Philly Free School: Philly Free School

When language is used as texture, as a constituent part of a spectacle that also includes sound and images, the audience (ideally) feels itself immersed or engulfed in a dynamic collage; as such, this kind of performance is an extension of the Modernist ethos. Fractured things can be more compelling than wholes; this was one tenet that motivated Pound, Eliot, and the rest. For an audience, sitting in a darkened room (and the Highwire offered two main spaces, a conventional gallery space and a warehouse space), this sense of brokenness could be interpreted many ways, but the essential thing for us was to present something that was dynamic, rather than static. The most elaborate of these presentations involved music, images, and poetry at once; while it would be reasonable to question whether the total effect was bombastic or not, the responses we received encouraged us to believe that what we were doing was significantly more exciting than an average poetry performance. Live poetry, I would argue, only works as texture to begin with; it is in the mix of things that live poetry comes alive. In the specific performances that I was personally involved with, I did, in fact, read entire poems; if I had it to do over again, I would not. It would have been substantially more appropriate to read fragments or even to improvise. The video collages were put together from foreign movies, Internet, music video, and photography bits. The musical elements alone were entirely improvised. Although I am proud of what the Philly Free School accomplished, it was merely a beginning. Thinking about it now, we could have been much more rigorous. We did what we could with limited resources.

What would a completely successful poetry spectacle, in the Artaudian sense, look like? Artaud, of course, became famous for his idea/ideal of the Theater of Cruelty; a spectacle that confronts an audience with its own mortality, in an unflinching, persistent way. What kind of poetry fragments could add, textually, to such a spectacle? It seems to me that the poetry would have to be written specifically in conjunction with, specifically for, the music and the images. They would have to function, in other words, dramatically, as carriers of a certain kind of drama, just as dialogue in a theater production does. What can poetry contribute that mere dialogue cannot? Poetry has in its arsenal a capacity for incantatory power that dialogue does not; an ability to build, to create rhythms, melodies, and cadences that dialogue cannot. Anaphora is one method by which this kind of fragment could work; rhyme is another. This is texture that creates stimulation; with other elements, the potentiality for genuine spectacle, cohesive spectacle (rather than naïve, haphazard spectacle) arises. As to what the spectacle addresses, there is no real limitation, other than the impulse to compel attention, hold it, and overwhelm at once. Certainly the apocalyptic conflicts in the Middle East, our flagging domestic economy, and the status of the environment are all fertile (pardon my irony) ground.

The whole shebang. And a compendium of P.F.S. miscellany.

.........................................................................................................

At the beginning of the Aughts in Philadelphia, I attempted to found an artist’s co-op, to stage multi-media art events around Philadelphia. I called the first co-op This Charming Lab. It met with limited success. By the middle of the Aughts, the situation had ripened. I now had the man power and venues to stage the events I wanted to stage, which would involve multi-media, around ideas and interpretations of Artaud, the Theater of Cruelty, and what could be made of Artaudian spectacle with the resources at hand. My essential partnership in the initial-model Philly Free School was with three fellow artists: Mike Land, Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, and Nick Gruberg. Matthew Stevenson and Hannah Miller also proved to be invaluable. Abby Heller-Burnham, Mary Evelyn Harju, and Jenny Kanzler all contributed as tangent artists. As of the early Teens, I began to use Philly Free School as a moniker employed to cover my entire cultural life in Aughts Philadelphia. This created a context for Abby, Mary, and Jenny to be representatively Free School artists, as well. Not to mention, those who had participated in Free School events in Chicago and New York, and everyone who had been published in Philly Free School Post (P.F.S. Post). Why Philly Free School acts as a correlative to Neo-Romanticism and the Creatrix is that it is, to be obvious, based in Philadelphia. On a less obvious note, “Free” and “School” together are meant to imply a group of artists on a vision quest, past the confines of post-modernity, multi-culturalism, and academic feminism, to learn what keys will turn what locks where so as to establish a maximum sense of residency in the most spacious, loft-like socio-aesthetic, socio-sexual, and generally socio-cultural rooms; to know, if it will be known, the boundless. Then, to begin to define the formal parameters of boundlessness in art, if they can or will be defined. And not bypass the imperative to grasp what might be boundless in human life and thought, too.