(You worked to make the parts of me combine to form a new, amazing being. But I think you didn’t want me new or different after all, wanted, instead, a replica of the known. Why must difference frighten?)
“If you think you are a ghost you will become a ghost”
(I feel myself a ghost when I think of you, even after all these years.)
“Sounds need to come into their own, rather than being exploited to express sentiments or ideas of order.”
(The living fact of my body broke all your ideas of order.)
An interviewer asked, “Why is there so much noise in Variations V? You used to be gentle, tender, how could you have become so violent?”
He answered, “What is a quiet mind? A mind which is quiet in a quiet situation? Let’s say there are only a few sounds. Let’s say they’re loud. What shall we do?”
(If I was sound you thought you wanted then found you didn’t want, did that mean you should choose not to hear me? Maybe I was the texture of your mind, the hidden noises and workings of your mind.)
He used the I-Ching to make pieces through “chance operations.”
(I remember Plato wrote that chance builds more wisely than art.)
For one piece he used star charts placed on a musical staff.
In 1985 he composed Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible). The first performance began on September 5, 2001, in Halberstadt, Germany. On February 2, 2003, the first chord was sounded. The piece is scheduled to take 639 years.
(Time builds, dissolves, re-forms inside me. Presences, absences intertwined, inseparable, conversing …)
“Nothing was lost when everything was given away.” “I write in order to hear.”
(These notes I throw to the wind … but what would I even hear without them? My rough scrawls on paper scraps, old shopping lists, torn pages. Even so I know so little.)
He was a lover of mushrooms, pointed out that “music” and “mushroom” stand next to each other in many dictionaries, though for him their link was random.
He won a mushroom quiz contest on Italian television in 1958.
Lactarius piperatus burns the tongue when raw but is delicious when cooked.
“beware of that which is breathtakingly beautiful, for at any moment the telephone may ring or the airplane come down”
(If I had said those words to you, bright shudderings I still hold inside my mind …)
He wrote: “we are getting nowhere and that is a pleasure”
He died in New York City, a few weeks before his eightieth birthday, on August 12, 1992.
Notes on Genetic Privacy
The Nuremberg Code states, “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” It calls the patient the “experimental subject.” (What would you have called me?)
It holds that experiments must not be “random in nature.” (Yet doesn’t much that’s beautiful and good arise from what’s random? My mind spins as I think this.)
(In “consent” I hear “sent.” You sent me forth into my self, my body, but that self was made of otherness and strangeness, in darkness and in shame. The experiment I was wasn’t mine. I was sent into a foreign country, but that country’s inside me, and I never meant to go.)
In October 1976, John Moore was diagnosed with hairy-cell leukemia.
After “withdrawing samples of blood, bone marrow aspirate, and other bodily substances,” Dr. David W. Golde confirmed the diagnosis and recommended Moore’s spleen be removed.
Moore signed a consent form authorizing the operation.
(Forms, signatures, codes—how far from what happened in your laboratory. Yet when I think of the doctor in his white coat behind his desk, and the patient on the other side, lost in the strange country of his illness, I think of all that passed between us. So much unspoken. So much before my eyes had even opened.)
On October 20, Dr. Golde removed John Moore’s spleen. He’d made arrangements to keep it for his research, but Moore didn’t know this.
He was using Moore’s T-lymphocytes to establish a cell line of lymphokines for medical purposes. From 1976 through 1983, John Moore returned for additional visits at Dr. Golde’s request. Each time he left samples of “blood, blood serum, skin, bone marrow aspirate and sperm.”
(Strange to think how part of oneself can thrive, exist, outside oneself, can have a separate life apart.)
(“The Truth, is Bald, and Cold—”)
Moore thought giving samples was an ordinary part of follow-up therapeutic care.
(How little we know of our lives. The mind sees but doesn’t, knows much but also doesn’t.)
His T-lymphocytes were “interesting” to Dr. Golde because they “overproduced certain lymphokines, thus making the genetic material easier to identify.”
On January 30, 1981, Dr. Golde, his colleague Dr. Shirley Quan, and the Regents of the University of California applied for a patent on John Moore’s cell line.
(Unlike them, you hid in shame what you had done. Should I respect the shame you felt? Feel tenderness toward the way you suffered, lived in secrecy? But what might have happened if I’d turned out as you wanted? What if you’d liked what you had made, hadn’t felt ashamed, disgusted? That question haunts me.)
On March 20, 1984, U.S. Patent No. 4,438,032 named Dr. Golde and Dr. Quan “inventors of the cell line” and the Regents the “assignee.” They would “share in any royalties or profits.”
Biotechnology experts predicted a three-billion-dollar market for lymphokines by 1990.
