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Sticky Impulse Archive Nights

The Poetical Is Political

July 28 – August 11, 2020

#StickyImpulse

What’s more political than identifying oneself as a poet?  To wax language down from utility, to play with words and shift cognition; to rest on sound, form, and rhythm… This month’s Sticky Impulse features a selection of readings, conversations, abstractions, and physical ephemera from the Lenore Herb Archive and other videos from Video Out and the Crista Dahl Media Library and Archive.

To understand poetry, and to participate in the form as a reader, writer, and in this instance, a curator, I have to open my mundane everyday to allow for those transformative moments which I interpret as poetic.  In the poetization of Language, which is often at times used as a weapon, the nature of poetry defies those usages by slowing down and making space for the reconceptualization of words, phrases, grammar, and voice.

Throughout my three+ years of working at VIVO, and especially in these last pandemic months, I have become quite familiar with these works, but am in no way an expert by any means, shape, or form.  With my fragmented research through an artist-run archive that is idiosyncratic and always evolving (e.g. on and off shelves and in and out of boxes, from Main Street to Kaslo, from beta tape to .mp4), my approach has been to search for connections between the past and present that are not just intermedia(l), that is in itself a poetical act.  

Curator KC Wei (Video Out)

VIDEO

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Stan Persky, Metro Media, c.1971.

“A book… is made up of a lot of small poems.”

Labelled simply “Stan Persky,” this recording covers a panel of writers, poets and journalists who engage in discussion with the audience on the subject of publication and writing as work.  Stan Persky is featured in a large segment of the first half of the video.  Location and year is unknown.  C1971-1974.

The name Stan Persky must have seeped into my consciousness from repeatedly skimming through Video Out’s Vimeo channel.  Just before the pandemic hit, I picked up a copy of Persky’s ode-to-Barthes collection of short texts on desire titled, Buddy’s, from Pulp Fiction.  In it he writes, in a section on the AIDS crisis, “As my friend Tom observes, ‘Though we cannot make sense of it, we nonetheless sense it…” *

* Persky, Stan. Buddy’s: Meditations on Desire, 122. Vancouver: New Star Press, 1989.

The Poem Company (Beth Jankola & Cathy Ford excerpt), Video Brain 1974.

The Poem Company is a collection of readings produced by the collective Video Brain for the Video Bag Exhibition of Video and Performance at the Burnaby Art Gallery in October 1974.  The full video includes readings by Roger Prentiss, Nellie McClung, Beth Jankola, Mona Fertig, Cathy Ford, Frederick Candelaria, Gwen Hauser, Opal Nations, and Gerry Gilbert.

What strikes me about this collection is how certain readings resonate and others don’t.  I can partly attribute this to personal taste, but other factors play in: sound quality, how the reader is framed within the shot, my own education (or lack thereof), etc.  The readings by Beth Jankola (4:46) and Cathy Ford (12:57) stick, though the two poets have very distinct styles.  Beth’s blunt and choppy rhythm grounds her delivery, while Cathy’s words flow to create an unique synthesis between her image, voice, and the poems.  At times she looks up, a motion that invites a closer becoming between myself as an audience and the poem itself.  Beth’s last piece about getting feedback  by a Gitxsan woman cuts in its directness, humour, and humility.

Sous La Langue, Nicole Brossard. English translation read by Daphne Marlatt.
‘Words Without Borders’, Gay Games III, 1990. 

In Canada’s first Gay Games, Poet Nicole Brossard reads from her book, Sous La Langue (Under Tongue) at ‘Words Without Borders’ at B.C. Place on August 5th, 1990.   As Nicole and Daphne switch off between French and English (4:43-14:40), a beautiful interplay between sounds and rhythms are exchanged.

nothing is foreseen

yet at eye level is where the body 

first touches everything

without foreseeing the naked skin 

and it needs saying without foreseeing 

softness of skin that would be naked 

even before the mouth

signals the state of the world

No Commercial Potential, Ernest Gusella, 1978.

No Commercial Potential is composed of 19 separate video performance works by Calgary-born Ernest Gusella.  As a musician and painter, Gusella was turned onto video during his time in New York City in the early ‘70s where he befriended The Kitchen founders Woody and Steina Vasulka.  Gusella’s work in video is, as he describes it, “1/4 fornicalia funk, 1/4 New York punk, 1/4 European bunk, and 1/4 Canadian skunk.”*  

In revisiting this work in 2020, I am wary of recapitulating the tropes of bohemian hipsterism and conceptual art, but several works still resonate powerfully with me; Neo-Plastic Key (22:25) is a solid music video, and the book-end work, Words (45:57) presents a wonderful dynamic between man and machine in a “game of chance.”

* “Christine Hill on Ernest Gusella”, Ludwig Forum fur Internationale Kunst Video Archive, http://www.videoarchiv-ludwigforum.de/artists-detail/ernest-gusella/

Pia Massie Reading at thirstDays no. 3, VIVO Media Arts Centre, 2016.

In the third iteration (curated by Denise Ryner and Tonel and hosted at VIVO Media Arts Centre) of artist Jayce Solloum’s ambitious 2-year thirstDays performance project, artist and experimental filmmaker Pia Massie reads from her text In All Directions (2016), a response to Kwakwaka’wakw artist Beau Dick’s Lalakenis Feast held in early 2016 at UBC.  She speaks of Beau, “He knows that he works within a system that cannot hear poetry, and he knows that poetry is the answer.”

The Snows, Russell Wallace, 2014

Featuring a poem Wallace wrote on a trip to Calgary in January 1999, walking in the snow, trying (and unsuccessfully) hailing a cab.  In Ucwalmícwts, “How many snows are you?” is a poetic way of asking how many winters have you survived, i.e. your age.  Wallace’s mother, Flora Wallace, translated the poem for a commissioned music work in 2000, and years later during a night snowfall in Vancouver, Wallace captured the video to accompany this poem: a 15 year meditation on time.

I dream a queer allegory, Michael V. Smith, Jared Mitchell, RM Vaughan, Finn Ballard, 2020.

In this video-poem by writer and media artist Michael V. Smith, a dream begins with an attempt by the narrator to initiate group-sex.  “Maybe desire is dead?” the speaker wonders, and from there on dream logic takes hold, the allegory reveals itself.  In the end credits, the work is “© videopoems are a good idea 2020” perhaps turning the copyright into a poem, flipping the proprietary mark against itself.

The Book of Equinox #1, Lenore Herb, 1992.

Newly discovered Hi-8 footage self-shot by Lenore from 1992. In this clip, she sets up the camera at Frank’s house, and the two give an impromptu reading-performance of Aleister Crowley’s text. The video is indicative of Lenore’s ‘record everything approach and ‘tell-all’ style.

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About Sticky Impulse Archive Nights

STICKY IMPULSE references the materiality of  videotape from the electric impulses that transfer content to magnetic tape to its inevitable deterioration of its core elements; the problematic, things difficult to navigate or let go of; creative spontaneity, abandon, recklessness, or the need to take action. Sticky Impulse is a Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive event encouraging new engagement with VIVO’s collections.