Visual Poetry/Exhibitions/4 May 1970/2007 Anniversary of Kent State Shootings

"emergence"


"It has to be reinvented"--
Arthur Rimbaud


(the above by d-b chirot)





Kent State University, 4 May 1973
Kent, Ohio, USA
National Guard kills 4, wounds 9
tape recently released to media recorded order to fire
protestors responding to the American secret bombing and expansion of Vietnam War into Cambodia















demolition of a house where protest being held --destroyed in just under three minutes



Settlers' grafitti, Hebron









d-b chirot (4 pieces above)

Foto Exhibtion, Nablus



Collages by Moki Cherry, from Exhibtion at ArtoMat, Long Island City, NY









Poster by Clemente Padin, for Bush's stop in Uruguay during Latin American trip





Tens of thousands of pages of documents relating to Leonard Peltier's case will not be released to his lawyers by the United States Governement for "reasons of National Security." Since the events in question happened over 30 years ago, it is very hard to understand why National Security should be at risk . . . But then, Mr. Peltier and the American Indian Movement have been called at various times "terrorists" --along with the old standby, "savages"--by the American government and press. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian"--and the next best is an Indian in prison for life regardless of evidence and lack thereof for "reasons of National Security."




Foto Exhibition, Hawwara Checkpoint

























Antonin Artaud


These are rubbings made in Chicago by my good friend and fellow artist/poet Barrett Gordon. I first met Barrett on a visit he made to Milwaukee last Fall and shared with him some techniques and we talked about ideas and experiences with rubbings. With many thanks to Kevin Thurston, who introduced me to their work and them via email, Barrett and Buck Downs (an excellent poet who lives in Washington, D.C.) are the only two artist/poets I know of who have worked with rubbings outside of the usual use of them for making copies of gravestones and plaques, etc. Barrett actually has a book of his earlier work called GRAVE RUBBER from House Press --that uses words rubbed/copied from gravestones and rearranged to form phrases and sentences of his own as forms of poems. Buck makes rubbings of single words, making of the word a minimilist poem in itself, focusing the attention on the forms of the letters, the form of the word as aa whole, as an object, and also the sense of the at once connection/disconnection between the visual/oral/aural senses of the word. The single word, isolated on the page--begins to look oddly mysterious, stranger and stranger the more one looks at it. I would say personally they begin to look a bit on the peripheries of being haunted to me! Both the methods--uses of the words complete, without any manipulations visually or use of visual imagery in itself as a form of sounding notation or simply as visual writing in its own right so to speak--I call "straight" rubbings. The connection with direct copying of what is both literally and literarily there as langauge is kept intact and rubbed in a straight forward manner, with little shading or "dirtying" involved--the visual elements as an "excess" (visually, sonically) are kept to a minimum.
Since last Fall Barrett has been developing his work in many different ways--I will be presenting some of these as he sends them--and also some of Buck's--I'm very thankful to both of them for sharing their work with me and for getting to know them--especially Barrett as Chicago is not very far from Milwaukee so we have met a few times. It is incredibly inspiring to find another person in the world who is involved with the work of rubbings as for years and years I knew of no one else at all interested in this. (I began making them almost daily in April of 1999.) It's been an immense chnage in my life to know someone to talk and write with about aspects of rubbings--ideas and daily odd experiences, textures, types of paper, the ways one sees differently at different times of day and so finds things in the evening one won't in the morning--all sorts of things small and large that are tremendously fun and exciting to me--but until Barrett I had no one to exchange thoughts and experiences about these things with on a practical level. So I am very happilly thankful to know him and his work--
If you yourself or someone you know has worked with rubbings over a period of some time--please contact me:
davidbchirot@hotmail.com

rubbings by Barrett Gordon