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Confession in Contemporary Contexts: Video Art, Poetry and Secular Impulses to Disclosure

David Jhave Johnston

Submitted to: PK Langshaw

For HUMA 875H

Concordia Fall 2008

This essay examines how art (specifically video art) explores confessional motifs.

Illustration 1: The Confessions of Saint Disgustine. David Jhave Johnston. 2008. 2 / 22

I will say a few things in advance. This essay catalogs inspirations that I encountered while creating a short series of surreal videos entitled “The Confessions of Saint Disgustine”. The inspirations emerge from high and low culture, advertising and elite art, online, paper and video media, glitch and gloss, mind and body, and post-modern and ancient sources. As such the essay is also the confession of a cultural junk-food artist-intellectual who snacks voraciously across the culture continuum, while also munching on the higher proteins: the protean fiber of philosophy.

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Confession is associated in religion with the church, in secular culture with scandal, and in psychoanalytic contexts with repression. It refers to a moment when communication and emotional redemption fuse in forgiveness or punishment. Confessions involve complex biochemical vortices that intersect with social risk and provoke transformation. Independently of any institution (the church, the popular press, or medical establishment) humans confess. Shame seem as inherent as hunger; confession is it's inevitable by-product, a form of communicative pressure release. Confessional state-changes, mysterious and indelible, permeate sexuality, politics, spirituality, culture and most of all people.

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Media art and internet video may seem to be an unlikely space in which to discover the abstract rays of transcendence, yet, anything with a consciousness of itself as sentient experiences dark nights of the soul; darkness requires transcendence.

The entire spectrum of culture displays concerns with confessions.

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Let's begin at the bottom, in the brutally rude humor of a patois cult comedy phenomena: Têtes à claques1 ( www.tetesaclaques.tv/ ). Têtes à claques are internet celebrities in Quebec: short animated films with human eyes and mouths masked inside doll heads that feature Illustration 2: Illustration 2: Têtes à claques. http://www.tetesaclaques.tv/video.php?vid=1171 slang humor. The series began in 2006 by accident when an ad-exec began messing around with the idea of creating educational animations of frogs, his interest swiftly devolved into fart jokes. Three months after sending the first invite to view videos to 50 friends, the site had over 3 million visitors; currently it receives 8 million visits per month. The technique was extremely simple: film the face, tell bad jokes, insert into doll. This form of comedy ridicules human hypocrisy. It leverages the gap between ideals and selfish and vain motivations.

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At the other end of the cultural spectrum, the philosopher Nietzsche alludes to a similar gap between appearances and reality: “Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir...” (Nietzsche. BGE, pg.8). If Nietzsche is correct, even philosophy is confession, and the origin of those confessions reside in instinct2. Drives competing for supremacy disguise self-disclosure as metaphysics. Nietzsche's skepticism suggests that confession is not simply truth-telling; confessions are sometimes self-centered attempts to get attention or manipulate sympathy. Each confessor is the site of a massive 1 I am indebted to PK Langshaw for pointing out how similar my own Saint Disgustine work was to Têtes à Claques 2 “... the greatest part of conscious thought must still be attributed to instinctive activity” (Nietzsche. ibid. 6-7) 4 / 22 particle system of potential truths, possible stories, fragments and apparatuses of concealment. Redemption becomes a wish; wishes becomes whispers; and written philosophies spawn (often unsuccessfully) toward authenticity. It is in this context of partial truth that secular truth operates, aware of itself as an imperfect morsel in an immense universe. Comics and philosophers agree on this point.

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Migrating upward through the magma of culture or downward through the tectonic plates to the core, at some point one encounters music videos. Chris Milk directs music videos. In Gnarls Barkley's 'Save my Soul'3 a very normal scene occurs, a girl is breaking up Illustration 3: 'Save my Soul' (2008) Director: Chris Milk. with a guy; she does it with a calm candor and naturalism; confessing: “I need space, I need the time to figure out who I am, you know? and it's totally not you, it's me, and it's the timing of it. I'm trying to find out who I am...”. The scene swiftly mutates into surrealism when the boy calmly extracts his heart; a heart which begins to sing. The video uses technology from the Institute for Creative Technologies Graphics Lab4 to scan and apply the vocalist's (Cee-Lo Green's) face onto a heart. The digital technique is much more sophisticated than Têtes à claques or The Confessions of Saint Disgustine, but the impulse is the same: anthropomorphism. Human features, specifically the face (which witnesses and guards our emotions), mapped onto the world. What is inside is brought out. Open heart surgery 3 Chris Milk. http://chrismilk.com/savemysoul 4 Institute for Creative Technologies Graphics Lab http://gl.ict.usc.edu/ 5 / 22 manga. Soul-spit merger.

