Happenings: A Tragico-lyrical Philosophical Essay
Among the many decisive political changes that have occurred in the past few years that bode poorly for our shared future is the US overturning of Roe Wade, and the appointment of men with histories of sexual assault to positions that will determine law and political policy. Happenings is an interactive philosophical essay that takes the form of a cinematically haunted digital poem that mashes up the work of Carolee Schneeman, the nineteen seventies feminist performance artist who famously pulled a scroll out of her vagina, with the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Abel Azonca, and Vladimir Nabokov and other men for whom the imagination of sexual violence was inextricably bound to their art.
Schneemann writes in 1991’s “The Obscene Body/Politic”: “I didn’t want to pull a scroll out of my vagina and read it in public, but the culture’s terror of my making overt what it wished to suppress fueled the image; it was essential to demonstrate this lived action about ‘vulvic space’ against the abstraction of the female body and its loss of meaning” (Moreland). Schneeman’s impulse to reach inside and show the world something raw seems again to be necessary.
Happenings is situated somewhere in between the tradition of films that ask you to read written words, such as Michael Snow’s So Is This (1982) and Hollis Frampton’s Poetic Justice (1985), and electronic literature where the written word becomes cinematic. This interactive digital work maintains the opposition between the static (pinned down?) word and free moving image, and gives the moving image medium license to invade and penetrate the other’s spaces. The result is a violation of the rules of genre (is it a book? a film? an essay? a poem? a documentary? a lightbox? horror? philosophy?) intended to leave the viewer unsteady. So too is the soundtrack, which is largely composed from layered sounds from the BBC Sound Effects archive of moths and butterflies, intended to discomfort.
In its deep dive into cultural logics and their legacies, the work is intentionally citational. Happenings turns to large language models for some animation and video augmentations as well, in order to allow these reservoirs seeded with Western culture memory to reveal their own uncanny and terrifying understanding of women's bodies. The objectives of the work are feminist. To this day, there is a startingly small body of feminist creative works that tackle the history of representation of women’s bodies, the cultural logic of their violation, and an even more startlingly small body of work theorizing the legacy of an academic and literary culture that celebrates the aestheticization of assault.
The work is subtitled philosophical essay but is an essay in the sense of Montaigne's Essaies (French for effort); this is an exploratory effort or attempt to find a new form that holds meanings that cannot be held otherwise.
The work is best read on a laptop or computer, with the sound on.
Trigger warnings: sexual assault, self harm, blood, insects, gun noises.
