Directed by Kunio Katô
Directed by Kunio Katô
Earlier this year, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ruled that use of "technical aids" was forbidden in competition. The broad interpretation of what constitutes a "technical aid" ultimately disqualified Oscar Pistorius, a double-amputee who runs on carbon fiber prostheses. That's right--Pistorius, a 21-year old South African sprinter who was born without fibulae, is so fast on his "Cheetah" blades that he has blown away his competition at the Paralympic level, acquiring the sobriquet "Blade Runner" in the process. For the past year, he had been competing against able-bodied runners, until the January IAAF ruling made him ineligible for these races. In considering Pistorius' case, the IAAF determined that his running blades gave him an advantage over able-bodied runners. Pistorius and his supporters (including Ossur, the company that makes his blades) contested this decision, arguing that more extensive research and tests were required.
Yesterday, taking new research into consideration, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which is based in Switzerland, reversed the IAAF's ruling. Pistorius is now eligible to qualify for the Beijing Olympics. In order to do so, he needs to shave at least 3/4 of a second from his current 400m time. If he makes it, expect a great deal more discussion and debate on this subject. It's amazing to me that the relative "advantages" or "disadvantages" of prostheses were never a question or a problem when Paralympic runners came nowhere near the running times of able-bodied runners. Advances in the technology of protheses have helped narrow the gap but it isn't clear if modern protheses represent an improvement on the human body or simply level the playing field between the able and disabled.
Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins participated in a fascinating on line discussion on yesterday's ruling. Many of the questions that she was asked concerned the issue of advantage and "the line between natural and artificial." Is the use of prostheses an "enhancement" equivalent to steroid use? Or is it more like wearing specially designed running shoes? Do Olympic athletes from wealthy countries ever wonder about "leveling the playing field" when they compete against athletes with considerably fewer resources? Is that gold medal any less golden because you had a better swimsuit? Or a personal nutritionist? Jenkins remarks:
There are profound inequities in what athletes from various parts of the world have access to. The first time you go to the Games and see what some athletes have and what others don't, the illusion of a level playing field is lost forever.
Her comment made me wonder if there are debates at the Paralympic level regarding protheses. The blades that Pistorius uses are very expensive, costing anywhere between $15000-18000, the "BMW" of protheses. Arguably, having the best protheses gives a runner an advantage over other disabled runners--is that fair? Or is that like having the best Nike running shoes? (And is that fair?) But what really intrigued me was that the current technology of running prostheses is having trouble keeping up with Pistorius' abilities. In other words, as Pistorius becomes a better, stronger and faster runner, his protheses may need to adapt accordingly. I can see how this line of thinking reveals a potentially slippery slope--at which point do the protheses, which are designed "to restore maximum biological function," actually make him a super-human? This question came up in Jenkins's discussion:
Vienna, Va.: I think this case is extremely interesting. I know that DARPA (defense research agency) is working to develop an exo-suit for soldiers to enhance physical capabilities. Maybe in the future, there will be two types of competition--one for "natural" bodies and one for "enhanced" bodies (mechanical, chemical or any other).
Sally Jenkins: Wow.
Yes. WOW. There are so many ways to approach the story of Oscar Pistorius, but what most fascinates me is how it brings to the foreground the question of what makes us human and how a fear of disability illuminates this question.
In 1998, Aimee Mullins, a bilateral amputee, appeared on the cover of the London magazine Dazed and Confused.
On the cover, her long, athletic legs spliced the question
"fashionable?" in two--"fashion" and "able?" "Able," notably, remaining in question. What the cover and its
accompanying article illustrated provocatively was the "cyborgian
quality" of the disabled body and the extent to which this quality is
both appealing and disquieting (Mullins played the "cheetah woman" in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3). In her work as a model and actress, Mullins, a former competitive
runner, challenges traditional ideas of disability--the idea that
prosthetic legs should resemble human legs, the idea that disability
should strive toward invisibility. I recommend that you take a look at
the images in "Walking as Art" (which includes the Dazed cover) and "A living sculpture."
I was particularly struck by a picture of Mullins's prosthetic legs.
She has several pairs of varying styles and uses. This range marks one
way that the disabled body challenges loss and absence by becoming a
site of hybridity, change and transformation.
Watching a clip of Pistorius running the 400m with able-bodied athletes, I'm struck by how different his race strategy is. Because of the blades, he actually has to kind of stand up straight at the start in order to continue moving forward. As a result, his start is much slower than that of the other athletes. But halfway through the sprint, he starts to pick up tremendous speed and, while other runners are starting to show signs of slowing down, he sustains this speed across the finish. It's amazing to watch--and not only because Pistorius is doing this on prosthetic legs. In order to accomplish this feat, he has to utilize muscles and techniques that able-bodied runners don't rely on. Why should these things necessarily place him in a separate category? Embracing new kinds of competitors and strategies is how a sport--how anything, really--evolves.