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In 1971, Bas Jan Ader made I'm too sad to tell you, a 16mm film of 3 minutes 34 seconds duration. It a black & white closeup of Bas crying. One shot, one take. No sound (as far as I know). A primal confession of authentic pain, a formal manifesto on the nature of intimacy and male feeling, and a document that is remarkably intimate yet nihillistic: is Ader questioning the roots of shame? Is he playing with privacy? Is he genuinely miserable? If so, why? Is it love? The world situation? A Illustration 4: I'm too sad to tell you. Bas Jan Ader. 1971. spiritual unfulfilled longing? Or 16mm film. 3:34 min. simply a fit of tears as innocent of intent or motivation as a spring shower? Or perhaps it's fake, he is doing it for a camera after all, so maybe he's just method acting? But then why bother? No it looks as if he's really anguished, genuinely anguished, and simply unashamedly, crying. What does it mean?

Bas Jan Ader is an enigmatic artist who disappeared in 1975 in the smallest sailboat ever to cross the Atlantic ocean, -- the sailboat made it across, Bas Jan did not, his death formed a resonant end to a project he had dubbed “In Search of the Miraculous”. Wikipedia refers to him as a “Dutch conceptual artist, performance artist, photographer and filmmaker.” This brief description disguises a peculiar marginalized oddball who made only 7 films, all of them single shots, most lasting less than 4 minutes (4m16secs for Nightfall). Most of the films are simple falls or physical performances. To describe them is to describe boredom5.

5 A documentary on Bas Jan Ader's life: Here is Always Somewhere Else: The Disappearance of Bas Jan Ader (2007, Renee Daalder) 6 / 22

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Intimacy leverages empathic energy and evoke questions; the inquiry is recursive; it cascades in the viewer oscillating between concern for the other and investigation of the self. Is my own conscience clean? How do I feel now under the mask of civilized fineness? Confessions are one way the universe keeps itself from congealing into concealment. Words fall out of us, tears fall out of us, Ader falls into a river, stories are suspended above the water of life, bodies like stones fall into the water of regret or misery, insight splashes out.

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Each generation makes its own claim to authenticity by reacting against the ideals of previous generations. “Within this idea of progression we have a paradoxical storm that we are simultaneously attempting to avoid. We all want to be new; newness is what perpetuates all new ideas. ... Can you successfully adopt the golden light, the dreams and visions of the harmonious few, abort their attempts at justice and impartiality, integrate your tiny mind to encompass a true vision of the egalitarian landscape.” (Laukemper & Warman. Script for ProgRock. 2007.6)

In Kelly Warman and Tobias Laukemper's ProgRock, confession take on an artificial self-reflexive style in an ironic yet intimate video exploring contemporary creation and design culture. Here advertising is the inspirational fulcrum. Their subject is the paradigms Illustration 5: ProgRock. Kelly Warman & Tobias Laukemper. that guide creative design 2007. DVD 5:17 consultants, theoreticians and

6 http://www.tobiaslaukemper.de/storage/en/laukemper_warman.pdf . 7 / 22 artists. ProgRock concocts a strange thick blend of buzzwords, a cocktail of keywords, and a chain of elaborate axioms deftly set within a Bauhaus universe of fake tans, empty atriums and elevators that lead to stairs. Honesty becomes tainted by an incestuous network of PDAs copulating with art-school diplomas. The personal is politicized inside a parody that takes its intention seriously.

As ProgRock exhumes the incestuous conceptual idioms within which contemporary creation occurs, it documents the implicit subliminal paradigms guiding the actions of an elite-culture. With the candidness of a viral video and the confidence of an industrial video-brochure, it deftly outlines the contours of the language landscapes and attitude habitats that sculpt cultural production. Confession in this case is collective and social. Instead of the intimate (Ader's I'm too sad to tell you or Crumley & Buce's Four-Eyed Monsters) or the procedural investigation of materiality and genre (Abigail Child's Mayhem), Prog Rock offers a manifesto proclamation on the 'we', the redundancy mechanism of identity, the replication of ideological motivations and stereotypes that cultural executives perform in an effort to be accepted by peers.

