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EXPOSITION OSTENSIONS - TRAVAIL DE L’ARCHIVE, ARCHIVES DU TRAVAIL

Vernissage le mercredi 2 juin 2010 à 18h
Palais de l’Athénée, Salle Crosnier, rue de l’Athénée 2, 1205 Genève
Exposition du 3 juin au 31 juillet

Un projet de François-Adrien Boieldieu, Clegg & Guttmann, Walker Evans, Ceel Mogami de Haas, Louis Chatel, Darcy Lange, Lefevre Jean Claude, Romain Legros, Carla León, Len Lye, Nicolas Momein, Julie Osen, Dieter Roth, August Sander, Armand Schultess, Camille Vanoye, étudiant-e-s du WORK.MASTER dans le cadre d’un atelier de Pierre Leguillon, avec les oeuvres de Darcy Lange et la participation de Lefevre Jean Claude.

Le principe d’Ostensions est fondé sur l’observation de différentes modalités contemporaines d’activation de l’archive : présentations et représentations d’images, d’images dans l’image, incarnations et ostensions de documents, jusqu’à la mise en scène. A ce travail de l’archive s’adjoint, en miroir, une réflexion sur les manières d’archivage du travail, d’inventaire des métiers et des gestes contemporains. A partir de quelques référents historiques, dont un hommage aux travaux pionniers de l’artiste néo-zélandais Darcy Lange (1946–2005), chaque participant-e déploie une ou plusieurs propositions articulant ce travail de la documentation, et la documentation du travail.

L’ouverture de l’exposition, organisée autour d’une performance rare de l’artiste français Lefevre Jean Claude, chorégraphie le processus même de son accrochage et s’installe dans le temps du vernissage sous les yeux des visiteurs.

L’exposition Ostensions a été conçue et réalisée par la Head – Genève dans le cadre d’un atelier avec les étudiant-e-s du master en Arts visuels WORK.MASTER. Elle est proposée dans le cadre des 50 Jours pour la Photographie à Genève 2010.


Lien vers la page de la HEAD

Les dieux sont tombés sur la tête (The Gods Must Be Crazy) est un film botswanais écrit et réalisé par le sud-africain Jamie Uys, sorti en 1980.
Dans une tribu isolée de Bochimans du Kalahari, sans contact avec la « civilisation », se produit un miracle : un objet extraordinaire est tombée du ciel. Transparent et très dur, il peut servir de pilon, de flûte, de récipient et de bien d’autres choses encore. Un cadeau des dieux pour ce peuple sympathique où l’on partage tout. Oui mais...

Il s'agit en fait d'une vulgaire bouteille d'un célèbre soda, qu’un aviateur peu scrupuleux a jetée par-dessus bord. Cette bouteille est si utile que tout le monde en a besoin en même temps. La belle entente d’autrefois fait place à des querelles incessantes. Pour avoir fait un tel cadeau, pas de doute, les dieux sont tombés sur la tête.

Le conseil se réunit et décide que Xhixho (pour la prononciation du xh de la langue xhosa, voir l’article clic) ira au bout du monde pour rendre aux dieux leur cadeau empoisonné...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4zufs6XZVg

THE ISLANDERS: AN INTRODUCTION CHARLES AVERY

Charles Avery, 'Untitled (The Eternity Chamber)', 2007
Pencil and gouache on card, 100 x 70cm


An exhibition by one of the most creative and thought-provoking Scottish artists of the last decade invites you on an expedition to an imaginary island. The Islanders: An Introduction is the latest instalment in an epic four year project to describe life on an island created by the artist Charles Avery. Using texts, drawings, installations and sculpture Avery has detailed the landscape, customs, and culture of his island, creating a challenging space for philosophical inquiry.
The Islanders: An Introduction will bring together the project so far, including several new works which will be shown in Scotland for the first time. Among these will be a large-scale sculptural installation, which was purchased by the National Galleries of Scotland in 2007. This sculpture depicts one of the most striking features of Avery’s invented world - a motley group of deities,
who live on a wasteland called The Plane of the Gods. This is the Island’s most popular tourist attraction and is home to the erect and threatening August Snakes. Visitors to the exhibition will also discover mysterious landscapes such as the Eternal Forest, where the mythical beast the Noumenon is rumoured to live. Other exhibits include a large taxidermy sculpture of a fearsome Ridable, a magnificent specimen of the islands wildlife and the bitterly disgusting, but ruinously addictive gin-soaked pickled eggs which are sold in the island’s marketplace.
Inspired by his upbringing on the island of Mull - and by time spent in Rome, and Hackney Avery’s work has its roots in figures as diverse as William Blake, Joseph Beuys, Joseph Kosuth, Jorge Luis Borges, Ludwig Wittgenstein and P.G. Wodehouse. Once complete, Avery plans for his Island project to be encapsulated in several large, leather-bound encyclopaedic volumes.
Charles Avery was born in Oban in 1973 and is based in London. In 2007, he was selected with five other artists to represent Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale, as part of the Scotland and Venice exhibition. In 2003 he was one of four finalists in the Award for Italian Art, shown in that year’s Venice Biennale. He has recently been selected for the forthcoming TATE Triennial in 2009. Following its exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, The Islanders: An Introduction will tour to Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam.


www.nationalgalleries.org

The KLF, To the north pole with the king of imaginary pop

The creative partnership of Bill Drummond (alias King Boy D, Time Boy) and
Jimmy Cauty (alias Rockman Rock, Lord Rock), mainly appreciated for their
ground breaking dance music from 1987-92, under the names 'The Justified
Ancients of Mu Mu' ('The JAMs'), 'The Timelords', 'The Kopyright Liberation
Front' ('The KLF'), 'The Forever Ancients Liberation Loophole' ('The FALL'),
and post-1992 as 'The K Foundation' and 'The One World Orchestra'. They have
also produced other groups, including their sometime backing singers 'Disco
2000', and re-mixed tracks by 'Depeche Mode' and 'The Pet Shop Boys'. Cauty
was also a founder member of 'The Orb' which he left, taking some tracks
with him which were released under the name 'Space'. After producing
critically acclaimed work, utilising cheap sampling technology to its
fullest, yet not selling many records (albeit interrupted by a freak novelty
world-wide No. 1), they finally found fame in the emerging UK rave scene,
and released a string of world-wide hit singles in the 90's, selling more
singles than any other band in 1991.

