SITE CITE CITY

One of the great things I came away with at the SPD Open House this past Saturday is SITE CITE CITY, thanks to David Buuck, who handed me a copy of his self-published collection of recent project documents, printed on the occasion of the Artifact reading @ Oakland Art gallery last month, which I sadly missed. Among other things, the writing proposes “ 'writing' as feint to draw attention to the thinking-body in socialized & activated space.” David’s chaplet is enfolded in a xeroxed notebook page with the sentence “Fuck you [ someone's first name ] for not stopping the war” hand copied 30 times — like a self-enforced punishment that can only become a curse — each iteration appearing with another name inserted. The simple exercise page has a devastating effect. First, there’s the implied recognition of our collective failure: “We fucked up and failed to stop the war.” But as this collective “we” appears as a set of individual names, one experiences an even deeper identification with our failure, and whether your own first name appears on the list or not, you can’t help but hear “I fucked up, I failed...” reverberating, unless one reads in bad faith, and exempts oneself. And yet, the curse rests on the understanding that things ought to have been otherwise, and that the power to have made them so remains frozen in each of us, as individuals, and as a collective. The page works as a negative affirmation of our social agency, currently arrested, or in suspension, and the writing activates the real sense that this agency must still be there — somewhere — ready to break forth. “It’s the not-writing that strings me along […] It’s the knot-writing that ropes me in.” There's too much to say about David's work here, and I'll have to bracket that for now. In the mean time, I hope everyone has a copy of this little book, and if not, well, maybe Buuck can let us know how to get one.