In his tribute to Pistorius, who was named one of TIME's 100 for 2008, Eric Weihenmayer wrote:
When I was learning how to climb mountains as a blind person, I had a lot of encouragement from experts. But after I summited Mount Everest, these people weren't ready to accept what I had done at face value. Some said I must have cheated; one even claimed I had an unfair advantage: "I'd climb Mount Everest too if I couldn't see how far I had to fall."
A disability is by definition a "deficiency," an "incapacity." So it follows that an ability is the opposite, what makes us complete. But does this definition still hold if it's our very abilities that hold us back? For Pistorius, "able" is not in question. "I'm not disabled, I just don't have any legs," he says.
image credit: ossur
Last week, Geegaw and I attended Anne Carson's reading/performance of "Cassandra Float Can" and "Possessive Used As Drink (Me)" at the 92nd St Y. Geegaw paid far better attention than I did, so I'll point you to her summary of both performances.
Cassandra Float Can
"a sensation of veils flying up...call this sensation Cassandra"
"not translatable but not meaningless"
This was a hypnotic and distracting performance. While Anne Carson spoke in soothing tones, several individuals dressed in black walked along the stage and through the aisles carrying large prints of architectural images. Some of these images were also projected on a large screen. Carson spoke about the relation between Cassandra and translation. According to Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of the Trojan King Priam and was cursed with a gift of prophecy that no one would believe. After the Trojan War, she was taken by Agamemnon and, in one of the most incredible scenes in literature (which I've only read in English), she stands at the threshold of his home, foresees what awaits her inside, and cries out to the spectators "Otototoi popoi da Opollon Opollon." Carson's entire performance hinges on this one phrase. The on line Ancient Greek lexicon that I consulted interprets "otototoi" as a cry of dismay, alarm, awe. Its translation varies. But it's also worth speculating, as Carson and other scholars do, if it is even Greek in origin. What language is Cassandra speaking at this moment? Is she simply emitting sounds of dread or speaking in another tongue? Either way, how does one translate this cry? Is there even anything to translate? The skepticism of the chorus provokes a fascinating exchange on language and translation:
CASSANDRA: I tell you you'll see Agamemnon dead.
CHORUS MEMBER: Poor girl, calm yourself. Tone down those words.
CASSANDRA: No—no one can heal what my words prophesy.
CHORUS: Not if they're true. But may the gods forbid!
CASSANDRA: While you pray here, others move in to kill.
CHORUS LEADER: What man is going to commit such crimes?
CASSANDRA: What man? You've completely missed the point.
You've failed to understand my prophecies.
CHORUS LEADER: Yes I have—
I don't see who has means to do it.
CASSANDRA: Yet I can speak Greek well enough.
CHORUS LEADER: So does the oracle at Delphi,
but understanding what it says is hard.(translation by Ian Johnston)
We learn later in the performance that many of these circulating images are part of what remains of Gordon Matta-Clark's "building cuts," large scale art works that often consisted of cutting holes and creating fissures in abandoned buildings or structures slated for demolition. It seems that inevitable destruction is the connection between Matta-Clark's buildings and Cassandra's threshold. Cassandra stands before Agamemnon's home and envisions its ruin. It's completely unavoidable. Her speeches to the chorus before she enters the house are stunning in their lyrical power but they are useless. Cassandra could have stepped inside without a word but, instead, she gives prophecy another try, though she's fully aware that she won't be understood. She's casting a light that no one will see until it's over. Like the light in those remaining, surviving images of Matta-Clark's "cuts."
Possessive Used As Drink (Me): a lecture in the form of 15 sonnets
"Poet Anne Carson proves that even the lowly subject of pronouns can be delicious." (via Play Gallery)
I've included links to video excerpts of this performance.
Coco Fusco
Fusco is a Cuban American performance artist whose work explores and challenges ideas on gender, race, and borders. One of her performances was included in this year's Whitney Biennial. You can read more about her work on her website, but I'd like to highlight two projects in particular that deal with death and gender:
I thought of Ana Mendieta; I thought of Frida Kahlo and the way in which she sort of dies on canvas--there was this form of performance... I started to think about these processes of idealization that are very much a part of Latin Catholic Culture, where women get shafted in reality and then deified at the moment of their death. I thought that one of the things that is kind of bizarre about this, in this particular moment in history, is that death becomes a kind of opportunity to really commodify to an incredible degree the images of these women. So I think about Evita Peron and the business that's been generated by her corpse traveling around the world for 40 years; the difference between Ana Mendieta in life and in death; what happened to Frida Kahlo who got one solo show in her entire life in Mexico and now is the best-selling artist from her country. (via MOMA)
The Incredible Disappearing Woman
So in the piece different possible scenarios emerge in the storytelling. The date rape drug, catalepsy was another version I did some research about, -- you know, people being buried alive because they looked dead and then they wake up. So one thing was to do the almost hardcore journalism, you know, asking, who could this have happened to , but another thing to think about was what would it be like to be alive when everyone thinks you are dead, to be just an object, not to be seen, not to be recognised, not to be present for people. In that sense, thinking about it in a more metaphorical way, gave me a way to tell the story. (via 3am)
Fusco's performances intentionally create a sense of complicity in the viewer. So reading about these performances seems beside the point but, at the very least, the interviews and talks that I've linked to contextualize Fusco's works in interesting and provocative ways.