In each case, --intimate, procedural or social-- an autopsy is performed on the apparatus of how meaning is generated. The surgery (of video editing) affords a glimpse into the anatomy of how self constructs self.

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It is not always trauma and catastrophe which generate identity, it's the tiny cellular knots of Illustration 6: La mariée mise à nu par normal circumstances. In 1934, Marcel Duchamp ses célibataires. Marcel Duchamp. La Boîte Verte. Paris, 1934 gathered together the stray debris of his life (papers, scribbles, doodles, snapshots) and boxed them. The boxes covers were perforated with a title and sold as artworks. Fragments reveal totalities; trivia is profound; tangents dive to the core. He made little attempt to conceal or sort according to qualitative criteria; he did not 8 / 22 attempt to hide or disguise his daily self. Migrant poetic scraps and philosophical fragments went in alongside grocery lists and laundry receipts. In this sense Duchamp (as usual) anticipated the anthropology of garbage. The anthropology of garbage studies the remnants and leftovers of civilization in order to construct insights. Reading the entrails and divining from tea leaves, the Delphic oracles are its ancestors. Wherever traces are, interpretation emerges. Debris confesses.

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The wind rises up in them. The mountains grow whole

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In Incidence of Catastrophe, Gary Hill lies down in his own shit in a fetal position and is prodded by a stick carried by the camera- person. The scene constitutes an

Illustration 7: Incidence of Catastrophe. Gary Hill. 1987 exemplary metaphor for the impulse to confess; internal-dialog text unavoidably gleaming on the walls, the floor stained by the wet shit-trace, the body curled to return to its origin, and the stick of shame poking at the inert resistant penitent.

What accounts for widespread notions of guilt, confession and forgiveness, and the accompanying extreme emotional change from pressure to liberation? Why 9 / 22 is it that people at all times and at all places in history have felt compelled to tell stories and create representations of cathartic change? In spite of some extreme post-modern or orthodox dismissals of emotion, emotions remain a core aspect of experience conveyed through both popular and elite culture. Catharsis resists exile.

Blood and neurotransmitters are one way of explaining catharsis, but material explanations are not the only way to explain it. Underneath and within the structure of matter, mystical traditions and poets have spoken of paths between solidity and sound that lead toward light. It is these paths that constitute an ecumenical (even agnostic or atheistic) gateway into understanding the widespread phenomena of catharsis and forgiveness which blossoms in diverse artistic productions. It is these paths that link emotion to light to video at a structural level; it is this thread that underlies the motivations of diverse thinkers and artists as they struggle with the constraints of guilt and shame, seeking forms of contingent redemption.

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Again I read in the bath. The bath which is absolution. The bath which is womb. The bath which is before becoming, beyond ambition. The bath where skin and hair and sweat are shed. The vortex of the drain like the priest's ear, a space of listening poultice, a zone of fluid non-computational concentration.

Perched on the bath's steamy porcelain edge is a book of film-theory that incorporates autobiographical notes and poetry: Abigail Child's political, philosophical and Illustration 8: Abigail Child. B/Side. 41 min. impassioned, non-linear and poetic This is Called Moving: a Critical Poetics of Film. Dense proliferations of inquiry, jabs of dialog, convoluted axioms, autopsied quotations, thick analysis, disciplined creative play, a primordial linguistic virtuosity and a raw primal 10 / 22 engagement with reality; Child leaps around in her essays. Life protrudes into mind; linearity gets jarred.

In "Sound Talk" she morphs from sober clinical theoretical perspectives ("We live under the image, the 'spectacle' where we experience the full power of Baudrillard's 'economy of the sign'"-pg.133) to ontological proclamations ("Idealogy works through all forms."p.g134) to inclusive political axioms ("How to deal with information? Make all the voices present."-pg.137) and sensual- intellectual probes ("Film makes an architecture. We want to walk in it. Entering space, collapsing and distributing time...."-pg137). Her chapters often open with an autobiographical note: (“I am living in San Francisco 1976-80, where through a fortuitous and roundabout connection via movement classes in Berkeley and a communal house in Pacific Heights, I meet ...”-pg.87). Her personal contexts enrich and complexify an already thick brew.