They have also branched out into other forms: they published a book 'The
Manual' and planned but never published at least two others and a graphic
novel, filmed a motion picture 'The White Room' which has yet to be shown,
released an 'ambient video' and planned at least two art exhibitions but
never staged them. They are also infamous for various anarchic situationist
'pranks' or 'happenings' which include billboard defacements, a crop circle
hoax, a pagan midsummer's ritual ('The Rites Of Mu', see question 4.002), a
BRIT Awards protest involving a dead sheep and buckets of blood (see 4.004),
a string of strange full-page mainstream press adverts, staging an
alternative art award for the worst artist of the year (see 4.005), and they
also burned a MILLION POUNDS (see 4.006) and subsequently toured the film of
the burning round the U.K. Bearing in mind the wilfully perverse way they
conducted their career, the group they share the most comparisons with would
probably be The Residents.

But what are the KLF about? One may well ask. This author believes that this
is no easy question and any answer he can give will be far too simplistic
for what is a very complex concept. On one level the KLF was about a duo of
music business veterans who initially used their knowledge and experience to
utilise cheap sampling technology later leading to commercial success and
acclaim. But then they also conducted this part of their careers in such a
way that it challenged the traditional models of the music-business, and
even rebelled against them. To anyone wanting more, this author can only
suggest they read ALL the material in this FAQ, and examine the WHOLE of the
ftp archive and ALL other related literature and material (including the
music itself) and then come to their own conclusions.

The letters 'KLF' stood for many things, which changed many times throughout
their life-span. The first documented occurrence is in 1987, when the
moniker 'Kopyright Liberation Front' was mentioned on their record
releases. But over the years up to the 1992 retirement, they always got
asked this question in interviews and were always making up new names. One
much-quoted line is "We're on a quest to find out what it means. When we
find out, we can stop what we're doing now." Various examples of these names
are: 'Kings of the Low(er) Frequency', 'Kool Low Frequency', 'Keep Looking
Forward', 'Kevin Likes Fruit' and so on, but the usually accepted definition
is 'The Kopyright Liberation Front'. [Nb. this has 24 letters, but if you
spell it Kopyrite, then there's 23!!]

The next question is how did this name come about. The Justified Ancients of
Mu Mu came from the Illuminatus books, and possibly to some extent the name
KLF was influenced by these as well. Over recent years there've been a
number of organisations using an acronym ending -Liberation Front. In the
1960's was the NLF - National Liberation Front - the North Vietnamese
resistance to the USA supported by 'hippies' in the US. In the 1980's was
the ALF - Animal Liberation Front - British radicals who became famous for
freeing animals from experimental labs. There's also the Kasmiri Liberation
Front. Then in Illuminatus! there's the ELF - Erisian Liberation Front -
leading the forces of chaos against order. So it could follow that for
sampling in the 80's and 90's there's the KLF - Kopyright Liberation Front -
Freeing Mu(sic) from copyright laws and using past sounds as much as you
want. There are many other ..LF's too, but I reckon those are the important
ones that led to Bill'n'Jimi choosing the name KLF.

Finally, Jamm!n adds: why Kopyright in KLF was spelt with a K... Well, there
are three reasons I can think of, all/some/none of which may relate to the
real reasons:
1. CLF sounds considerably less cool.
2. The letter K has many mystical connections. Too many to list here, but it
is linked to certain grams in I Ching and Tarot amongst others. KLF aren't
the only band to spot this; for example mystic-guru-wannabes Kula Shaker
with their album "K". "K" was also the letter used to mark barrels of the
strongest brewed drink available, and hence is now the brand name of an 8.4%
abv cider. Decide the relevance of that for yourself.
3. Kopyright has been used in Discordian circles for some time to draw
attention to the complete absence of Copyright. The standard rubric is
something like:
Kopyright (k) 3163 Gold & Appel Transfers, Inc.
All rites reversed. Reprint what you like.
The use of K here of course has the additional relevance that it is the
first letter of kallisti, and hence a common Erisian symbol is the golden
apple with just a K on it.



http://www.klf.de/ >>> bad wisdom
>>> Kalevala records

le faux site du faux label finlandais (la "bande son" du bouquin Bad Wisdom):
http://www.probe-records.com/KALEVALA/page.html

la "discographie" du faux label:
http://www.discogs.com/label/Kalevala

Le rituel du serpent : Art et anthropologie d’Aby Warburg

Jean Lacoste, la Quinzaine littéraire, mai 2003, numéro 854.

La situation semble empruntée à Kafka : en 1923, l’historien d’art Aby Warburg, soigné depuis cinq ans pour de graves troubles mentaux à la clinique de Bellevue à Kreuzligen, sur la rive suisse du lac de Constance, doit présenter une conférence scientifique au personnel et aux patients pour montrer qu’il a recouvré la santé mentale : cette conférence, véritable rite de passage, est la condition de sa sortie. Les éditions Macula publient, dans un même volume, avec une intelligente iconographie, le texte de la conférence de Warburg, accompagné d’une introduction de Joseph Leo Koerner et d’essais de Fritz Saxl et de Benedetta Cestelli Guidi.


