Emotional Outreach Project 5.0 Now Live in Berlin!

TRD-Berlin @ REH-Kunst

If you happen to be in Berlin up through the end of August, please do visit This Red Door's exhibition space there, where you'll see amidst the many exciting performances, installations, readings and talks, and artworks on display my little Emotional Outreach cards, which, I think it's fair to say, may be especially appropriate given the particular moment we're living through right now. Here are some photos, courtesy of TRD and Jomar Statkun, of the TRD-Berlin space, at REH Kunst, and of the Emotional Outreach Project display.

And don't forget, if you do pick up some cards, and give them away, use them or just have thoughts about them, feel free to drop me a note at fieldresearchstudygroup [AT] gmail.com or [AT] yahoo.com. So far I've been bombarded with appeals from my overseas brethren to help them gain release of their impounded funds, but I'd much rather receive even brief notes about the cards and their use! Vielen dank!

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Emotional Outreach Project 5.0 @ TRD/REH-KUNST Berlin

(Crossposted at the Field Research Study Group A blogsite)

Starting next week, the newest iteration of the Field Research Study Group A durational conceptual work, the Emotional Outreach Project, now at version 5.0, will appear at This Red Door's 2-month sojourn, from July 1 through August 31, 2013, in Berlin, Germany, at REH-KUNST. TDR's Berlin site is directly accessible here.

As with earlier versions, the vouchers are free of charge.


To refit the cards for German-language participants, I first translated the rationale and instructions (with the help of Verbalizeit, since my ability to write more than basic sentences in Germany is minimal) into German, creating a new plaque to be mounted at the REH-KUNST site, to facilitate the cards' use.  The German text reads:

Lieber Freund:  

Vielen Dank für das Mitmachen beim "Emotional Outreach Project 5.0". Das "Emotional Outreach Project" umfasst eine Serie von Gutscheinen in Businesskarten Größe, die ursprünglich in 2002, 2003, 2007, 2009 (in Kuba) und 2012 umsonst und mit Desinteresse an Personen unter verschiedenen performativen und zeitlichen Kontrollen und vorgeschriebenen Variablen verteilt wurden. 

Auf einer Seite der Karten steht in schwarzem Fettdruck und in Großbuchstaben auf Deutsch, Englisch und Jiddisch ein emotionaler Zustand, eine Reaktion, eine Etappe, eine Eigenschaft oder ein Prozess (wie zum Beispiel Hass, Freude, Schadenfreude, Kaltblütigkeit, Selbstlosigkeit, Entsetzen, Gleichgültigkeit etc.) mit dem klaren und kleingedruckten Untertitel "Free Emotional Voucher"("Gratis Emotionen Gutschein"). 

Auf der anderen Seite: 

Lieber Freund, bitte nehmen Sie diesen emotionalen Gutschein entgegen. Obwohl er keinen geldlichen Wert hat, sollten Sie frei von seinen anderen nutzen Gebrauch machen, insbesondere wenn Sie glauben, dass Sie diese Emotion benutzen müssen oder falls Sie sich von diesem Gefühl freimachen oder reinigen wollen. Sich über seine eigenen Emotionen bewusst zu machen und mit diesen zu recht zukommen ist äußerst wichtig für das psychologische und physische Wohlempfinden.
FSRGA (JK c 2013) 

Als Teil dieses Projektes bitten wir Sie mindestens eine von diesen Karten in den nächsten vier (4) Wochen zu nehmen und an verschiede Personen, die Sie kennen oder nicht kennen, zu verteilen, insbesondere wenn Sie glauben dass der Empfänger eventuell Nutzen an einem haltbaren Mechanismus, der jegliche affektierte Probleme - persönlich, öffentlich, oder anderweitig - anspricht, machen könnte. 

Sollten Sie selbst davon Nutzen machen wollen, bitten wir Sie dies zu tun. Falls Sie herausfinden wie der Empfänger der Karte (Sie inklusive) sie benutzt hat, melden Sie sich bitte bei uns unter fieldresearchstudygroup@yahoo.com, und unter der Themen-Linie "Emotional Voucher" ("Emotionen Gutschein") können Sie uns ein paar Sätze als Beschreibung oder Schilderung senden. - FIELD RESEARCH STUDY GROUP A

The German plaque

Next I translated the free emotional outreach vouchers (cards) themselves into German by myself, taking care not just to find the German approximations for English-language emotions (Love = Liebe; Fear = Angst/Furcht; Hope = Hoffnung, etc.), but also emotions specific to German-speaking countries, such as Torschlusspanik (fear of one's life's door closing without achieving what one hoped to), Lampenfieber (a feeling akin to stage fright), Waldeinsamkeit (fear of being stuck in a forest), and Geborgenheit (complete safety), to name a few. As with prior versions, each card's front side features an emotion, the caption that it is a Free Emotional Voucher (translated as Gratis Emotionen Gutschein in German), and, on the back side, a brief explanatory text about how the recipient might use the card.