Fortunately, Child's velocity of shifting genres is balanced by a taut focus that radiates through the potential topologies of each argument. It's prose that works as poetic manifesto, pacing attention with cadenced insights. I find myself wanting to watch the films she describes (some of which I had in my anti- intellectual brute arrogance pre-confined to the scrap heap. Suddenly they are redeemed. Why? Because of her ardent capacity for explicating the abstruse intent of structural elements in film). Rhythmically woven, heir to Vertov's formal filmic concerns, Jameson's imaginative radicalism, Goya's enraged heart, Child's voice (like her montages) rapidly splashes and fractures conventionally separate academic domain-species into a nourishing idiosyncratic soup. A primer in radical ontologies. A gateway into a continuum of engaged textuality. Analysis that functions as art by keeping its capacity for fluid tangents alive. Time falls apart and what remains is a sinuous ribbon of reflections on culture's cutting floor, and Child is chuckling there, clutching her shearers, film's history running through her fingers like soft milk. 11 / 22

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Engaged radicalism (around sexuality/self) is inter- generational and it runs from the conceptual to the personal, from the constructivist approaches (which dissect the roots of narrative through examining the material of film cuts and Illustration 9: Four Eyed Monsters. Arin Crumley and Susan Buce. 2005. media) to the documentary form.

In 2005 Arin Crumley and Susan Buce “...made a feature length film called Four Eyed Monsters. The film tells the true story of how susan and I met online and I stalked her at her work and then we ended up dating but with a rule to never speak in person... As our romance develops, we only write, draw, email, text, have sex, instant message, and make videos for each other. No talking.”

Four Eyed Monsters was released in streamable podcasts online the making of the film was viewable in episodes; the film was screened physically and in Second Life. Basically, the contours of reality tv, were preceded by generations of confessional poets, Crumley and Buce follow that path. From the romantics to Marquis de Sade all forms of sexuality make their appearance: the urge to divulge, to tell story, to release what is inside, crosses boundaries. Boundary- crossing crosses boundaries, beings migrate between narratives.

Intimacy brought out into public domains; privacy converted into expression. “I must confess”. Guilt and redemption have done more than hold hands, the intricate subconscious feedback between these circuits of exile and belonging have primordial roots. Arin Crumley began his relationship with a deviant act: by stalking his lover with a camera, the camera became his confessional, circumventing guilt to arrive at celebration. 12 / 22

By spontaneously arriving at the decision to enter into a relation without speaking, Arin and Susan deviated from the norms; their social risk amplified by their personal risk. Strong forces often merge together in complex unanticipated formations. Jean Genet, criminal and homosexual, converts crime into redemption and confession into coherent manifesto, proclaiming an inversion of values. For him the prison is a field of alluring freedom, the murderer on death row it's priest-king-sacrifice.

The act of speaking and of making art is the secular equivalent of spiritual ablutions. By purging and exposing what seems at first to be aberrant, the artist engages in self-confession. The paradoxes of this exposed interiority is how profoundly it is shared. The unique must speak and therefore confirms that it is universal and at the same time conforms to some set of norms.

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Confessions are, in some cases, made under duress. Tortured either by internal conflicts or external devices, the penitent begins speaking. Anything can be said. The effective of the confession is relative to its capacity to stop pain. From this perspective Sophie Calle may not be an appropriate subject to Illustration 10: Double Blind. Sophie Calle and Gregory Shephard. 1992. 75:58 min, colour, sound. consider as a confessor: her confessions are promiscuous proclamations, overt extroverted inversions of privacy. From another perspective, since Calle is so clearly drawn toward apparently-full disclosure by inward compulsions, she can also be considered as an artist forced by severe 13 / 22 psychological necessity (either internal torture or an absolute liberation from shame) to confess. Underwear worn as skin in the guise of the buffoon; extremely intimate thoughts spoken as psychological porn; repressed goals diverted to the surface personality as acne of the personality. The confessional action becomes habit, practiced and sculpted.

In Double Blind, Calle documents her unusual relationship with her future husband (an extremely reluctant Gregory Shephard) as they (two relative strangers) travel across America, each with a large video camera filming the other. What sounds idyllic and romantic is actually demented and delusional. Their relationship is one of neurotic pressures and non-disclosure; each of them is far from being in-love in the traditional sense; their bond is actually driven by complex aversions, guilt, doubt and repulsion. Manipulations overlap in this dance of disclosures that never actually reveals anything without also suggesting concealment.

