> hi Stephen,
>
> thanks for the interest! i can't offer 14 pages on witness, appropriation &
> documentary evidence and its use in modernist art, but will 5 do?
> http://jacketmagazine.com/30/hardy-reznik.html
Indeed, Edmund, I find this is a lovely essay on Reznifoff's work,
Testimony, in particular - and it does answer the question of, at least, R's
approach to the facts/evidence of witness; how he posits what he gathers as
a way of constructing a music, in this case an expansive lament for this
condition called American. I have always called R an "urban Whitman" - dark
side up! Or, as, in the Whitman metaphor, for the grass fallen (so
variously, and interestingly via these court cases in Testimony).
For those who do not know R's work, Edmund's essay has example enough to get
a sense going.
Thanks for putting this view out into the world.
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
>
> it's the essay on Reznikoff & grass I was puzzling about here a fortnight
> ago, now finished.
>
> Isn't pornography always a political form, because it aims at pure affect,
> though a very narrow one? And it is successfully critiqued as a politics.
>
> There are no lines to be drawn - & it must be a struggle - and the
> arrangement of historical evidence will carry an affect, particularly if one
> thinks of left-wing perception as being from the outside inwards, trying to
> see in from the furthest imaginable perimeter, to see & be concerned about
> as many people as possible
>
> but when does it become a kind of pornography? in excerpting from oral
> histories (in the last three snaps) i want enough context for these never
> to be outside history, to float free as entriely numbing image. what does
> the historical image do? the archivist & the editor probably hope at best it
> creates momentarily a becoming-affinity-towards-everybody
>
> less stimulating; more stimulating - i just pick up on a _feeling_ whether a
> particular project is going one way or the other - Reznikoff, Rukeyser's
> Book of the D, and Dos Passos USA, going one way; some war photography and
> war-obsessions going the other
>
> My question is: What use is an archive if it's static? It ought to shuffle
> around, the archivists should be speeding around the stacks, going mad,
> going down with a fever. The first lesson of my anthropology days was: the
> ethnographic record is always fusing & recombining and sparking. But then
> you find that it never quite does so outside anthropology & not enough
> inside.
>
> Here are further sections from the same source:
>
> < Miss Marzee, she wuz Marse Spence en Miss Betsey's
> daughter. >
>
> < She wuz playin' on de pianny when de Yankee sojers
> come down de road. >
>
> < Two sojers cum in de house en ax her fer ter play er
> tune dat dey liked. >
>
> < I fergits de name er dey tune. >
>
> < Miss Marzee gits up fum de pianny en she low dat she
> ain' gwine play no tune for' no Yankee mens. >
>
> < Den de sojers takes her out en set her up on top er de
> high gate post in front er de big house, en mek her set dar twel de whole
> regiment pass by. >
>
> < She set dar en cry, but she sho' ain' nebber played no
> tune for dem Yankee mens! >
>
>
> *
>
>
> < De Yankee sojers tuk all de blankets offen de beds. >
>
> < Dey stole all de meat dey want fum de smokehouse. >
>
> < Dey bash in de top er de syrup barrels en den turn de
> barrels upside down. >
>
> < Marse Spence gave me ter Miss Marzee fer ter be her
> own maid, but slav'ry time ended fo' I wuz big 'nough ter be much good ter
> 'er. >
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