Notes 5/27/07

N8: set up tension in the space (Binod)—competing screens?
set up as if church? Something in front, with pews, and then something behind that unnerves somehow—us reading the poems?
nice to use the space somehow. use the corner? If so, and if there’s emptiness in the middle of the space, will that be active somehow?

Or two things in back, one in front

how to suggest church? 1 pew, folding chairs w/ numbers, book on each chair, altar, chalice, cross, bowl for (holy) water, stage? risers?, books on chairs are bibles/coloring books/oil texts

DG: how can we signify the emptiness/soulessness of contemporary Tulsa churches? defamiliarize this sort of architecture/design, thus calling attention to industrialization of modern churchgoing? Aluminum siding, Starbucks coffee, ugly cheap tables, carpeting, fake flower urns, altarpieces, the driller on the altar—make our own iconography?

M: chairs in diagonal toward corner?

N8: what is our true subject matter? Not so much oil and religion, but the sense of isolation/alienation that we feel, living in/leaving Tulsa.

DG: Oil vs religion—regarding fundamentalist Chr, I’m entirely antagonistic, contemptuous, must struggle w/ living in that environment; w/ oil, I’m agonistic, must register how rooted I am in an oil culture no matter what my intellectual relation to it.

GJ feels implicated in Christianity the way DG feels implicated in oil

Hanson’s debut album: The Middle of Nowhere

DG: in a sense what we’re doing is mapping the emptiness at the geographical, symbolic, economic, and spiritual center of America

Susan Howe: narrative as implied, fragmented narrative, full of fleeting details that may or may not be true, w/ sources pulled in from all over the place—kernels of information

Mojo Curio Company: rich poem for grounding some of these issues

Wakow as an artistic refinery

do we want to generate alienation in people? Brechtian…
N8: television is the opposite of alienation; comfortable. We need to do something other than recreating the feeling of watching PBS on your couch.

MS: might be interesting to have the chairs right up against the short wall, but still projecting onto it, so that your perspective is thrown off, or so that the chairs become part of the perspective

DG: I still like the idea of creating a niche within the space—dropping black curtains, having a sound inside (the oil/water sound from Tulsa, the preacher, etc)

if we do a church, we can do a bulletin using our materials, etc

if we invoke a space (church, movie house), then we can push against it in some way.