Aby Warburg souffrait, selon les termes d’une lettre à Freud du directeur de la clinique, Ludwig Binswanger, d’une « grave psychose », accompagnée d’angoisse, d’obsessions et de « manœuvres défensives » ; il choisit pour sa conférence un thème à la fois exotique et manifestement en rapport avec sa propre situation psychique : la manière dont des Indiens Pueblos d’Amérique du Nord, les Hopis, maîtrisent collectivement, par l’impressionnant « rituel du serpent », une peur immémoriale, et croient dominer les forces de la nature par le jeu de la pensée symbolique. Dans la situation elle-même angoissante dans laquelle il se trouve, Aby Warburg cherche le matériel de sa conférence non dans son domaine habituel, l’histoire de l’art, la Renaissance en Occident, mais dans les souvenirs d’un voyage qu’il a fait 27 ans auparavant aux Etats-Unis. Warburg, qui est issu d’une grande famille de banquiers juifs de Hambourg et entretient des relations difficiles avec le judaïsme et son refus traditionnel des images, éprouve en même temps une profonde aversion pour l’histoire de l’art esthétisante et formaliste de l’époque : pour fuir ces conflits, il entreprend en 1895-1896 un long périple aux Etats-Unis, de New York à la côte Ouest, au cours duquel il passe quelque temps à l’ouest de Santa Fe et du Rio Grande, chez les Pueblos du Nouveau-Mexique et ceux de l’Arizona, les Hopis. Il rapporte de ce voyage des poteries à la subtile ornementation symbolique, dont il fera don au musée ethnographique de Hambourg, des photographies fascinantes, où on le voit, « banquier cow-boy », à côté de danseurs ornés de plumes, et surtout une conviction : l’art et l’anthropologie s’éclairent réciproquement. En fait, Aby Warburg, dans son voyage du printemps 1896, n’a pas véritablement assisté au rituel au cours duquel les Hopis dansent en tenant un serpent à sonnette vivant dans leur bouche. Il a assisté à d’autres cérémonies au cours desquelles il est fait usage de masques, comme médiateurs démoniques, dont les fameuses poupées katcina, qui figuraient en bonne place dans la collection d’André Breton, sont l’énigmatique reproduction. C’est au cœur de l’été, en août, quand la culture du maïs est menacée par la sécheresse et dépend des pluies d’orage que les Hopis, lors de « festivités paysannes », pratiquent la danse des serpents. Le serpent, en effet, est comme l’éclair, zigzaguant, il est l’éclair, et manipuler l’animal dangereux est une manière de maîtriser les forces naturelles dont dépend l’existence même de ces Indiens agriculteurs et sédentaires. En obligeant le serpent à participer à la cérémonie, sans le sacrifier, en surmontant la peur qu’il inspire, on influe sur le cours de la nature, dans un étrange, instable et pourtant efficace mélange de magie rituelle et de finalité pratique. Entre la main, et la pensée, entre le geste et l’intellect, il y a place pour le symbole qui permet de surmonter la terreur que suscitent les phénomènes naturels incompréhensibles et les périls de l’immédiat environnement. Les Hopis - c’est-à-dire, dans leur langue, « les Pacifiques » - se placent ainsi à mi-chemin entre les sacrifices sanglants pratiqués par d’autres ethnies nomades, pour la même fin, et la « sérénité » que procurent les religions du salut.

La suite ici : http://www.larevuedesressources.org/spip.php?article183

Aby Warburg Rituel, Pathosformel et forme intermédiaire

Dans la tradition iconographique occidentale certaines formules gestuelles resurgissent, après une longue période de latence, chargées d’une intensité affective nouvelle. Peut-on comprendre ce phénomène en se limitant à l’étude des images elles-mêmes ou faut-il plutôt tenter d’ouvrir la recherche sur les actions rituelles, les mythes et les récits qui accompagnent les figurations de ces gestes ? Comment envisager ces survivances du point de vue global, qui est celui de l’anthropologie de l’image, sans sacrifier aux généralités du « contexte social » la spécificité formelle singulière et complexe de « l’œuvre d’art » ? Au croisement de l’esthétique, de l’anthropologie et de l’histoire de l’art, ces questions ont été posées dès l’institution académique de cette discipline par Aby Warburg (1866-1929) qui compte parmi ses fondateurs. À partir de l’interprétation des présupposés théoriques d’un certain nombre de ses travaux, nous proposons dans cet article une nouvelle articulation de ses interrogations et deux exemples d’analyse qui montrent la valeur heuristique actuelle de la démarche.

Télécharger le texte intégrale sur :
http://lhomme.revues.org/index198.html

Cargaison. Remo Guidieri

Essais Seuil. Fiction&Cie. Avril 1987

In John They Trust

South Pacific villagers worship a mysterious American they call John Frum - believing he'll one day shower their remote island with riches

* By Paul Raffaele
* Photographs by Paul Raffaele
* Smithsonian magazine, February 2006

In the morning heat on a tropical island halfway across the world from the United States, several dark-skinned men—clad in what look to be U.S. Army uniforms—appear on a mound overlooking a bamboo-hut village. One reverently carries Old Glory, precisely folded to reveal only the stars. On the command of a bearded “drill sergeant,” the flag is raised on a pole hacked from a tall tree trunk. As the huge banner billows in the wind, hundreds of watching villagers clap and cheer.

Chief Isaac Wan, a slight, bearded man in a blue suit and ceremonial sash, leads the uniformed men down to open ground in the middle of the village. Some 40 barefoot "G.I.’s" suddenly emerge from behind the huts to more cheering, marching in perfect step and ranks of two past Chief Isaac. They tote bamboo “rifles” on their shoulders, the scarlet tips sharpened to represent bloody bayonets, and sport the letters “USA,” painted in red on their bare chests and backs.

This is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”

The island’s John Frum movement is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a “cargo cult”—many of which sprang up in villages in the South Pacific during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of American troops poured into the islands from the skies and seas. As anthropologist Kirk Huffman, who spent 17 years in Vanuatu, explains: “You get cargo cults when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes.” The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world. To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region constructed piers and carved airstrips from their fields. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy.

But the venerated Americans never came back, except as a dribble of tourists and veterans eager to revisit the faraway islands where they went to war in their youth. And although almost all the cargo cults have disappeared over the decades, the John Frum movement has endured, based on the worship of an American god no sober man has ever seen.

Many Americans know Vanuatu from the reality TV series “Survivor,” though the episodes shot there hardly touched on the Melanesian island nation’s spectacular natural wonders and fascinating, age-old cultures. Set between Fiji and New Guinea, Vanuatu is a Y-shaped scattering of more than 80 islands, several of which include active volcanoes. The islands were once home to fierce warriors, among them cannibals. Many inhabitants still revere village sorcerers, who use spirit-possessed stones in magic rituals that can lure a new lover, fatten a pig or kill an enemy.

