artstrike 1 9 9 0 - PhotoStatic Magazine - Detritus

N O T R E P R O D U C T I O N Retrofuturism Nº10
P R Æ C I S I O
by Geof Huth
How can doing be nothing? How can
I not-act? How can I not-move? I cannot
stop my heart from its incessant
beating, not stop my lungs from their
filling and blowing out. Even my brain
seems to writhe w/in my skull, thinking
it over.
Yet it is possible to do (almost literally)
nothing. Maybe to actually do
nothing we have to have never existed,
but there are types of inaction that
have meaning as action, & these are
the præcisio we perform by.
“The Dead String Quartet” is a skit
by the original troupe of Saturday
Night Live. The skit opens w/ the Dead
String Quartet set up to play: four dead
people seated in chairs w/ their instruments
somehow propped in their laps,
btwn their legs. No music plays. No
one moves. The performance (such as
it isn’t) is complete. (Destroying the
purity of præcisio, at the end of the
skit, the musicians begin to slip out
of their positions, an imprecise music
is aleatorically played on their instruments,
& the quartet topples our of
their seats.)
It’s Gary Shandling’s Show is a program
famous for the attention it pays
to the “fourth wall”, the proscenium,
that open wall that the audience can
see thru. On television, this wall is our
screen & is a tangible surface, an actual
barrier btwn reality & video. It’s
Gary Shandling’s Show attempts to
break down this wall, to acknowledge
its presence by talking to the audience
& by admitting it is, after all, a television
program. & in one episode, the
program began with no-one. No person
to talk to the audience, no Gary
Shandling, the familiar stage, but
Gary’d forgotten that his show was abt
begin & he was busy somewhere else.
The performance was absent. (Tho
soon someone appeared on the stage,
looking for Gary. Television producers
don’t think their audiences are
ready for præcisio.)
Those præcisio actions turned into
real action. For only a moment (a
heartbeat) they existed before us (inhale,
exhale) as nothing. But there are
some examples of true præcisio
nonperformances. Ramsey Clark, a
former Attorney General of the United
States, once began his defense of a
group of 1960s demonstrators by resting
his case. “I rest my case” (or something
like this), he said. The case
against his clients, he was telling us,
was too ridiculous to warrant a defense.
&, most incredible of all, Clark
won his case.
We perform nonaction every day,
somewhere. We pass a disabled automobile
on the road, not-stopping, nothelping.
We don’t tell someone what
they need to know. & we are fragile
vessels of consciousness, carrying this
nonaction with us wherever we go.
Our past, a history of our future. Our
thots, a memory of acts that never
were. Nihil obstat [Nº7
NOTES FROM
THE STREET
by R.K. Courtney
I had been saving notes picked
up in the street for about a year,
even though I would probably
not use many as collage material.
So it was almost revelatory
when I picked up the first slip in
this series:
Fri
T__– Howdy!
I didnt mean to be rude or anything
yesterday. My xx for not
saying more than hi –my mind
was going a 1000mph. –but
that’s no excuse. Have a good
wkend & wk next wk.
B.
See the mark
on your tire?
Came today.
1 9 8 9 1385