Ending Up, 2022
Text written for Catalog issue 22, ‘Beard. Man. Jug. Rubble. Woman. Vessel’., which featured documentation of a performance by Kasia Fudakowski. The performance explored the idea of the Trümmerfrau figure as a vessel, continually filled and emptied with different, conflicting political ideologies and compares it to the equally varied history-of-use of the traditional type of stoneware jug known as a Bartmannskrug.
Ending Up
A cache is rarely as put together as you’d like it to be. As the process of ‘caching’, gathering stuff into a vessel, gets interrupted, disrupted or co-opted, stuff just ‘ends up’: leftovers, hangers-on, silverfish. Or you were never in control of this process in the first place, it was fixed from the start.
Once cached, stuff gets pushed around, shuffled: it ferments, preserves, decays, is imposed upon. What ultimately ends up being poured into your cup differs greatly from what was cached. And it’s always incomplete. There is always backwash.
On YouTube, I watch the recorded video of Meetings on art: What could a vessel be?1, a panel as part of the 59th Venice Biennale, which reflects upon the metaphor of the vessel. The talk by Christina Sharpe is structured around the question: “What could a vessel be?”
Le Guin’s carrier bag.
Virginia Woolf’s deep old desk.
The Trümmerfrau legend.
“A vessel is both a thing to contain and a thing through which to move, a passageway. To pierce a vessel—to make sieve—is to be left with a pile of holes. It’s to concede that to hold is not the same as to enclose.” 2
“Is a whale a vessel?”
“Is a score a vessel?”3
I’m in room 1 – 105 at the University of Cologne: Englisches Seminar I – Kathy Acker Room. Laying on the table in front of me is Kathy Acker’s personal copy of Gary Indiana’s book Shanghai4. The ink from the dedication on the flyleaf has bleached into the previous page. The dedication starts with a ‘Dear Kathy’. I take a photo with my phone, export it to my computer and select/copy/paste the text, aided by macOS Monterey’s integrated OCR software technology:
Due Feasty
Friends y collagues
what's bore
Yo you with
said
PS. Chen whene
DAme mad
at you, I'm not reelly
“Is a jellyfish a vessel?”5
I watch a recorded live TV broadcast, it transports me into the living room of the single family home at Gelukstraat 55 in Ghent, Belgium. It’s June 1986. At the center of the large wall in the living room is a door, hung in a door frame. On the eggshell white surface of the door are three words:
Egalité
Broederlijkheid
Freiheit
Equality, fraternity, liberty. The national motto of France, represented here in French, Dutch and German, the three national languages of Belgium.
You can open the door but when you do, you end up nowhere: you end up hitting a wall
The door is a work by artist Jef Geys and was installed in the living room of Gelukstraat 55 as part of the exhibition Chambre d’amis, which presented the works of 51, primarily white male artists in 58 private homes as well as in spaces of the Fine Arts Museum of Ghent. The TV programme was originally broadcast live on Belgian national TV as The longest day6 and lasted 6 hours, 15 minutes and 48 seconds.
Gelukstraat 55 is located in a structurally disadvantaged neighborhood. A TV presenter asks some of the inhabitants of Gelukstraat a series of provocative questions, aimed at their economic reality: do you know what it costs to keep this TV helicopter in the air? 20.000 Belgian francs an hour! Can you even afford to buy beers with your salary? This leads to a discussion of several minutes about money. A young woman talks about the social security payments she receives and how they’re insufficient, she has lost the care over her children.
Finally the presenter asks the inhabitant of the house if the work of Geys resonates with him, and it does. He says that these ideas of equality, fraternity and liberty don’t exist anymore; that, every time you open a door, you end up faced with a wall. “For two years now, I’ve hit my head against that wall.”
“Die gelijkheid en die broederlijkheid en die vrijheid, die bestaat nie meer vandaag. Dus als ge de deur open doet, botste met uw kop tegen de muur. Ik bots met mijne kop al twee jaar tegen de muur.”
“What is a vessel for holding a life?
[…]
What is a vessel when in the first six months of 2021, over 1146 people have died in the Mediterranean Sea, while attempting to reach the shores of European nations. These migrants, refugees from brutal conditions have been made to drift and sometimes drown and sometimes die of dehydration and heat exhaustion. European powers think that not rendering aid will stop people from fleeing unlivable lives, the very unlivable lives produced by their extraction and exploitation.
What is a vessel when you are locked in the same hold that marked economies of capital, from the first ships to these?”7
The Leonard Cohen song ‘Everybody Knows’ was among the 278 songs and derivatives written by Cohen that were acquired by the Blackstone private equity fund’s Hipgnosis Songs Capital ICAV in March 20228. The songs end up as a cache of assets, used as collateral against hundreds of millions of dollars of debt9.
“Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows”10
