In a singular world where the outside is only presented as replication
white/austere and digitized
interfaced to everywhere. Data cubes and touchable screens – the sound of metal
being shaped & fans & silence.
One woman rises to run in a closed circle – node extending from her mind – the events become fragmented until an orb appears.
Some new component to press against the senses. Blue serves to shock against the pale everything
within
the orb appears liquid – from which she, the woman, alone and paste-white, places her face into and comes to wonder & see something else that enters the world of the viewer – one line of red and two of black that cross on the carpet.
All the world’s future and we’re in it together…There is here and there.
The news press and zents – to give a space for voice for people whose places don’t remain or for the placeless in photo and word.
And the grid provides a looping video – one game as life to become the game presented in person – the fold in reality warps when the gun is fired
our imagined world is liquid and what narrative a person carries helps to form our versions
of self among weapons and the capture of motion.
The distancing of self and dancing as it moves across continents through the internet and animation of one reality – places our selves against where we have been.
The shop is fake and when it’s photographed the fake becomes
still and more than real, or real, at least, at last – the blur between disappearing
and what it is we record – or what lens we use to call whatever real is as real as it, it is
cooptation through clays and paint been emptied
dust motes can’t be captured or captioned & how the light
lets dust pile in and show
topped with a way to part people from money by sending it through a metal Rube Goldberg machine
that ends in plate-glass plinko – “Only Euro Please”
series of cast offs as what’s left.
all cock and droopy sex bits
Outside a tree pulled up from its place is moving across the space in front of the pavilion, what animates wanting and how sound carries
turns out it’s French.
Cigarettes placed strategically in the halved torsos of women with a washing machine and circular porn shots like record covers on the wall
concrete claims and sex animals formed of bulbs and bent lines all surrounded by severely dehydrated piss yellow walls
and cigarettes either in the ass or vagina. only one in the navel.
No one tries to stop the trees and this is France – thanks!
The trees remote are better nature than what nature can handle – trees
leave tracks to our imagined pacing. We lay on false concrete
and listen to the sounds of the roots and sap and time lapse the tree walking
around the vestibule covered in people
The keys are built into the sky
And a boat at every center
Red drops from the ceiling like
a night coming on and closing
and the sky it drops this way
to open. heaps of keys inside
the boats – so no ways out
but what is leaving & what does
staying mean?
Boats for all the edges
red strung for all our lives
inaccessible points hung in front
and rung to others.
Think of the snow obscuring this or nothing
Think of that and what it means
to open.
One narrow white path between
the whole of a thing
Marx in white on white built into the wall that holds a mirror
up against the black and white painting
you pass through but know not what to look at –
the thing or the reflection of the thing & in crafting us as
viewers split in space between reflection & reception
we have become illusion itself or pace and pass through
between art and replica and seeing as what of this:
“the problem is not to free ourselves from illusions. The problem is to free ourselves from situations which demand illusions”
so the real is reflection of the real and what meaning is crushed by the apotheosis of meaning
or between and through us and less a lens but
Strings banding pencils to a white wall – looks playable
and to see the placement markings – movements in time?
minuscule cut paper interior mapping
something out – the built world as circuitry
and hieroglyph and map
as life weight placed and white nearly flat everywhere
global myopia – to scale the world as something stringed
to grow it again/time
memory as present thing – taxidermy shop erected
in the empty spaces, and left
empty – skins and a wolf the ham, the harm
no, the absence of people – of things – of a state
the arm of animals as described – escape is
impossible and we are encroaching, a man blames
women for the change – delicacy – “the making
of what we wear
will, it’s all
over now. The tanneries
have closed. All other things …are finished”
To say goodbye as a future
Darwin’s room – semi
figurative large-scale paintings
man and wolf as set
in snow covered birch forest – van gogh a little
bit in the ear
the wolf’s mouth and man’s blood…what threat
is life – in this to create
United dead nations gather dirt covered flags with the metal ground wearing a swirl of the washed off colors and the names of former nations that housed the many flags written on the walls. date to date.
the dripping of water
from a white bag
onto a pool
and onto
a screen
contained in
a wooden crate
big broken windows – the frames
Large microphones breathe in
interior space
singular notes being played,
plaintive, plaintiff and almost song rises –
harmonium to discord, but the glass
in pieces stills
no going or back
Poem on color line/blocks
I give you my word/mi parole
babies being breast fed by mothers in balaclavas, children in balacalvas telling their short lives, an old woman in a balaclava reading a manifesto flanked by two younger women waving cooking instruments
bubbling liquid the flesh
tones of Europe
supposed against a green
wash of light
to make
faces coarse/course
black dots as wheels on a white wall that can rotate
to reveal ID titles/slogans in slots cut out of the black
balls in tubes get pushed around by fans in the upper
half of the room – movement between what one is
and isn’t and is again – pneumatic motion
a breathing pillow in the center
the curve of light and shadow behind it
A blow up airstream presented by Swatch, full of LED flowers and the sounds of crickets
US might be missing, might be a performance of refusal
shadow presentation – to narrate the collection and objects – it might be a sheep on the wall
videos of women weaving their hair together in shadow
charred wood and writing marks
permanent and suggestive variations
on being able to be / to be to be
all ways
charred wood and writing marks
permanent and suggestive variations
on being able to be / to be to be
all ways
in the center one circle of dried rose buds that look like nuts or cork
and a neat array of scythes
against the grain they’ve cut in photograph – one way home
A room with ‘the end’ written out and packed for it, presented
as an edifice of luggage. A stepladder into the dome
with the top platform cut out to say the same two words
sounds of a man replicating TB and video of this life coughed out as one possible
photos of faces erased by print
song about coffee and currency with women around a table – women and men break into a song about products – lollipop – narration of objects being spoken over top of the footage
warehouses and warehouses
“the miners remain armed and away from work, this is illegal” sung
the sound of a register tabulating
situations of workers in the world – the production locations basically empty but for the singers when lit fully and bringing life to the objects they’re singing about?
Palladium stack in Russia – world supply being controlled and manipulated by governments and objects continue being made – all sung
discard the parts from everywhere, we are all complicit.
Tony Mancus is the author of a handful of chapbooks, most recently City Country (Seattle Review) and collaboratively with Magus Magnus, a section of eckClogs (Furniture Press). With Meg Ronan he co-curates the In Your Ear reading series in Washington, DC, and with Sommer Browning he co-founded Flying Guillotine Press. He currently lives in Arlington, VA with his wife Shannon (the doctor), and three fuzzbucket cats.