(More and more I trust in the bare facts of things, even if such facts are hard to gather and get clear. I want to grasp the facts of this, what happened. I want to let those facts—not my wonderings about them—speak.)
When he learned of the patent, Moore filed suit, accusing the doctors and university of interfering with his “ownership” and “right of possession.” He claimed a proprietary interest in any “products the defendants might create from his cells or patented cell line.”
(Strange how the body becomes a thing that’s owned, co-owned, disputed. How it’s one’s own but not—a generator of profits. Legalized, fought over, shared, unshared. What does it mean to be “oneself”?)
In 1990, the California Supreme Court ruled against John Moore.
Dr. Golde had, by that time, “negotiated agreements for commercial development of the cell line and products derived from it.” He would be paid in exchange for “exclusive access to the materials and research performed.”
(There’s a silence in John Moore I can’t get hold of. Not the part of him that sued, but that place within him where he came to know his cells were taken, grown, changed and sold by others and all the while he hadn’t known it. Unlike me, had he been asked, he could have decided yes or no.)
The court ruled human cell lines patentable because “long-term adaptation and growth of human tissues and cells in culture is difficult—often considered an art.” (And yet they were his cells.) Therefore, the cell line is a “product of invention” not a “raw material” of nature.
John Moore asked, how could he not own his genetic material? How could it belong to someone else?
(When you made me did you feel you owned me? Did you think of me as your invention?.)
Justice Arabian wrote on behalf of the majority, “The plaintiff has asked us to recognize and enforce a right to sell one’s own body for profit. He entreats us to regard the human vessel, the single most venerated and protected subject in any civilized society as equal with the basest commercial commodity. He urges us to commingle the sacred with the profane. He asks much.”
(Yet it was the others who were profiting and selling. What would have happened if John Moore had sued to have his cells not sold at all, no profits made from them for him or anyone?)
Justice Arabian continued, “The majority view is not unmindful of the seeming injustice in a result that denies the plaintiff a claim for conversion of his body tissue, yet permits defendants to retain the fruits thereof.
”
(Sometimes it seems the same questions continually arise in different guises: What’s privacy, ownership, slavery, freedom, what’s choice? What can be commodified, what not?
I don’t know what became of John Moore. I don’t know if he’s even alive.
Such an ordinary night, this night. I look out on the stone face across the way, stoplight flashing, slow line of passing cars. Familiar sounds, background sounds. Then I think, what’s ordinary? There’s so much that’s strange within a single, ordinary day—look at what happened to John Moore, the otherness his body became without his even knowing. When the ordinary starts to seem frightening, what then? Or has it always been frightening and I just hadn’t noticed, hadn’t thought of it that way?)
Notes on Stelarc
He believed the human body as we know it is obsolete—distraught, overwhelmed by information and sensory data, inefficient.
His body was his exhibition space. He performed his ideas in Japan, Australia, Europe, North America.
He sought to “rupture the body’s surface,” examining it as an “extendable evolutionary structure enhanced by the most disparate technologies.”
(My body is something I hide, or try to.)
He wired himself with electrodes and transducers in order to allow Internet data to be transmitted into him and activate his movements.
For his performance FRACTAL FLESH he developed a touch-screen Muscle Stimulation System which enabled remote access and actuation of a human body. “A movement that you initiate in Melbourne can be displaced and manifested in another body in Rotterdam.”
(Even as I hide, the world comes into me and through me, as once your laboratory instruments probed beneath my skin. Radio waves, subliminal messages, electronic and mechanical vibrations, toxins, chemical pollutants—such fragile boundaries between a body and the world. Or are there any boundaries at all?)
“The usual relationship with the Internet is flipped—instead of the Internet being fed by human input, it constructs the activity of the body.”
(I find this frightening. I wonder if he found it frightening.)
(Often in my nightmares I see you feeding data into a computer, though computers didn’t even exist in your lifetime, waiting for the printout of my body, the information that will help you make me. Then I see some of my flesh is human, some constructed. Like the robot, Cog, my eyes are grayscale cameras, a microphone’s mounted in my head. I’ve been designed for “rich, flexible, dynamic interaction.” As I watch I feel my mind dissolving.)
Sometimes he performed with a robotic third hand and arm, or atop a pneumatic six-legged walking machine.
In 2003 he built a prosthetic head. (I remember Roger Bacon built a talking head. Albertus Magnus built a brass man.)
Once he implanted a mechanical device inside his stomach, then videotaped its actions, noting how “the hollow body becomes a host.”
“The body reclines, pacified, to accept the implant… the machine mechanism dances within …”
(He sounds almost joyful, finds a kind of freedom in a future without body-feeling, but what’s thinking apart from the body? How would I feel and experience what I think?)
“The body is no longer an object of desire but an object for designing.”
