Rare Words

indigoauras:

katiekashmir:

acosmist - One who believes that nothing exists
paralian - A person who lives near the sea
aureate - Pertaining to the fancy or flowery words used by poets 
dwale - To wander about deliriously
sabaism - The worship of stars
aubade - A love song which is sung at dawn
eumoirous - Happiness due to being honest and wholesome

The next poem I write will be titled one of these words!

“ALL THE WORLD (AND THE MEDIA) IS YOUR STAGE: OCCUPY WALL STREET, ACT II”

12.02.2011 FROM www site DANGEROUSMINDS.NET:

The Occupy movement isn’t waning, it’s mutating into something different now. Something we can’t predict yet.   When the dust settles and the history is written, Zuccotti Park will be seen as a “strange attractor” rallying place, a “temporary autonomous zone” and a very potent symbol ofwhat could be, but that’s all it will be in the final narrative: The First Act.

To get too bogged down in trying to hold on to some real estate would have merely become a distraction and as time went on,

 the “visuals,” as so many in the media like to say, would have taken on a different semiotic and not done the movement any favors in what is, essentially still a war of images. All things considered—and this is just one asshole’s opinion, mine—I think it’s probably the right time for the various Occupy encampments to disperse. It was starting to f

eel like the first act needed to come to a climax. And what a G-spot barnstormer that curtain-closer was.

source” http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/all_the_world_and_the_media_is_your_stage_occupy_wa

ows

This leftist reporter (pro-Occupy) is buying evermore into the “fantasy” of <Revolution>.  Unfolding like adrama, she critiques the propriety of its physical cues and acts end, climax, villains, shapeshifting motives.  This rhetorical vision has created a social reality/rhetoric one can orderly see as dramaturgical, fantasy, visual, and place.  

<Occupy> movement and a possible critical approach

The <99 percent> and <occupy> wall street movement certainly exhibit strong ideographs (as labeled).   Ideographs are the link between rhetoric and ideology, vehicles through which ideologies or unconsciously shared idea systems are used as a shared belief system to organize consent to a particular social system, thus becoming rhetorically effective.

We are the 99 % (http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/) began on the Tumblr website in September.  Social movements use rhetoric (words and pictures, as well as body and place) to connect with an ideology in order to spread it.  What better way to launch a movement (as one “Chris” did on Tumblr) than with the circulation and exponential effects of social media reblogging sites.  A single glance at the site, which became a meme through their detailed instructions on “Getting Yourself Known”:

Let us know who you are. Take a picture of yourself holding a sign that describes your situation - for example, “I am a student with $25,000 in debt,” or “I needed surgery and my first thought wasn’t if I was going to be okay, it was how I’d afford it.” 

Below that, write “I am the 99 percent.” 

Below that, write “occupywallst.org”

If you don’t show your whole face, please show at least part of it. Despite what the form says, you need not post your full name. Use a pseudonym if you’re not comfortable with a name. 

Please have your note be hand written. We’ve found that notes written in marker, in large letters, come out the best, in terms of legibility. 

Please do your best to be concise. 

Put a face to the 99 percent. Let’s get known. 

BTW regardless of what media types are writing, the only thing we are in charge of is this magic blogmachine.

ALSO — The Occupy Wall Street Archives Working Group, which collects and curates the artifacts of our movement for posterity, has informed us that they are also collecting signs written on We Are the 99 Percent for future preservation. If you have submitted a sign in the past, or are about to, please consider also sending the actual, physical sign to: 

The UPS Store

118 A #205

New York, NY 10038

c/o Occupy Wall Street Archives!

So that your story may become part of our history.

A rhetorical critic would not be doing a fair job if the rhetorics of public memory, visuality, and social movements were not tied or acknowledged in the critique itself.  All factors lean against one another; no single approach could harness the modalities of rhetorical work being done.

The faces as seen on http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/archive demonstrate the meme / visual / affect steam-powered thrust that spawned the physical occupation of space.  Continuing the <occupy> ideograph was instantly recognizable to peoples of different origins, countries, continents, languages.  This meme travelled geographically, not historically.  To critique this movement, I would rely more on the non-vertical memetic approach that necessarily uses text and image as its carriers.  ”Words move with us, go with us. In fact, William Burroughs says they’re a virus and humans, their host.”  (Daniel Coffeen, http://hilariousbookbinder.blogspot.com/2011/12/words.html)  

To go as far as calling words memes is fine by me, and a friend of mine said (as he is now finishing his MFA at the SVA) pictures are memes.  I’m not quite on board with that idea, but I do agree that the archive (linked above) looks like the text is the one using the body as its host to get itself reproduced.

