Monday 20 October 2008

The Age

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.





3 comments:

Jackson Webb said...

We have been stuggling here. Maybe what is really resonating with us is not the poem, but the encounter between The Age and Badiou?

For Badiou, Mandelstam's vitalistic portrayal of the age echoes his own methodological approach - so I guess for us, what is interesting is Badiou's methodological approach, and his interpretation of the poem as echoing that approach..

Ideas of self-reflexivity do underpin our practice, but is the point that The Age is part of a meta-narrative about self-reflexivity? So using the material from the poem as some sort of 'source' feels inappropriate...

Jackson Webb said...

Badiou is asking how the Century sees itself - what does it think it was thinking ('our method takes its cue from the ways in which the century relates to itself')

..I think this is an interesting question to ask about an exhibition, particularly one which is politicized - what does the exhibition think it is thinking? What does JW think it is thinking? Is it a question/possibility of/for collective self-reflexivity?

Jackson Webb said...

Mandelstam is interesting because he 'embarked on an artistic rebellion of sorts against Stalinist despotism, but without either becoming a genuine political opponent....HIS JUDGEMENT WAS ALWAYS ANCHORED IN POETRY OR THE VERY SUBTLE THINKING THAT SURROUNDS IT' (Badiou)