• Influenced by Throbbing Gristle making a collage
• Translating visual images into live performances
• Five hits of acid and whiskey
• Facing the grotesque
• St Sebastian. Mishima brought me to him. Always revived during times of plague.
• Drawing a graph of AIDS, a long journey from immanent death to Frankenstein drugs.
• Post AIDS, what does it mean.
• Images in response to people's death
• We expect that we will listen in an affinitive way, with hospitality. In a kind of in translation that permeates body and soul.
• Matter does not exist without interaction. Between atoms there are interactions. One would wish this would happen between living beings.
• Things that interact become one, like with gluons, in between. Not only among humans. Translating into other species. Not having affinities before. My mother became a kind of cat. She expresses herself catly.
• Finding my way through activism. Training as an activist, I understood this as a dancer, the deep spaces of relationship
• Clit Club multi race and multi class
• Friends disappearing. Going to ACT UP but also trying to find artistic outlets
• Memorial work that was personal and not performed.
This is a test. Can I hang with the graduate school lecture crowd, being a garden variety intellectual with a state college education?
• Forms of kinship that are disruptive, what are they meant to disrupt?
• Kinship a way of ordering relationships? Reordering one that needs disruption?
• Or maybe kinship rests upon a certain disruption.
• Kinship emerged in feminist anthropology to ask about exceeding the family.
• Modes of intimate alliance that take neither conjugality or reproduction as their means.
• Not all intimate bonds are kin, so how do we distinguish?
• Foundering on the categories.
• Do we only know them through the breach? Nexus of greek tragedy.
• At what moments does one get recognized as or become kin?
• Oedipus could not recognize mother or father, or at least not consciously.
• Drum one's own subconscious if one is to make sense of kinship.
• I forget sometimes I worked with a cast of 25 before I ever did solo. Not a minimalist.
• Understanding the flesh and navigating it differently.
• The traumatic way in which we bind to each other
• Pulling together, we show up in what severs and cuts describing us. Cut to each others size.
• Stuck with old names and old ways of naming. You may want to advance but language lassos us back. Limits us.
• Without is connected in-stoppably to with. Even if there is a severance, we are still WITHout. A structure that holds us.
• Why do we say "all alone"? Isn't it shitty enough to be "alone"?
• Elective affinities. A question of how people might relate in ways that cannot be substantialized.
• Adoptions, enrollments, offering a dismal set of nonstarters.
Thought about my kinship with my former coworkers, how these relationships were not friendship or family. But the breaking apart that happens in lay-offs, a forceful disruption of affiliation, it has an impact on our society, to have so many people who have experienced being let go, having their attachment to colleagues severed. I mean, I had an especially emotional attachment to my coworkers after processing so much around racism and homophobia and exclusivity and so much more that was in the air in our work, then suddenly I'm ass out and all those problems are none of my concern anymore. I loved these people who were not my friends or family. But even with people you don't like that much, seeing them every day they grow on you and you don’t want to be parted from them. Maybe it is in our nature to grow attached to those around us. At least I know it's in my nature. What are the psychic implications of having the relational disruption of lay-offs happen on a massive scale across the country?
• Supposedly you are learning about your body in dance... but if you keep exploring you learn an inside-out understanding of what it can do and how it can change... challenging your body to go to a place where you don't know what you have... making changes in modes, duration, embedded texts
• Rope containing myself and containing the situation so it does not become spectacle
Wealth and whiteness of the New School crowd and the Kara Walker installation on stairwell, as we waited to see Butler, Cixous, Ronell we stood by silhouettes of slavery’s horrors among students with individualistic eyewear.
Ron Athey
• Presented as a living corpse. Dead yet sexualized. Elements of sex show in non-sexy way.
Helene Cixous
• Myths are with us all the time, we are them.
• Maybe we do not want to think or believe that murder and family are similar. We prefer to think family is love, but love is also murder.
• It is terrible to be of the same blood. Even if we do not think in those terms, it is with us.
• When I kill my kind, I shed my own blood. And blood does not climb back into the veins.
• When you kin with other work, related to predecessors and those who will follow. Intertextuality. Graft other works inside the work. When you read Proust, the whole of french lit is there. Swallowed and thrown up, preserved and buried. You can adore the other without killing, if you swallow the other, you can't kill somebody who is dead, which is why I prefer to deal with fictitious people, dead people.
• There is enough distance between us for us to be close without biting one another.
I was dog sick during the talk and bodily fluids were about to escape me. Not to mention I could have simply taken out my tampon to instantly make this a more bloody happening.
Avital Ronell
• Aversion of the gaze, evasion. At the very moment you want to acknowledge a profound proximity.
• When does it get too close or too far, when you think you are really close you might have abysses to clear.
• New York was invaded by the united states of america 10 years ago
• You're so cute I want to eat you up.
Judith Butler
• Transference systems link us and tear us apart
• When we undergo transference, we get signed up.
• Transfer and transform and transference
• Finding oneself transformed into something else.
• Iterability defined by its ruptures and elaborations
Wanting so much more about personal connections and loneliness, the most striking thing was brief mentions of loneliness. No, the most striking thing was Helene Cixous discussion of her relationship with Derrida, where he insisted he was connected to death and she was connected to life, and she always said inside NO but he was so insistent that she started to identify with it despite herself.
Julie Tolentino
• Take a signature work and archive it into my body.
• To curate work I want to see, here are the five artists I am interested in.
Ron Athey
• Post AIDS. How many dead people I know, guilt that I don't keep them simmering somehow.
Judith Butler
• Kinship beyond the blood but also the metaphor of blood, the most fictive moment in ethnography
• Differences between adopting, grafting & cannibalizing
• Interactions that produce metamorphosis of another kind
Julie Tolentino
• I really do appreciate seeing my body joining Occupy Wall Street. I'm interested in how the local is coming through. More issues around race are coming up because people are trying to find ways to be together. To be a body on the line with my full experience.
• I even said in the performance- I'm bleeding- carpeted the room and described where the cutting would happen. All the things you cannot do. I did a cutting before the performance while you were giving your pre-performance talk
Ron Athey
• Economy of self mutilation. Boxing is OK, sport is OK, I'd rather be mutilated than punched
• Bodily fluids are here right now, just beneath the skin