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In the earliest surviving example of Roman law, issued in 341 CE, it is written, “Superstition shall cease; the madness of sacrifices shall be abolished.” It's as simple as that. Man's nature must be abolished and the metabolic structure of consciousness altered. No more superstition. If only the intricate turbulence of blood could be tamed with simple commands, centuries of pain and torment could be avoided. The wounded sentinels of existential angst might not prowl through museum and gallery.

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My desire to re-claim or re-purpose confession for secular aesthetic and visual uses in contemporary art is not unique. Motivated by an explicitly-stated “desire to change the world”, in 1983 Bill Voila made A Room for Saint John of the Cross which he considers a 'turning point” in his evolution as an artist(Viola in Kidel. 2005). He returned to the theme of contemplation in 2001's Catherine's Room: 5 depictions of the room of a solitary mystic (4 seasons plus the death bed). Viola 14 / 22 admits that when he was younger, the loving mind “would have been considered a cop-out”(Viola in Kidel. 2005).

Diminishing testosterone may be responsible for the change in attitude; or it may be that the sustained witnessing of futile aggression convinces. Viola refers to the 'path of love and forgiveness ...as a motion from social perfection Illustration 11: Bill Viola. Catherine’s Room. 2001. Video polytych on to personal perfection ... I see five wall-mounted LCD the soul as being tied into political realities.”(ibid).

Psychological change flows beyond the body into society. Through silence/word the state of being that emerges when the self is empty of all confessions, transforms the world. As the poet Susan Stewart states in an interview: “There is no way in which the use of language does not imply a political consequence. ... Since the 18th century and the development of the very idea of aesthetics, this relationship between the particular and the general is at the heart of what art is. A significant work of art will be universal and also particular, and there will be no way to define a boundary between those two things. There will be a constant movement back and forth. That's one reason why I am a meditative poet because I think meditative forms give me the flexibility to do that kind of cognitive work.”7

From a negative perspective, the process of confession can also be tormented outcry. Susan Stewart (later in the same interview) refers directly to the self- destructiveness of a generation of confessional woman poets who preceded her. She refers directly to her experience of hearing Ann Sexton read the night before she killed herself, “so this model of the melodramatic confessional woman

7 Susan Stewart: Reading and conversation with Penn Students -- April 20, 2004 http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Stewart.html 15 / 22 poet, or always framing woman poets with extra-textual frames was rather burdensome.”

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Females are not alone in exploring self- destructiveness; the male poets of every generation display extraordinary skill at suicide and mental illness. Events blossom and decay in Dionysian explosions amplified by physiognomy. Desperate reality has not

Illustration 12: My Dinner with Weegee. Donigan gone away: decay, addiction and excess are Cumming. 2001. 36:26 min. persistent qualities. In addition, time eventually kills us all. On the opposite end of the spectrum from the privileged formal dignity of Viola's quiet renunciation mystics are Donigan Cummings' brutal videos. Donigan Cumming's video subjects are dirty deranged and full of indignity and decay; they operate as confession by proxy. Utilizing real people who are living through normal but extreme circumstances (severe alcoholism compounded by aging, brain damage and cancer, etc...), Cumming's work explores the grotesque as inevitable, the place where humans are all the same, in our deviations and disintegrations, in our desperate needs. The work is surprisingly comic, ruthless yet compassionate, invariably honest, and candid to the point of perversion.

His 2001 documentary My Dinner with Weegee follows an elderly radical-activist alcoholic named Marty. Marty is beyond shame and offers his degenerating existence as a volatile cautionary tale. Cummings films everything from Marty's shitty underwear to nuanced intelligent conversations orbiting nostalgia.

The trust entailed by this approach means that Cumming develops relationships with his subjects that span decades; he works alone with small prosumer cameras; he admits (without shame) that the motivation for the work springs from a singular set of associations spawned from his upbringing in a family with a brother who (congenitally brain-damaged) was sent away to a facility. 16 / 22

Necessity converts theses character portraits into studies of structural disintegration; they are both frantic appeals for appeasement and formal meditations on mortality. They confess our fears to us: the horror of disintegration, the terror of our ineptitude and flaws.