South Bronx Recreation of MLK and Oratory lends itself to critical remix

I am going to mingle visual art with literature, (community art) and (oratory), continuing the tradition of the “visual turn” which seems to be a revolving door.  One side is text and ideas the other, simulacra and visuality.  

MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail is the focus of my remix (linked at the end of this message.  First, a different angle on visual rhetoric looking at oratory.  

Tim Rollins and K.O.S.

By Merrily Kerr

Same ethos, new gallery: Tim Rollins and his K.O.S. cohort continue to make resonant art in their signature medium of book pages and paint on canvas. K.O.S., or Kids of Survival, is made up of students and alumni from Rollins’s workshops, and their collaboration’s anomalous dual status as both fine art and community art continues to force questions about what art is and who makes it.

The work makes answers moot: After 26 years, Rollins and K.O.S.’s pieces still have power. A canvas featuring a giant black X painted over pages from Malcolm X’s autobiography shares the bold, minimalist chic of Wade Guyton’s ink-jet series on the same letter. Triangles and vertical lines suggest Goth-inflected diagrams, but turn out to represent Martin Luther King’s metaphorical mountaintop (the pyramids) and his time in prison (the bars).

Race, never mind faith, is rarely on the agenda in Chelsea these days, but here a painting of a cross quotes King’s observation that “the problem of race is America’s greatest moral dilemma.” In a series of smaller-scale works, delicate splatters of paint obfuscate the score of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, written with loss and redemption in mind as World War II drew to a close.

Rollins has said that classic literature helps his students take their own measure, as well as the measure of the current cultural climate. By their lights, it looks like America has some way to go, although these texts, and by extension the pieces they are part of, inspire. And if their straightforward sincerity grates, there’s plenty of lighter fare around the neighborhood.

now for press article #2:

Art Info

Nov. 2008

Tim Rollins and K.O.S. in New York

By Jillian Steinhauer

NEW YORK—The paintings by Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) on view at Lehmann Maupin may take visual cues from Minimalism, but in their aim they are the very opposite. Whereas the Minimalists decried art as self-expression, focusing instead on formal concerns, Rollins and K.O.S. use abstract shapes and decontextualized letters to communicate their highly personal interpretations of literature, politics, and history.

This is and always has been the crux of the collaborative team’s artistic practice, which began in 1982, when Rollins, then a special education art teacher in the South Bronx, launched an after-school program called the Art and Knowledge Workshop, whose goal was to use art as a tool for understanding literature. Rollins began collaborating with some of the regular attendees, a group of at-risk kids who called themselves K.O.S., and in less than a year, they were contributing work to shows at galleries in New York and Los Angeles. 

In the 26 years since, the makeup of K.O.S. has changed as members have come and gone, but the style of the art has very much remained the same. The group pastes pages from a classic work of literature, or sheet music from a classical composition, onto a canvas and then paints over them with images that represent themes in the work as well how those themes relate to members’ backgrounds and lives.

The ten paintings at Lehmann Maupin, on view through December 20, take race as their subject, using texts by Malcolm X, Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and employing, fittingly, an all black-and-white palette (with the exception of a small brown square in the work Suffering and Faith). The imagery ranges from oblique associations — a giant black triangle in I see the promised land (after the Rev. Dr. M. L. King, Jr.) — to more blatant ones — the letters IM painted in black in Invisible Man (after Ralph Ellison). While some might argue that the latter appears too obvious, the simple-minded work of “kids,” the big, bold letters render Ellison’s title nearly ironic by proclaiming their presence and prompting a visual leap from IM to I AM.

“With our group being based in the Longwood historic district of the South Bronx since 1982, this excellent museum exhibition is our history made personal. What a testimony of hope, pride, and perseverance that in addition looks really, really good.”

What I did is simply remixed, animated, and layered three pieces from Rollins and K.O.S. because to give anything motion is a commendable thing.  And to further their trajectory, even in the smallest nuance as I have done, shows there’s great potential to keep these ideas circulating, interesting, and in dialogue with one another.  

My tiler collage of the painting “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and 2 others form the same series (originally viewable here http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/#/exhibitions/2008-10-23_tim-rollins-and-kos/) (visible the URL of animated collage is: http://bit.ly/vaQkzv)

There are countless emergent affordances yet to be designed, implemented, and practiced.  This is merely one instantiation of productive, locomotive, framed and layered experiences being presented together, bringing life back into the reality behind the titles, and static compositions.  Is criticism not supposed to do this?