Americans with longer memories remember Vanuatu as the New Hebrides—its name until its independence from joint British and French colonial rule in 1980. James Michener’s book Tales of the South Pacific, which spawned the musical South Pacific, grew out of his experiences as an American sailor in the New Hebrides in World War II.

My own South Pacific experience, in search of John Frum and his devotees, begins when I board a small plane in Vanuatu’s capital, Port-Vila. Forty minutes later, coral reefs, sandy beaches and green hills announce Tanna Island, about 20 miles long and 16 miles at its widest point, with a population of around 28,000. Climbing into an ancient jeep for the drive to Lamakara, which overlooks Sulphur Bay, I wait while Jessel Niavia, the driver, starts the vehicle by touching together two wires sticking out from a hole under the dashboard.

As the jeep rattles up a steep slope, the narrow trail slicing through the jungle’s dense green weave of trees and bushes, Jessel tells me that he is the brother-in-law of one of the cult’s most important leaders, Prophet Fred—who, he adds proudly, “raised his wife from the dead two weeks ago.”

When we reach the crest of a hill, the land ahead falls away to reveal Yasur, Tanna’s sacred volcano, a few miles to the south, its ash-coated slopes nudging the shoreline at Sulphur Bay. Dark smoke belches from its cone. “‘Yasur’ means God in our language,” Jessel murmurs. “It’s the house of John Frum.”

“If he’s an American, why does he live in your volcano?” I wonder aloud.

“Ask Chief Isaac,” he says. “He knows everything.”

Dotting the dirt road are small villages where women with curly, bubble-shaped hair squat over bundles of mud-coated roots called kava, a species of pepper plant and a middling narcotic that is the South Pacific’s traditional drug of choice. Connoisseurs say that Tanna’s kava is the strongest of all. Jessel buys a bundle of roots for 500 vatu, about $5. “We’ll drink it tonight,” he says with a grin.

For as long as Tanna’s inhabitants can remember, island men have downed kava at sunset each day in a place off-limits to women. Christian missionaries, mostly Presbyterians from Scotland, put a temporary stop to the practice in the early 20th century, also banning other traditional practices, or “kastom,” that locals had followed faithfully for millennia: dancing, penis wrapping and polygamy. The missionaries also forbade working and amusement on Sundays, swearing and adultery. In the absence of a strong colonial administrative presence, they set up their own courts to punish miscreants, sentencing them to forced labor. The Tannese seethed under the missionaries’ rules for three decades. Then, John Frum appeared.

The road drops steeply through more steamy jungle to the shoreline, around the point from Yasur, where I will stay in a hut on the beach. As the sun sets beyond the rain-forest- covered mountains that form Tanna’s spine, Jessel’s brother, Daniel Yamyam, arrives to fetch me. He has the soft-focus eyes and nearly toothless smile of a kava devotee. Daniel was once a member of Vanuatu’s Parliament in Port-Vila, and his constituents included John Frum followers from what was then the movement’s stronghold, Ipikil, on Sulphur Bay. “I’m now a Christian, but like most people on Tanna, I still have John Frum in my heart,” he says. “If we keep praying to John, he’ll come back with plenty of cargo.”

Daniel leads me to his village nakamal, the open ground where the men drink kava. Two young boys bend over the kava roots Jessel had purchased, chewing chunks of them into a stringy pulp. “Only circumcised boys who’ve never touched a girl’s body can make kava,” Daniel tells me. “That ensures that their hands are not dirty.”

Other boys mix water with the pulp and twist the mixture through a cloth, producing a dirty-looking liquid. Daniel hands me a half-coconut shell filled to the brim. “Drink it in one go,” he whispers. It tastes vile, like muddy water. Moments later my mouth and tongue turn numb.

The men split into small groups or sit by themselves, crouching in the darkness, whispering to each other or lost in thought. I toss back a second shell of the muddy mix, and my head tugs at its mooring, seeking to drift away into the night.

Yasur rumbles like distant thunder, a couple of miles over the ridge, and through the trees I glimpse an eerie red glow at its cone. In 1774, Capt. James Cook was lured ashore by that same glow. He was the first European to see the volcano, but local leaders banned him from climbing to the cone because it was taboo. Daniel assures me the taboo is no longer enforced. “Go with Chief Isaac,” he advises. “You can ask him tomorrow.”

After I drink my third shell of kava, Daniel peers into my undoubtedly glazed eyes. “I’d better take you back,” he says. By the seaside at my hut, I dance unsteadily to the rhythm of the waves as I try to pluck the shimmering moon from the sky and kiss it.

The next morning, I head to Lamakara to talk to Chief Isaac. Surrounded by an eerie doomsday moonscape of volcanic ash, Yasur looms behind the village. But at only 1,184 feet high, the sacred volcano has none of the majesty of, say, Mount Fuji; instead, its squat shape reminds me of a pugnacious bulldog standing guard before its master’s house. My driver points at the cone. “Haus blong John Frum,” he says in pidgin English. It’s John Frum’s house.

In the village dozens of cane huts, some with rusting tin roofs, encircle an open ceremonial dancing ground of impacted ash and the mound where the American flag flies each day, flanked by the much smaller flags of Vanuatu, ex-colonial ruler France and the Australian Aborigines, whose push for racial equality the villagers admire. Clearly, John Frum has yet to return with his promised cargo because Lamakara is dirt poor in consumer goods. But island men, wrapped in cloth known as lava-lava, women in large flowered dresses and mostly barefoot children in T-shirts appear healthy and seem happy. That’s no surprise: like many South Pacific coastal villages, it’s a place where coconuts drop by your side as you snooze. Yams, taro, and pineapples and other fruit thrive in the fertile volcanic soil, and plump pigs sniff around the village for scraps. Tasty fruit bats cling upside down in nearby trees.