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When confession emerges without self-destructiveness what occurs is an easy relaxed authenticity unashamed of itself. In a interview, the artist Christian Boltanski confesses without confessing; he just states how it is in his life as an artist: "I come to my studio every day at 10.30, and I stay and do nothing. I go to Paris sometimes. I have a few ideas. To be very pretentious, sometimes I believe it is mystical. Sometimes you find nothing, and then you find some-thing you love to do. Sometimes you make mistakes, but some-times it’s true. In two minutes, you understand what you must do for the next two years. Sometimes it’s in the studio, but other times it’s walking in the street or reading a magazine. It’s a good life, being an artist, because you do what you want."8

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Confessions are normally short as in Boltanski's “I stay and do nothing” or the succinct “I did it.”, “Yes” and “It was me”. The details take time, the chronologies may be lengthy, but confessions are often uttered in a single breath. A breath begins or opens a narrative path, story's birth, a life perforation through which the pressure of secrecy dissipates.

For this reason, confessions are well-situated to be welded to the succinct formalism of poetry9 where condensed language seeks to represent the essence of a situation. Video constitutes a contemporary media where poetic symbolism can be viably recreated and emotional states purged. Video-poetry constitutes a symbiotic form merging these features. The imagery necessary to evoke core dilemmas can be quite simple.

8 Tate Magazine Issue 2: Christian Boltanski http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue2/boltanski.htm 9 Setting aside for the instant, abstract L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. Poetry (poetry which investigates the materiality of text and media), traditionally poetry allows humans ways of expressing elusive aesthetic experiences, emotions or cathartic changes. 17 / 22

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In The Confessions of Saint Disgustine I attempt to symbolically portray some very personal elusive dream-like emotional states that hopefully have resonance toward larger realities. The works was done intuitively without thought, but themes emerge in retrospect. Specifically the reflexes of aversion and desire, self-censorship and inertia, closure, over-thought and authority (the amputated head).

In the first episode, the rabbit (symbol of fear in many indigenous cultures) with its huge eye inverts the normal role of predator. The woman standing (yawning holding carrots in her dirty dress) before the rabbit also references Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland: logic contorts around the paradox of temptation that evokes indifference.

In the second episode, the doll's head with it's drooling mouth is like an idiotic baby god10; a large totemic sculptural altar that grows more contemplative when the weeping kneeling figure arrives before it. I wanted this scene to be enigmatic but also reveal Illustration 13: The Confessions of Saint Disgustine. myself. 2008. something honest about the reality of being a human male animal: we cry. We curl up or crouch down and cry occasionally. Jas Ban Ader's I am too sad to Tell You was not consciously in my thought when I filmed myself crying, but there is a subtle resonance. Males in our culture must still inevitably (it seems) resist the strong tides of machismo and militaristic values which perpetually gather new life from cycles of blame. The conventional conditioning of a boy who is becoming a man is to feel shame when crying; we de-condition the crying reflex out of our male young. When

10 The drooling doll's head is a bad dream had by Saint Augustine. 18 / 22 penitent remorse becomes sublimated into alternative channels, and the young cannot cry or express sadness, violence and self-destructiveness is one result.

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“I closed her eyes and an overwhelming grief welled into my heart and was about to flow forth in a flood of tears. But at the same time in a powerful act of mental control my eyes held back the flood and dried it up.” Saint Augustine wrote these words in 4 A.D. when in his mid-forties he recalled his reaction to his mother's death. (The Confessions of Saint Augustine, p.174). A couple of pages later Augustine permitted himself to cry when alone for a “fraction of an hour” , “Now I let the tears flow freely which I had held back so that they ran as freely as they wished” (ibid, p.176).

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The shame of tears is matched by the shame of sex. The pink pillow11, the probing clitoris or penis at the waist all elicit similar blushes. Desire (that all major religions denigrate) is as natural as breathing. Fucking, the act from which we all originate, is both a dirty word and a dirty thought. Confessions therefore have an ongoing history with sex. Most of us have an enormous amount of sex stuff that we don't talk about with most other people.

