In his recent book The Century, Alain Badiou asks what the twentieth century thought it thought - he sets out to 'examine what this accursed century, from within its own unfolding, said that it was'. Badiou's methodology resonates somehow with our practice which is underpinned by a self-reflexive examination of it's own conditions of production.
In chapter 2 of the book, Badiou introduces a poem entitled The Age, by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. The poem is seen as an 'exemplary document' not least because it draws a picture of the century as a living beast, who starts out as vital and living, and ends up looking back at the traces of its own steps. For Bad Moon Rising we hope to examine the poem, and through this examination address some of our own questions about what it means to make art now.
Here is the poem, translated (as it is in The Century), by Steven Broyde:
My age, my beast, who will be able
To look into your pupils
And with his own blood glue together
The vertebrae of two centuries?
Blood-the-builder gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
Only a parasite trembles
On the threshold of new days.
A creature, as long as it has enough life,
Must carry its backbone,
And a wave plays
With the invisible vertebration.
Like a baby's tender cartilage,
Oh age of infant earth,
Once again the sinciput of life, like a lamb,
Has been sacrificed.
In order to pull the age out of captivity,
In order to begin a new world,
The elbows of nodular days
Must be bound with a flute.
It's the age that rocks the wave
With human anguish,
And in the grass a viper breathes
The golden measure of the age.
Buds will again swell,
A sprout of green will spurt,
But your backbone is broken,
My beautiful, pitiful age.
And with a senseless smile
You look backward, cruel and weak,
Like a beast, once supple,
At the tracks of your own paws.
In chapter 2 of the book, Badiou introduces a poem entitled The Age, by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. The poem is seen as an 'exemplary document' not least because it draws a picture of the century as a living beast, who starts out as vital and living, and ends up looking back at the traces of its own steps. For Bad Moon Rising we hope to examine the poem, and through this examination address some of our own questions about what it means to make art now.
Here is the poem, translated (as it is in The Century), by Steven Broyde:
My age, my beast, who will be able
To look into your pupils
And with his own blood glue together
The vertebrae of two centuries?
Blood-the-builder gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
Only a parasite trembles
On the threshold of new days.
A creature, as long as it has enough life,
Must carry its backbone,
And a wave plays
With the invisible vertebration.
Like a baby's tender cartilage,
Oh age of infant earth,
Once again the sinciput of life, like a lamb,
Has been sacrificed.
In order to pull the age out of captivity,
In order to begin a new world,
The elbows of nodular days
Must be bound with a flute.
It's the age that rocks the wave
With human anguish,
And in the grass a viper breathes
The golden measure of the age.
Buds will again swell,
A sprout of green will spurt,
But your backbone is broken,
My beautiful, pitiful age.
And with a senseless smile
You look backward, cruel and weak,
Like a beast, once supple,
At the tracks of your own paws.