“Machines will manipulate molecular structures, extending the body from within … They will inhabit and navigate cellular spaces.”
Such future bodies will be “more complex and interesting,” each no longer a “single entity” but “host to a multiplicity of agents.”
(When I watched Claire and Mary and Clerval, wasn’t it partly their quiet suffering that made them vivid, all the ways I couldn’t reach or help them, the ways they were separate and enclosed?)
“Can a body act with neither recall nor desire? Can it act without emotion?”
“The body’s complexity, softness and wetness are difficult to sustain … A hollow body would be a better host for essential technological components.”
We live in a “zone of erasure.”
The body will no longer be interested in “circling itself, orbiting itself, illuminating and inspecting itself.”
It will become a collection place for efficient operational modules.
Think of a body that quivers and oscillates not to sadness, joy, heartbeat, lungs, circulation, but to the ebb and flow of computer activity.
(I close my eyes: Clerval’s hand moves from left to right across the page then back again, line after line of words appearing. Is he writing a letter to his friend? He warms some noodles, looks at the smoke trees out his window. Does he get dizzy for a few seconds when he stands? Does his hand suddenly remember the weight of a book, a pebble, a brook’s cold rushing water he played in as a boy? How odd the way something in us remembers even as we don’t remember—remembers without words.)
Notes on Eva Hesse
From 1964 until her death in 1970, she made sculpture from industrial materials: fiberglass, latex, rubberized cheesecloth, plastic, steel.
She didn’t want her work to be beautiful. Of Right After she said, “Coming back to it, I felt it needed more, and that was a mistake, because it left the ugly zone and went into the beauty zone.”
She had just been operated on for a brain tumor.
(Can ugliness be a form of beauty? Her latex panels look beautiful to me—each worn, damaged membrane slowly leaving but still tethered to the world.)
She wanted her work to be “non-work,” to exist beyond her preconceptions.
Right After can be hung differently each time.
(When thinking, my mind goes this way and that, swerves, reconsiders, swerves again. But I pull back, as if I must create a single line of thought, stable, unwavering—that this is what’s expected.)
“I don’t ask that pieces be moved and changed, only that they could be moved and changed.”
(Did you think control might make you safe? In your laboratory you sought so much of it. But what if you’d been more curious than frightened, though in your own way you were bold, determined? What if the result, my body, hadn’t filled you with revulsion?)
A friend remembers: “She found some object on the street—a broken pipe or something—called it a ‘nothing’ and said she wanted to make ‘nothings.’”
(If you and I could have seen ourselves as nothings, as not locked within the quantified, the known, the labeled, what might we have been to one another? Myself that broken pipe even now, scrap paper, crushed metal, fraying cord.)
In many of her pieces the latex is badly degrading. It oxidizes, weeps, turns brittle.
Some say those pieces are “beautiful ruins.” Others that they need to be reworked to resemble the originals (but aren’t the ‘degraded’ ones still the originals?). Some believe Hesse made a terrible mistake.
She said, “Life doesn’t last, art doesn’t last… It doesn’t matter …”
“The whole issue of the unfinished is a living idea … something unfinished changes. That means it’s in a certain way alive.”
(I think of her making sculptures as she sickened. How they grew up around her—fiberglass forests; broken, aging windows; the sound of something mixing in with nothing.)
(Her hand as she sickened … That unstable, still-willful, leaving hand …)
For years Aught was kept in boxes. “The curators were afraid to take it out… The last time they exhibited it, a couple of days into the hanging it started to weep, that is, the latex began to drip.”
An expert on latex explained it could drip just as easily inside the box as out. What was gained from keeping it hidden away? Hung once more, “for some reason known only to the latex, it remained completely, utterly stable for the whole two months on display.”
In a small notebook she kept lists of words: “Aught—anything, in any degree or respect. Anything whatever; any little part.”
(All those parts you found to make me … How you fevered as you arranged and rearranged. As if we inhabit a controllable, known wor
ld. But what if our world is mostly, and ever will be, unknown?)
She believed chance is articulate. After filling four latex and canvas panels with polyethylene sheeting, rope, and other materials, she hung them on the wall so the random falling and settling would show through.
Dying, she lay in her bed partly directing, partly watching, the hands of others. This was for her piece Untitled (Rope Piece) made of latex over string and wire.
(There’s a ripped beauty in the mind, a harsh tangling that wonders, doubts, falls silent.)
(I see I’ve left out her childhood in Germany—she was born in Hamburg in 1936—and how she and her sister were sent to Holland to escape the Nazis. I’ve left out her marriage and much else. Mostly I don’t think about or feel those things when I look at what she made, but intersections of presence, absence, namelessness, the vulnerability and utility of form.)
Laurie Sheck Page 27