Fusco's "Buried Pig with Moros" will be showing from April 3 to May 2 at The Project.
Alex Colville
If you've seen Michael Mann's 1995 film Heat, you may recall a scene (scroll down for images) in which the character Neil McCauley, played by Robert de Niro, is standing at a window with his gun resting on a table behind him. The entire scene is bathed in deep blue light. I remember this moment from the movie and learned recently that this shot was inspired (most likely) by Alex Colville's 1967 painting "Pacific" (click here for a higher res image).
Colville was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1920 and studied fine arts in college. During World War II, he served as a war painter for the Canadian army and was sent to Europe. In 1945, he was among three Canadian artists who entered the newly liberated Bergen Belsen camp. "Bodies in a Grave" was one of the works that came out of that experience. The website for the Canadian War Museum contains a few more images from this period of Colville's work. When I think of a "war painter," particularly a painter-soldier, I think of someone who is like a journalist but working in images (admittedly, though, I don't know a great deal about the subject). Colville himself describes the work of this period as "reportorial." But a painting like "Bodies in a Grave" doesn't really report, in a journalistic sense of the word, the scale of death and disease that Allied soldiers encountered in Bergen Belsen. It feels very personal and very partial, like a remnant.
For more on Colville, I recommend his page on Art Gallery of Nova Scotia's website.
Frank
In his article "Honk if you see high art," Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post argues that a mural for a auto service shop is "Picassoid":
Finding an accidental work of modern art in our own urban scene may be no stranger than spotting some Constable-like beauty in the untouched English countryside. The fact that the trees don't know they're artful doesn't make them seem any less artistically arranged. (my link)
"Trees Don't Know They're Artful" should have been the title of this post.
The actual title for this post comes from The Kills version of Serge Gainsbourg's "Chanson de Slogan."
Following up on my previous post on ASL poetry, I recommend that you read H-Dirksen L. Bauman's article "Redesigning Literature: Poetics of American Sign Language Poetry." Bauman employs the lexicon of film studies to discuss ASL poetry as a visual art.
"Whether flesh, celluloid, analogue, or digitized, the ASL text is always a human body, projecting its own visual-spatial-kinetic experience, awakening similar lived experiences in the minds and bodies of the viewers...The two bodies together, the poet's and the viewer's, ultimately combine to create the text which is more than a script of linguistic signs, but a lived cinesthetic experience."
...
"While many presume that film has introduced a uniquely modern means of perceiving the world, we can reasonably assume cinematic-like composition of Sign predated the cinematograph by a good 2500 years. We can speculate that the Deaf signers mentioned by Plato in The Cratylus conversed through a series of visual images that were constantly being framed, cut, and edited throughout the course of a narrative. In this sense, cinematic experience may be akin to aspects of Deaf epistemology that have been around as long as signing communities. Cinema is but one medium through which we can produce moving images; Sign is another such medium-perhaps even the ur-medium-for producing moving images."
Plato's The Cratylus:
SOCRATES: ...Suppose that we had no voice or tongue, and wanted to communicate with one another, should we not, like the deaf and dumb, make signs with the hands and head and the rest of the body?
HERMOGENES: There would be no choice, Socrates.
SOCRATES: We should imitate the nature of the thing; the elevation of our hands to heaven would mean lightness and upwardness; heaviness and downwardness would be expressed by letting them drop to the ground; if we were describing the running of a horse, or any other animal, we should make our bodies and their gestures as like as we could to them.
HERMOGENES: I do not see that we could do anything else.
SOCRATES: We could not; for by bodily imitation only can the body ever express anything.
HERMOGENES: Very true.
******
The Frick Collection is currently showing "Antea," a beguiling portrait by Parmigianino. It's a one work show, which made me think of the last one work exhibition I saw: Jay DeFeo's "The Rose" at the Whitney. "The Rose" weighs over 2000 lbs and took DeFeo about eight years to complete. It was featured on the main level of the Whitney in a space that seemed too small, too claustrophobic for a work that massive. But the longer I spent in front of the painting, the less constrained I felt by my physical surroundings. There were a few other drawings and paintings by DeFeo on display in that wing, but I still think of it as a one work exhibition.
Fans of John Ashbery may recognize the name Parmigianino. It was his self-portrait that inspired the title poem of Ashbery's 1975 collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
Paul J. Karlstom's 1975 interview with DeFeo is a first-hand account of the post-Depression history of fine arts pedagogy in California. I wish I had taken more art history courses in college but, honestly, I never honed the skills necessary for retaining dates (my Achilles heel when it comes to history, in general, and birthdays, in particular). But I found this interview to be a very engaging history lesson. "...when I say that, when I went to the University of California, we were hanging on to the apron strings of Cubism, I mean I was hanging on for dear life. And I've never let go because I still love that period."
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