While sexual lifestyles may modulate, the basic problems of fidelity and jealousy are consistent over time; secrecy and cheating are allies. Passion in the simple primal sense has enormous destructive capacity; shame and guilt may be the way nature exits Illustration 14: The Confessions of Saint Disgustine. myself. 2008. the recursion of jealous rage. Episode 3 of Saint Disgustine was made by blowing onto a pink pillow, then adding a finger that pokes out of it in 11 The pink pillow is the pedestal for a ceramic sculpture by Maya Ersan. http://beta.onf.ca/film/cumulus/ Used with kind permission. 19 / 22 post-production. Outside could be inside in this inter-penetrable Escheresque tableau. Trans-gendered diplomacy for that ineffable fluff job evolution is playing on us all.

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'What the ears hear', episode 4 of Saint Disgustine is about vulnerability, censorship, self-censorship and tenderness. I feel that we are all somehow waiting to hear something. Whether it's the voice of god explaining the origins of the universe or our mother or lover or friends telling us we are loved, our ears are tuned toward the unheard. Sometimes the hand of circumstances reaches down from the sky, rotates us,-- perhaps to help us hear, perhaps to prevent us from hearing. Illustration 15: The Confessions of Saint Disgustine. myself. 2008. As humans our position is precarious. We are tiny perforations sutured to the earth, glued to the waxy protrusion of the brain.

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Through the dangerous field of disclosure, there are at least two paths confession takes: one is conscious, the other subconscious. Conscious confession is candidness (the expository speaker telling a tale); subconscious confession is enigmatic ritual, visual poultice, the alignment of disparate symbols which fuse to form unforeseen capabilities (the contents of dreams shifting their mysterious ballast).

Saint Disgustine takes the subconscious path of confession. Obviously the surrealist project constitutes a strong influence. Andre Breton triumphed the capacity for the hidden matter of the mind to offer insight into civilized habits. Disgustine is an exercise in the silent capabilities of inexplicable images. 20 / 22

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In his confessions, Saint Augustine emphasizes the consolation of god and the necessity of surrender to god's will. The final episode of Saint Disgustine emphasizes kindness. Disgustine, placing no faith in an abstract creator (who seems to be as neglectful as many human fathers) suggests instead an alternative path to tentative redemption: gentleness.

I decapitated a toy puppy in Illustration 16: The Confessions of Saint Disgustine. myself. 2008. my kitchen and then put my nostrils into it. Perhaps as a process described this way, kindness does not seem applicable. But by ending the short series with a caress, the capacity of touch and community to offer consolation is emphasized. Rather than the impulsion to speak, there is the potential to be consoled.

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Even within oneself, communities of values arise into conflict. Psychoanalysis, one of the secularized forms of the religious confessional, relies upon the capacity of the patient to enter into dialog with their self(s). Biochemical transcendence relies upon self-mediated forgiveness: networks of energy releasing locks upon energy. Computationally, these locks are analogous to semaphores which lock data so that only one user can write to it; occasionally, like rush-hour traffic, semaphores gridlock. Gridlock evokes the paralysis of neurosis; neurosis is the secular descendant of a 'state of sin'.

Salvation is the soothing touch of kindness: on this both Augustine and Disgustine agree. Openness unlocks souls, even secular ones.

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“Terrible thoughts. Do you write your terrible thoughts? Do it, it will clear your mind.”

(A. Jodorowosky. Film Director. Speaking at ICA. 2003) 22 / 22 Bibliography

Augustine. 1998. Confessions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bas Jan Ader. Available at: http://basjanader.com/ [Accessed November 18, 2008].

Calle, Sophie et al. 2005. Double-Blind. Electronic Arts Intermix.

Child, Abigail. 2005. This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Cumming, Donigan. 2005. Donigan Cumming Controlled Disturbance. Vidéographe.

Jodorowsky - After Screening Talk #3. 2007. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=nBUN6OwPQXU [Accessed October 2, 2008].

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Lane, Patrick. 2007. Last Water Song. Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Pub.

Martin, Sylvia. 2006. Video Art. Ill. Taschen GmbH.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 2002. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pharr, Clyde (trans.). “Theodosian Code at Scroll Publishing Co..” Available at: http://www.scrollpublishing.com/store/Theodosian-Code.html [Accessed September 19, 2008].

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Spielmann, Yvonne. 2008. Video: The Reflexive Medium. English ed. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Stewart, Susan. 2004. “PennSound: Close Listening.” Reading and conversation with Penn Students. Available at: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Close-Listening.php [Accessed December 7, 2008].

Tate Magazine Issue 2: Christian Boltanski. Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue2/boltanski.htm [Accessed December 7, 2008].