Mrs.B:My intentions were not to kill him.It wasn't me that did that. That wasn't in my mind.
Dick:They come to Belgrade and they EXPLODE. You SMOWWWKE TOO MUCH. YOU DREEEENK TOO MUCH, there is group sex ACTIVITEEEE and then everything GETS OUT OF CONTROWWWL.
Martin:My philosophy is ;every day's a new day.
Mrs.B:We asked what kind of drugs he’d done.Oh, I just took one hit of acid [LSD],’ and I was like, ‘Shut up, man, you had to be doing something more than just acid to go into convulsions.’ And he just kept on lying to us and said that he had it from one of his good friends.
Dick:I'd like to disappear.
Martin:Hey, man, you wanna’ come with us,’ he’d like look up, pale faced, and just like, ‘No, I don’t wanna’ go. I want to sit here,’ And I was like, ‘OK, well, I can’t force him. So me and Eric took off about 10 and that was the last time we saw him.
Mrs.B:I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank.No epitaph,and no name.
Dick:And what about Dale Depue?
Martin:Patient supine with leg pants around knees up on sidewalk, upper torso in street.Approximately 20cc blood under patient’s head. Pupils bilaterally dilated, unreactive to light. Patient displaying decerbrate posturing.
TOM'S IMPRESSIONS
The Dawson's eat three meals a day.They have breakfast in the morning,a light lunchat noon,and big dinner at night.They often eat breakfast and lunch in hurry,but they have more time for dinner.Americans drink a lot of water,a lot of milk,and a lot of coffee,but they don't drink much tea..Yes,
I LIKE AMERICAN FOOD VERY MUCH NOW,INCLUDING THE PANCAKES,THE SANDWICHES,THE HAMBURGERS,THE SALADS,THE APPLE PIE AND WONDERFUL ICE CREAM.
MANIK,APRIL 2008.
LESSON NINE
-
Type: discussion
Comments
I think MANIK have been responsible for two absolutely remarkable sequences on this list, the first being the mutated images series of a long time ago & the second being this ”lessons” sequence.
There was a discussion (isn't there often) here a couple of years ago about what constitutes networked art.
It seems to me that with extreme economy of means ( including a remarkable control & devastating use of what on the face of it appears to be a fairly fractured English, although I'm not sure how much I should accept ''the face of it" where MANIK are concerned - I think they have developed more of an, admittedly idiosyncratic, control over register than many native speakers ) they've created something -a piece of genuinely networked art - which says a good deal about the winners and losers in today’s Europe in particular but has a kind of elegance to it also which makes it of artistic as well as polemical interest ( in that it talks of language, of popular culture, of cliché, of misunderstanding,of the nature and difficulty of communication, of geography, in addition to its more obvious preoccupations; plus it is often very very funny)
Far be it from me to accuse them of balance but there's a certain hesitancy, almost a delicacy, here, compared to the more straightforward rants-to-list, which on occasion we've had words about, which far from disarming the thing politically actually makes it more resonant, more generally applicable -ie the piece feels as much about alienation, being left out, left behind *in general* as it does about the particular situation of the Serbs -it could equally speak to the areas & inhabitants of UK inner cities which have effectively been both abandoned & simultaneously criminalised by government.
The work's modesty of means shouldn't blind us to its virtue - indeed I find myself admiring the fact that simple ( in one sense -of course the performative/conceptual nature of this is anything but simple) words posted to a discussion board can be much more resonant than so much higher tech, more boastfully conceived & more grandiosely trumpeted work.
It's modest in a second sense in that MANIK are confident enough in what they are doing that they don't have to continually explain to us what this is (in fact to their credit they don't really do that at all).
In particular I cherish the exhilarating derangement of lesson nine to which I’ve appended this comment. I’m guessing there’s a certain a good deal of cut and paste happening here -there’s also a linguistic knowingness about SMOWWWKE, DREEEENK, ACTIVITEEEE & CONTROWWWL which bolsters my suspicions about MANIK’s actual command of English idiom.
Rhizome would be the poorer without this singular, spiky & profoundly moral presence.
michael
Hi manik,
i was curious about your use of the John Hartman testimony offered from the last day. What is your knowledge of Dale Depue? You use a part of one conversation and tie it with another from the same website where they describe the way john was found as described by the emergency workers on sight. Are you surfing the web or are you emotionally tied to that night?
NO
MANIK,APRIL 2008.
Is MANIK more than one person?
please share what you do know, it is very peculiar that you use THAT posting to use… are you from Alaska?