How to get –> there, 2024

An installation of a publication and hand-painted notes on the windows of Overgaden's O–Rooom. 'How to get –> there' takes its name from a note, left by the writer Kathy Acker in her personal copy of 'The adding machine' (Calder, 1985). I've gathered this and other notes during my visit to the Kathy Acker Reading Room at the University of Cologne, where Acker's personal library is kept. The notes, combined with my own text and borrowed fragments form a new narrative about distortion, hiss and bleed.

In the publication are also four commisioned texts and contributions by artists, writers and designers Meg Miller, Phil Baber, Noah Emanuel Morrison and Carlo Canún. Their contributions are about the lost parts of Sappho's Fragment 95, trans-dimensional thin spots, the traces of cruising and racist graffiti.

→ How to get –> there at O–Overgaden, Copenhagen (May–June 2024)
→ Part of the series ‘Adagio for Things’ by Wilfred Wagner

How to get –> there¹

The 6054 books, magazines, manuscripts and other artifacts that made up the library of Kathy Acker were boxed up after her death in 1997. In 2015, they were dug up, stuffed in a shipping container and taken 9000 kilometers away to be unloaded, unpacked, cataloged and placed on shelves in room 1 – 105 at the University of Cologne: Englisches Seminar I – Kathy Acker Room. I came here to see notes in books: impulses, jotted down, in the margins, ink leaching into fibrous paper. Anything that has left an impression.

to fuck
up
replication
(language
as not-
replication)²

In 1965, at age 14, would-be musician Greg Sage had access to a disc cutting lathe, a machine which translates an audio signal into a modulated spiral groove on the surface of a blank lacquer disc. After observing these freshly cut grooves through a microscope, Sage soon started playing bass guitar, inspired by the large elaborate grooves needed to reproduce bass tones.

CONCEPTS. COME
EASY. BUT SEEING?
[REALLY SEEING?
DRAWING HELP
EXACT SEEING.]³

This process, originally intended to produce one-off records, is also used to produce limited editions of records, lathe-cuts, using polycarbonate discs. Due to the limits of this material, the sound quality is of lower fidelity. It is a popular misconception that lathe-cuts are less durable, which is likely due to listeners hearing the excess background hiss and mistakenly assuming it to be the sound of the mechanical stylus, wearing the grooves down to nothing.

Picture
is one
of time

←
lost
Identity
→⁴

“Oui, j’aime bien penser à la littérature – enfin, oui, la littérature disons – comme quelque chose qui, je reviens à cette idée de risque et de responsabilité, qui engage, et cette idée qu'il faut mettre son corps dans les pages, c’est à dire il faut... Je trouve que si on prend pas ce risque-là, enfin, je crois que c’est ça aussi qui peut séduire le lecteur. Moi, c’est quelque chose que j’aime bien, comme lectrice, de recevoir autant que possible, la totalité de celui qui écrit. Oui, je dirais que c’est ça: pour moi c’est un geste. Il y a quelque chose de cet ordre-là.”⁵

While the writer Constance Debré is talking, the translator is feverishly making notes, and when he finally replicates the translated answer, he’s edited out any doubt or hiss, any enfin, oui, disons.

“Yes, I like to think of literature, let’s say, as something to come back to this idea of ‘risk and responsibility’ that engages you, that commits you, it’s the idea of putting the body into the pages, I think if you don’t take that risk, I mean, it’s something that you can also seduce the reader with. I as a reader like to receive as much as possible the totality of a person/writer writing. I’d say it’s that, it’s a gesture.”

He then continues by crossing out his notes with a dramatic swoop. When the audience, panelists and moderator laugh, the translator reacts, “Well… this is MY gesture.”

Where is the person?⁶

Photo 5267 (of 5663), taken at the prime minister's office, 10 Downing Street, on 13 March 2020 at 20:09:23, displays a whiteboard with words scribbled on it in red dry-erase marker. It is a working document, part of figuring out the UK government’s COVID response. At the top of the board, the stated fact that no vaccine will be available in 2020. Must avoid NHS collapse. Lockdown. At the bottom, and written with governmental disdain for life, note number 6: ‘Who do we not save?’

How do we get out of this shit?⁷

As part of the case brought before the International Court of Justice by South Africa, alleging that Israel has engaged and is engaging in acts of genocide, South Africa presented two photographs. One is of a whiteboard, wiped clean of no-longer-possible surgical cases, leaving only a hand-written message by a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor. ‘We did what we could. Remember us.’ The second photograph is of the same whiteboard, destroyed, on the floor after an Israeli air strike has killed the author of the message, Dr Mahmoud Abu Nujaila.

✓
Can’t
get
away
by
being
neutral⁸

1. The adding machine: collected essays / William S. Burroughs. – London : John Calder, 1985, p. 135
2. Death at the Parasite Cafe : social science (fictions) and the postmodern / Stephen Pfohl. – London : Palgrave Macmillan, 1992, p. 35
3. The Scarlet Letter / Nathaniel Hawthorne. – New York : Signet Classics, 1959, [biography page]
4. Invisible cities / Italo Calvino. – New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 28
5. “The Cost of Freedom: Constance Debré and Eileen Myles” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa11-8e7NkI&ab_channel=VillaAlbertine
6. Invisible cities / Italo Calvino, p. 35
7. Exterminator! / William S. Burroughs. – New York : Viking Press, 1985, p. 46
8. Exterminator! / William S. Burroughs, p. 94