Chief Isaac, in an open-neck shirt, green slacks and cloth shoes, greets me on the mound and leads me into a hut behind the flagpoles: the John Frum inner sanctum, off-limits to all but the cult’s senior leaders and, it seems, male visitors from abroad. “Office blong me,” he says with a smile as we enter.

The hut is dominated by a round table displaying a small U.S. flag on a pedestal, a carved bald eagle and imitation U.S. military uniforms neatly folded and placed in a circle, ready for use on John Frum Day in a little more than a week. Above, suspended by vine from a beam, hangs a globe, a stone ax and a pair of green stones carved into circles the size of a silver dollar. “Very powerful magic,” the chief says as he points to the stones. “The gods made them a long time ago.”

Written on a pair of blackboards is a plea that John Frum’s followers lead a kastom life and that they refrain from violence against each other. One of the blackboards bears a chalked red cross, probably copied from U.S. military ambulances and now an important symbol for the cult.

“John Frum came to help us get back our traditional customs, our kava drinking, our dancing, because the missionaries and colonial government were deliberately destroying our culture,” Chief Isaac says, his pidgin English translated by Daniel.

“But if John Frum, an American, is going to bring you modern goods, how does that sit with his wish that you lead a kastom life?” I ask.

“John is a spirit. He knows everything,” the chief says, slipping past the contradiction with the poise of a skilled politician. “He’s even more powerful than Jesus.”

“Have you ever seen him?”

“Yes, John comes very often from Yasur to advise me, or I go there to speak with John.”

“What does he look like?”

“An American!”

“Then why does he live in Yasur?”

“John moves from America to Yasur and back, going down through the volcano and under the sea.”
When I mention Prophet Fred, anger flares in Chief Isaac’s eyes. “He’s a devil,” he snarls. “I won’t talk about him.”

What about your visit to the United States in 1995? I ask. What did you think of your religion’s heaven on earth? He raises his hands apologetically. “I have much to do today. I’ll tell you about it another time.” On the way back to my hut, it occurs to me that I forgot to ask him to take me to the volcano.

Chief Isaac and other local leaders say that John Frum first appeared one night in the late 1930s, after a group of elders had downed many shells of kava as a prelude to receiving messages from the spirit world. “He was a white man who spoke our language, but he didn’t tell us then he was an American,” says Chief Kahuwya, leader of Yakel village. John Frum told them he had come to rescue them from the missionaries and colonial officials. “John told us that all Tanna’s people should stop following the white man’s ways,” Chief Kahuwya says. “He said we should throw away their money and clothes, take our children from their schools, stop going to church and go back to living as kastom people. We should drink kava, worship the magic stones and perform our ritual dances.”

Perhaps the chieftains in their kava reveries actually experienced a spontaneous vision of John Frum. Or perhaps the apparition has more practical roots. It’s possible that local leaders conceived of John Frum as a powerful white-skinned ally in the fight against the colonials, who were attempting to crush much of the islanders’ culture and prod them into Christianity. In fact, that view of the origins of the cult gained credence in 1949, when the island administrator, Alexander Rentoul, noting that “frum” is the Tannese pronunciation of “broom,” wrote that the object of the John Frum movement “was to sweep (or broom) the white people off the island of Tanna.”

Whatever the truth, John Frum’s message struck a chord. Villagers on Tanna began throwing their money into the sea and killing their pigs for grand feasts to welcome their new messiah. Colonial authorities eventually struck back, arresting the movement’s leaders—including Chief Isaac’s father, Chief Nikiau. They were shipped to a prison at Port-Vila in 1941, their subsequent years behind bars earning them status as the John Frum movement’s first martyrs.

The cult got its biggest boost the following year, when American troops by the thousands were dispatched to the New Hebrides, where they built large military bases at Port-Vila and on the island of Espíritu Santo. The bases included hospitals, airstrips, jetties, roads, bridges and corrugated-steel Quonset huts, many erected with the help of more than a thousand men recruited as laborers from Tanna and other parts of the New Hebrides—among them Chief Kahuwya.

Where the U.S. armed forces go, so go the legendary PXs, with their seemingly endless supply of chocolate, cigarettes and Coca-Cola. For men who lived in huts and farmed yams, the Americans’ wealth was a revelation. The troops paid them 25 cents a day for their work and handed out generous amounts of goodies.

The Americans’ munificence dazzled the men from Tanna, as did the sight of dark-skinned soldiers eating the same food, wearing the same clothes, living in similar huts and tents and operating the same high-tech equipment as white soldiers. “In kastom, people sit together to eat,” says Kirk Huffman, who was the curator of Vanuatu’s cultural center during his years in the island nation. “The missionaries had angered the Tannese by always eating separately.”

It seems this is when the legend of John Frum took on a decidedly American character. “John Frum appeared to us in Port-Vila,” Chief Kahuwya says, “and stayed with us throughout the war. John was dressed in all white, like American Navy men, and it was then we knew John was an American. John said that when the war was over, he’d come to us in Tanna with ships and planes bringing much cargo, like the Americans had in Vila.”

In 1943, the U.S. command, concerned about the movement’s growth, sent the USS Echo to Tanna with Maj. Samuel Patten on board. His mission was to convince John Frum followers that, as his report put it, “the American forces had no connection with Jonfrum.” He failed. At war’s end, the U.S. military unwittingly enhanced the legend of their endless supply of cargo when they bulldozed tons of equipment—trucks, jeeps, aircraft engines, supplies—off the coast of Espíritu Santo. During six decades in the shallows, coral and sand have obscured much of the watery grave of war surplus, but snorkelers can still see tires, bulldozers and even full Coke bottles. The locals wryly named the place Million Dollar Point.

After the war, when they returned home from Port-Vila to their huts, the Tanna men were convinced that John Frum would soon join them, and hacked a primitive airstrip out of the jungle in the island’s north to tempt the expected American planes from the skies. Across the South Pacific, thousands of other cargo cult followers began devising similar plans—even building bamboo control towers strung with rope and bamboo aerials to guide in the planes. In 1964, one cargo cult on New Hanover Island in Papua New Guinea offered the U.S. government $1,000 for Lyndon Johnson to come and be their paramount chief. But as the years passed with empty skies and seas, almost all the cargo cults disappeared, the devotees’ hopes crushed.