Given that the exhibit is in Berlin, Germany, I also thought it appropriate to produce a certain number of the cards in Yiddish, again approximating both English and German emotions (Joy = Freude = Freyd; Grief = Treuer = Troyer; Humility/modesty = Bescheidenheit = Beshaydenkayt, etc.), as well as some that are specific to Yiddish (and Americans), like Chutspah = Ballsiness/Shamelessness, and Shpilkes = Nervous energy. On the Yiddish cards, I included both the Roman and Hebrew spellings of the Yiddish words. These, as well as cards bearing English-language versions of the emotions, with German texts on the back, have been fully mixed in with the German-language cards.

Examples of the vouchers (cards)

I don't think I can afford to go to Germany to catch TRD live, but if any J's Theater readers are in Berlin and do drop by TRD, please do take a card, let me know your thoughts and send me a snapshot of yourself with the card (at fieldresearchstudygroup [AT] gmail [DOT] com or yahoo [DOT] com). Also, if you give it away as part of your own (extension of the) outreach project, use it in a ritual, and document yourself doing so, please let me know! Should I get to Berlin, I'll certainly report on TRD, the cards, and more.

Part of the package on its way to Berlin

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Three From Kluge & Richter in NYRB

Alexander Kluge, Germany's living avatar of analytical fiction (and a cinematic pioneer in the l950s and 1960s), and Gerhard Richter, one of its most important living visual artists, have collaborated on a book entitled December, which Seagull Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, published early last year in English translation. (Seagull posted an pre-publication interview with Kluge  in December 2011.)

There are few fiction writers who can pack as much critical thought into condensed, vivid narration as Kluge, and in December it appears he is still working at at the level of adamantine economy he displayed with prior books such as The Devil's Blind Spot (New Directions, 2004) and Cinema Stories (New Directions, 2007).  The 80-year-old author's 39 calendar-based narratives here, as in prior books dating back to the 1960s, draw from German, European and global histories as well as from his lively imagination, and sometimes run no longer than a page or two, in concert with Richter's 39 beautiful, enigmatic photographs of wintry landscapes.

The Decembers in these stories, however, bear little of the holiday cheer we associate with the winter holidays or the conclusion of the calendar year. Instead, one story--or prose poem, so brief and clipped is its unfolding--concerns German children collecting scrap metal in 1941. What is not said--the fascist state, brutal war, the Holocaust--looms behind this and other narratives, as it does the tranquil but ominous images of nature. A few presents in fictional form realist flashes of Kluge's life; born in 1932 in Halberstadt, in what is now the German state of Saxon-Anhalt (formerly part of East Germany), he likely would experienced circumstances not unlike these. Most, however, transmit the theoretical and emotional clarity that Kluge's work so often offers, whether he's writing about the near death in 1931 of Adolf Hitler or an obscure monk whose sense of time upends our own sense of temporality. Kluge's prose pieces always come pierced, as Rilke might have written, with rays of wisdom and feeling, usually through metaphors and aphorisms, that most other writers would take sentences to achieve.

Last month, The New York Review of Books published three Kluge excerpts, alongside three Richter images. I found myself rereading the Kluge pieces several times despite their brevity, and studying the Richter photographs, which grew more ominous with each view. You can read the pieces at the NYRB link above. (You can download some of his movies here.) Below is one of the photographs. If you were to compose a short prose piece for December to accompany this image, what would it be?

© Gerhard Richter

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Auf Wiedersehen, signandsight.com

It know that it occurred 7 years ago, around the time I began this blog, but I cannot recall the route by which I first happened upon signandsight.com, the website whose motto is--or was--"Let's Talk European." I say was, because almost a month ago, on March 28, the editors, Thierry Chervel and Anja Seeliger, posted a valedictory letter, letting readers know that this little internet torch of knowledge would be doused; there would be no more new articles, magazine essay summaries, feuilletons, links, anything. All good things do come to their end, but the web will be intellectually and discursively poorer without signandsight.com, which focused primarily on German arts and letters, but cast its net widely to gather together reviews, intellectual debates, controversies, new cultural discoveries, translations, and a range of other materials few other sites matched.

German writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar (signandsight.com)

Most of the authors, among whose ranks you could find the likes of 2009 Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller, eschewed the sort of refined, sometimes icy hauteur in displaying their prodigious learning a reader might encounter in The New York Review of Books, yet by the same token they also delved more fully into their topics than New York Times or Guardian journalists. Since the site was anchored in German history and culture, that country's and the Germanophone world's concerns usuallyfilled its scrolling headings, but the range of topics often crossed (European and global) national boundaries. The weekly (every Tuesday at noon!) European magazine summaries, the last appearing March 27, were like smorgasbords of information, often offering a slant perspective on American takes on the news.  To give one example, there's been little coverage in the US press, save in Paul Krugman's blog posts, about the growing rise of fascism in Hungary, but in this last grove of links, you could learn about the mutual far-right admiration societies in Poland and Hungary, the latter's influence sending chills up the spines of moderate and left-leaning Poles.

Among the longer articles, a representative range might include "The medium is English," questioning whether there were still any British intellectuals; "Against obscurantism," which covered the Argentinian philosopher and scholar Horacio Potel's battle against publishers who sought to kill (and did) his not-for-profit websites featuring texts by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others; and "How to save the quality press," an impassioned and informed article by none other than Jürgen Habermas, one of the world's greatest living thinkers.  More than once on Sign and Sight I learned something new about a figure, like Christa Wolf, whose work I thought I was conversant with, but I also would learn about writers and thinkers I'd never heard of. For example, Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011) a German media theorist, scholar, and peer of and correspondent with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Klaus Theleweit. In an interview conducted by Andreas Rosenfelder originally in Welt am Sonntag (Sunday World newspaper) that signandsight.com posted, I learned that Kittler's seminal works examined "discourse networks," war and militarism, hacking and computers, popular culture, and, in his latter years, love as concept and practice. Such is his following that there exists a group of young scholars who call themselves the "Kittner Youth." I also learned that Kittler wrote the first chapter, on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, of his influential dissertation only after rolling a joint and inhaling deeply. He also apparently had crackups, traveled to hear Jacques Lacan's seminars, and proposed a distinctive way of thinking about technology, including writing as technology and the technology of writing. I have, suffice it to say, since sought Kittler's work out.

Here is his response to Rosenfelder's question about whether he has any interest in Facebook:

No, not remotely. It gives me the uncanny feeling that normal people have become so unimportant for those in power and business that self-presentation is the last resort. When I arrived in California for the first time and went up Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley heading for campus, I passed a playing field full of exhibitionists running about. People dressed as harlequins begging for money or smoking dope. When I then entered campus and looked at the people there, they lowered their eyes. People either seem completely depressed or they put on a huge show and telephone loudly in the train restaurant.

As for the interview itself, he compared it to the pleasures of psychoanalysis, the creating of literature while lying on the couch. A bit of that literature, he hinted, might have been created in his conversation with Rosenfelder; a trove of literature, it's clear for anyone who regularly read signandsight.com, could be found behind its seven-years-worth of headlines. Auf wiedersehen!

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My "Subway Stores" in German Zine Show

Last year about this time, on a whim, I submitted a zine I'd offered for free on this blog (there was only one taker, eheu, who never sent me an address) to a zine exhibit open call at D21 Kunstraum in Leipzig, Germany.  The self-assembled, limited-edition zine, "Subway Stories," featured some of my iPhone drawings, with minimal text, though the images created something of an associative narrative.  I never heard anything back from the exhibit, "Thank You for Sharing," figured they were not interested and chalked it all up to experience. Last week, while cleaning up one of my email inboxes, I came across a mention of the show, and decided I would write the curator, Regine Ehleiter, just to find out if she had ever received my submission.  Things do sometimes get lost in the mail.

Lo and behold, not only had she received it, but the little zine was accepted and appeared in the May 2010 exhibit!  I never received an email or the acceptance letter, but these things happen. Ms. Ehleiter also told me that it was also listed in the printed documentation that the organizers finally finished last week (p. 37), and it will be mentioned in the publication at left, Thank You For Sharing, which will be released on Friday, January 21, 2011, at MZIN in Leipzig.  Ms. Ehleiter also kindly sent a link to pictures of the exhibition on Flickr, and to an article that appeared on their website, which listed my zine among the many others.  Although it appears that there won't be any more zine events at D21 Kunstraum, the zine collection, along with the display units developed by the four Leipzig designers, may travel to other sites in Germany and Europe. It would be great if they came to the US as well; perhaps a store/exhibition space like Printed Matter (a wonderful arts institution which I've never had even the slightest luck getting a response from) might be persuaded to partner with Ms. Ehleiter's organization. Perhaps someone (other than me!) could mention it to them.

Nevertheless, I was delighted by the news; I have never set foot in Germany, but I can now say that something I created has. Now, to "Subway Stories #2"....

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