inadvertently pointed out to me that, probably, my favorite mood in music is “dramatic.” I wish there were a way to do some sort of search on Allmusic where you could combine “moods,” I would type in “dramatic,” “evil,” “completely fucking terrifying,” and “dear fucking god let me drone the fuck out.” Maybe, I don’t know. I try not to think about music that often because it is difficult.

  In an interview Liliane Giraudon says that intellectuals read more than three hours a day. I don’t feel any necessity to attain the title of “intellectual,” but I would like to be able to spend at least four hours a day reading. And yet right now I am still listening to Alan Parsons Project and staring at a screen, but at least the screen is not currently blank.

  I will stop for now.

  
  ]]> http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/midnight-in-the-garden-of-my-bedroom-awake-not-sleeping-staring-at-my-computer/feed/ 0 brutalfuckingmurder http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/interview-with-rosmarie-waldrop/ http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/interview-with-rosmarie-waldrop/#comments Tue, 20 Jul 2010 21:11:31 +0000 M. Kitchell http://brutalfuckingmurder.wordpress.com/?p=81 ]]>

  MC: In a conversation with Mark C. Taylor Jabès once said, “As I probed more deeply I began to realize that Judaism is an extended lesson in reading, which involves an endless questioning of the writer. Adorno once said that after Auschwitz we can no longer write poetry. I say after Auschwitz we must write poetry, but with wounded words.” The Adorno quote is quite famous, and has engendered, ironically, an enormous response. As a child of Nazi Germany, I wonder what your response is to the injunction?

  RW: Obviously I side with Jabès. Adorno’s statement is uncharacteristically unintelligent. I understand the emotion behind it, but it betrays a shallow conception of poetry. I don’t think Adorno’s later recanting is to the point either: “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.” “Right to expression” is not the point. We must write poetry because we must pay attention to language because it constitutes our identity as human beings. But we must write with “wounded words:” we must be aware of— and responsive to— the horrors as well as the beauties. We must not sequester ourselves.

  -Old, but very worthwhile

  
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