At Sulphur Bay the faithful never wavered. Each Friday afternoon, hundreds of believers stream across the ash plain below Yasur, coming to Lamaraka from villages all over Tanna. After the sun goes down and the men have drunk kava, the congregation gathers in and around an open hut on the ceremonial ground. As light from kerosene lamps flickers across their faces, they strum guitars and homemade ukuleles, singing hymns of John Frum’s prophecies and the struggles of the cult’s martyrs. Many carry the same plea: “We’re waiting in our village for you, John. When are you coming with all the cargo you promised us?”

Threaded among the singers’ perfect harmonies is a high-pitched Melanesian keening that hones each hymn with a yearning edge. I look around in vain for Chief Isaac until a senior man in the cult whispers that after drinking kava, Isaac has disappeared among the darkened trees to talk to John Frum. The weekly service doesn’t end until the sun comes back up, at seven the next morning.

The John Frum movement is following the classic pattern of new religions,” says anthropologist Huffman. Schisms split clumps of faithful from the main body, as apostates proclaim a new vision leading to sacrilegious variants on the creed’s core beliefs.

Which explains Prophet Fred, whose village, Ipikil, is nestled on Sulphur Bay. Daniel says that Prophet Fred split with Chief Isaac in 1999 and led half of the believer villages into his new version of the John Frum cult. “He had a vision while working on a Korean fishing boat in the ocean,” Daniel says. “God’s light came down on him, and God told him to come home and preach a new way.” People believed that Fred could talk to God after he predicted, six years ago, that Lake Siwi would break its natural dam and flood into the ocean. “The people living around the lake [on the beach beneath the volcano] moved to other places,” says Daniel. “Six months later, it happened.”

Then, almost two years ago, Prophet Fred’s rivalry with Chief Isaac exploded. More than 400 young men from the competing camps clashed with axes, bows and arrows and slingshots, burning down a thatched church and several houses. Twenty-five men were seriously injured. “They wanted to kill us, and we wanted to kill them,” a Chief Isaac loyalist says.

A few days before Lamakara’s annual John Frum celebration, I visit Prophet Fred’s village—only to find that he’s gone to the island’s northern tip to preach, most likely to avoid the celebrations. Instead, I meet his senior cleric, Maliwan Tarawai, a barefoot pastor carrying a well-thumbed Bible. “Prophet Fred has called his movement Unity, and he’s woven kastom, Christianity and John Frum together,” Tarawai tells me. The American messiah is little more than a figurehead in Fred’s version, which bans the display of foreign flags, including Old Glory, and forbids any talk of cargo.

All morning I watch as vocalists with a string band sing hymns about Prophet Fred while several wild-eyed women stumble around in what appears to be a trance. They faith-heal the sick by clutching the ailing area of the body and praying silently to the heavens, casting out demons. Now and then they pause to clutch with bony fingers at the sky. “They do this every Wednesday, our holy day,” Tarawai explains. “The Holy Spirit has possessed them, and they get their healing powers from him and from the sun.”

Back in Lamakara, John Frum Day dawns warm and sticky. After the flag raising, Chief Isaac and other cult leaders sit on benches shaded by palm fronds as several hundred followers take turns performing traditional dances or modern improvisations. Men and boys clad in stringy bark skirts stride onto the dancing ground clutching replicas of chain saws carved from jungle boughs. As they thump their feet in time to their own singing, they slash at the air with the make-believe chain saws. “We’ve come from America to cut down all the trees,” they sing, “so we can build factories.”

On the day before I leave Tanna, Chief Isaac and I finally climb the slippery ash slopes of Yasur, the ground trembling about every ten minutes with each thunderous explosion from within the volcano’s crater. Every ear-humming bang sends a huge plume of potentially killer gas high into the sky, a mingling of sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen chloride.

Darkness brings a spectacular display, as molten lava explodes from the crater’s vents, shooting into the air like giant Roman candles. Two people were killed here by “lava bombs,” or falling chunks of volcanic rock, in 1994. Chief Isaac leads me to a spot on the crumbling rim, away from the drift of the hazardous gas but still within reach of the incandescent bombs the unpredictable volcano bursts into the air.

The chief tells me about his trip to the United States in 1995, and shows faded pictures of himself in Los Angeles, outside the White House and with a drill sergeant at a military base. He says he was astonished by the wealth of the United States, but surprised and saddened by the poverty he saw among white and black Americans alike, and by the prevalence of guns, drugs and pollution. He says he returned happily to Sulphur Bay. “Americans never show smiling faces,” he adds, “and so it seems they always think that death is never far away.”

When I ask what he most wants from America, the simplicity of his request moves me: “A 25-horsepower outboard motor for the village boat. Then we can catch much fish in the sea and sell them in the market so that my people can have a better life.”

As we look down into John Frum’s fiery Tanna home, I remind him that not only does he not have an outboard motor from America, but that all the devotees’ other prayers have been, so far, in vain. “John promised you much cargo more than 60 years ago, and none has come,” I point out. “So why do you keep faith with him? Why do you still believe in him?”

Chief Isaac shoots me an amused look. “You Christians have been waiting 2,000 years for Jesus to return to earth,” he says, “and you haven’t given up hope.”



Find this article at:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/john.html?c=y&page=2

Roy Villevoye

http://www.motivegallery.nl/index.php?pageid=78&sub=94

Liant papier

60 % papier
30 % sable
10 % chaux

Le jardin de Cyrus

http://issuu.com/220jours/docs/portfolio_lejardindecyrus

Mark Geffriaud
Alexander Gutke
Joachim Koester
Benoît Maire
Bojan Šarcevic
Raphaël Zarka
Et la participation de Batia Suter, Mark Manders & Roger Willems

Commissariat : Yoann Gourmel
EMBA / Galerie Edouard Manet, Gennevilliers
3, place Jean Grandel - 92 230 Gennevilliers

Link on Tracking the Zombie Diaspora: From Subhuman Haiti to Posthuman Tucson

http://codeless88.wordpress.com/tracking-the-zombie-diaspora/

The Magic of the State. Michael Taussig

Interview David Levi Strauss and Michael Taussig

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/18/strauss.php

I first met Mick Taussig about eight years ago,
as The Magic of the State (Routledge, 1997) was coming out. I'd read Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (University of Chicago Press, 1987) when it appeared, and was especially drawn to its treatment of images and ima­ge-making in power relations. Later I was invited to participate in an informal seminar that Mick and Peter Lamborn Wilson had gathered around the subject of shamanism. The conversation among Mick, Peter, and me, on states both fictional and non, has continued since then around frequent fires and dinners, almost always within a stone's throw of the Rondout Creek, where we all live in the Hudson Valley.

After getting a medical degree from the University of Sydney, Australia in 1964 and working as a physician in the university's main teaching hospital for a year and in general practice for another six months, Mick read for a Master's degree in sociology at the London School of Economics and worked as a psychiatric resident in mental hospitals in London. He was appointed a Research Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies of London University in 1969, and went to Colombia in September of that year, to "join the Revolution." What he saw there intrigued him, and his fieldwork in Colombia, Putamayo, and Venezuela would continue over the next four decades. His Ph.D. dissertation (with Julian Pitt-Rivers) examining the socio-cultural impact of the commercialization of agriculture was published in Spanish in 1975. He taught in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and in Performance Studies at New York University before accepting his current position as Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of eight books: The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987), The Nervous System (1992), Mimesis and Alterity (1993), The Magic of the State (1997), Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (1999), Law in a Lawless Land (2003), and My Cocaine Museum (2004).

The Magic of the State is my favorite of all of Mick's books, because of its particular mixing of fiction and documentary. "This is the most 'fictional' of my writings,"Mick told me. "I use the Sydney expression 'fictocriticism' to convey the hybrid sense and I clearly designate the fictional quality through a variety of devices, mainly humor and tone, camp and arch-camp. An aim of such writing is to turn the attention of the reader to the very act of writing as an 'anthropological' or cultural act which engages with the desire to succumb to authority in general, and to colonial or postcolonial tropes in particular." As the New York Times put it, "Over the last several decades, as the exemplars of traditional fieldwork have been toppled from their pedestals, Taussig has been developing a radical alternative. . . . Blending fact and fiction, ethnographic observation, archival history, literary theory and memoir, his books read more like beatnik novels than sober analyses of other­ ­cultures...."

http://www.castillocorrales.fr/galerie/index.php/2008/07/22/17-the-magic-of-the-state

VonuLife

Lien pour télécharger le pdf complet:
http://www.metronomepress.com/documenta12.html


Metronome No.10
Future Academy
Shared, Mobile, Improvised, Underground, Hidden, Floating
Oregon, 2006
Edited in collaboration with Oscar Tuazon
Metronome No.10 (Oregon) is an instruction manual for artists who wish to live and work portably and features unusual yet vital hints for social and economic survival. It is modeled on the long-running hippie survivalist zine Dwelling Portably, edited by Bert and Holly Davis and distributed from Philomath, Oregon, USA. In March 2006, while living and working out of a temporary, mobile publishing studio located in a RV, Clémentine Deliss, Oscar Tuazon and two Future Academy participants from Edinburgh (artist, Marjorie Harlick and neuroscientist, Guy Billings) searched for the editors of Dwelling Portably covering nearly 2000 miles of logging roads, and typed over 25,000 words on manual typewriters for this latest issue. During this production period they built a ‘hill-lodge’ into the side of a south-facing slope in the woods near Philomath, digging out the mud bank and setting up tarps and poles to insulate the 3 x 2m cavity against the pouring rain and wind.

Contributors to Metronome No.10 include Ibon Aranberri, Nico Dockx, Didier Fiuza Faustino, Richard Fischbeck, Yona Friedman, Jan Mast, Christos Papoulias, Douglas Park, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Matthew Stadler, and members of Future Academy in Edinburgh, India, and Dakar .

The production was made possible through the support of Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh, and Stephanie Snyder, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon.

ANIMISM

Animism
22 January – 2 May, 2010

Animism is a long-term exhibition and publication project first presented between 22 January and 2 May 2010 in Antwerp in a collaboration of Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen and the Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA). A second version of the exhibition will be shown at Kunsthalle Bern from May till July 2010. Subsequent versions will be developed at the Generali Foundation in Vienna and the House of World Cultures in Berlin (with the Free University Berlin) in 2011 and 2012, respectively.


Can animation be thought beyond the fictional, as a practice shaping vital relations with the world? What is the role of aesthetic processes in the drawing of the boundaries between life and non-life, humans and things? The exhibition takes as its starting point what was once the negative backdrop against which modern objectivism defined itself. Coined by 19th century anthropologists in the context of the colonial encounter, animism was understood as a 'primitive' religion and psychological mechanism through which non-modern cultures were thought to endow objects with life, that is, with souls, agency, or forms of personhood.

This project responds to a new interest in animism, which stems from a widespread re-visioning of modernity, by a reflection on aesthetic processes seen through the prism of an exhibition. Animism has recently become a concept through which to look at the construction and organization of collective relations between various social actors – human and non-human – once again. Retrospectively, the concept opens new perspectives on modern boundary-practices – culture and nature, life and non-life – forms of knowledge and power, and the aesthetic economies that they produce.

Structured around two opposed and yet complementary aesthetic processes and effects, animation and objectification, the exhibition brings together contemporary and historical works that explore the modern anxiety about the boundaries between persons and things, the animate and inanimate, and puts their negotiation in artistic practice in historical perspective.

An accompanying catalogue – the first in a series of two, published by Sternberg Press – connects several recent attempts at rethinking animism from a variety of perspectives, and traces their various historical genealogies.

With works by:
Agency, Art & Language, Christian W. Braune & Otto Fischer, Marcel Broodthaers, Paul Chan, Didier Demorcy, Walt Disney, Lili Dujourie, Jimmie Durham, Eric Duvivier, Thomas A. Edison, Harun Farocki, Leon Ferrari, Victor Grippo, Brion Gysin, Igloolik Isuma Productions, Luis Jacob, Ken Jacobs, Joachim Koester, Louise Lawler, Len Lye, Étienne-Jules Marey, Daria Martin, Angela Melitopoulos & Maurizio Lazzarato, Wesley Meuris, Henri Michaux, Santu Mofokeng, Vincent Monnikendam, Tom Nicholson, Reto Pulfer, Félix-Louis Regnault, Jozef Robakowski, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Paul Sharits, Jan Švankmajer, David G. Tretiakoff, Rosemarie Trockel, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Dziga Vertov, Klaus Weber, Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Histoire de Jean-Alphonse Renart, Kiki Landru et de la revue Spectre

(...)
C’est en effet une amitié passionnée qui se noue en quelques années entre les deux adolescents. Pendant trois ans, Jean-Alphonse et Kiki s’entendent comme larrons en foire. Tout ce que Renart aime, Kiki s’y intéresse, et tout ce que Kiki dit, Renart le fait. C’est grâce aux encouragements de son nouvel ami que Jean-Alphonse Renart suit un régime difficile lors de ses dix-sept ans, et perd vingt kilos, ce qui accroît sa confiance en lui et lui permet de rattraper son retard affectif en vivant simultanément trois passions amoureuses et charnelles (nous n’en connaissons que les prénoms : Alexia, Blandine et Corinne). Kiki le suit également momentanément dans ses restes de ferveur mystique, ou ses retours de mysticisme, mais tous deux s’en désintéressent finalement assez vite. Au christianisme, Renart et Landru préfèrent la science-fiction, le fantastique et l’étrange. Parmi les passions des deux amis, la série Twin Peaks diffusée à la télévision française en 1991, mais aussi les anciens numéros de Métal Hurlant, qu’ils collectent sur les quais de la Seine les week-ends, les nouvelles de Borges, les romans de Philip K. Dick… Et l’aventure du Grand Jeu, qui leur semble en tous points la plus belle aventure littéraire du XXe siècle, à laquelle ils s’identifient, naïvement, et dont ils ne quitteront jamais le cousinage, quelles que soient les formes que prendront leurs recherches par la suite.

(...)

La revue Spectre, Kiki Landru rencontre ses futurs membres dans un café près de Canal Saint-Martin dans le cours de l’été 98. C’est un choc, un coup de foudre. C’est au bar à concerts « L’Atmosphère » où Scott Batty croisa pour la première fois Lucas Falchero comme Aurélien Nicolas et où les futurs animateurs de la revue donnent la majeure partie de leurs rendez-vous, copieusement arrosés de bières (plus tard, ils déplaceront leur « Q.G. » à la brasserie « La Gueuze », rue Soufflot). Pendant quatre années riches en événements et en rebondissements, Kiki s’investit corps et âme dans le destin de cette petite revue d’art et de littérature populaire dans laquelle il fonde les plus grands espoirs. Devant un Kiki ébloui, Lucas Falchero, Philippe-Antoine Lambert et Pacôme Thiellement, qui se font alors appeler les « Gentlemen Invisibles », déploient les premières articulations de ce qu’ils nomment la Théorie de l’Invisibilité et qui s’inscrit dans le sillage de Thomas Pynchon et de N. Senada, le « maître obscur » du groupe de pop music The Residents.

Ainsi Pacôme raconte la Geste de Caméo Mephen-Little et Terry Zgeg-Gueiro, deux étudiants construisant en quelques années une nouvelle méthode de guérilla pour attaquer, par des moyens ésotériques, le monde moderne. Ainsi Philippe-Antoine assimile la société actuelle au monde de l’Hyper-réel, soit, dans une vision où les intuitions de Heidegger et de Debord se croisent, un monde qui n’est plus composé que par les conceptions que les hommes se font de lui et d’où a disparu tout mystère dans son impératif d’ « auto-représentation » calculée. Ainsi Lucas, quant à lui, commence un travail récapitulatif sur un sorcier de Thiers, Jacques Valorce, ayant fait échouer sa précédente revue, Vies Contemporaines, travail qu’il abandonne en fin de compte au mystérieux Mr ***. Pour Kiki, c’est une révélation, le début d’une ère nouvelle. Modestement, pour leur n°0, il se contente d’écrire un article consacré à Marilyn Manson. Mais il ne s’arrêtera pas en si bon chemin…

Comme il l’explique lui-même dans son autobiographie, Jean-Alphonse Renart ne suit pas Kiki dans son intérêt pour les membres de la revue Spectre. En effet, ceux-ci lui apparaissent surtout comme de bien mauvais plaisants, des apprentis sorciers très « occidentaux », quand ce n’est pas des magiciens noirs, fort éloignés de sa démarche prudente de sa réappropriation d’un savoir traditionnel, « oriental », resté caché. Il préfère se rendre, quotidiennement, à la Bibliothèque Nationale pour parfaire ses recherches concernant l’Indouisme, l’Islam chiite ésotérique ou la Pensée Cathare. Au bout de trois ans, dans le courant de l’an 2000, il abandonne même l’Université et mène seul sa quête. Et, chose troublante, celle-ci se déploie, aux côtés de celle de son ami Kiki, sur des lignes qui finiront par, mystérieusement, magiquement, se croiser.

http://laguerretotale.blogspot.com/2009/12/le-combat-contre-jarry.html

Coutumes sexuelles des îles Trobriand

" Although an understanding of reproduction and modern medicine is widespread in Trobriand Society, their traditional beliefs have been remarkably resilient, The real cause of pregnancy is always a baloma, who is inserted into or enters the body of a woman, and without whose existence a woman could not become pregnant; all babies are made or come into existence (ibubulisi) in Tuma. These tenets form the main stratum of what can be termed popular or universal belief. If you question any man, woman, or even an intelligent child, you will obtain from him or her this information. In the past, many held this traditional belief because the yam, a major food of the island, included chemicals (phytoestrogens and plant sterols) whose effects are contraceptive, so the practical link between sex and pregnancy was not very evident."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trobriand_Islands

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sexual_Life_of_Savages_in_North-Western_Melanesia