VLAK: Contemporary Poetics & the Arts

VLAK #5

by Louis Armand (Editor), David Vichnar (Editor), Olga Pek (Editor)

VLAK is aunique international curatorial project with a broad focus on contemporary poetics, art, film, philosophy, music, science, design, politics, performance, ecology, and new media.

Marina Abramović, Seth Abramson, Bruno Adams, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Gwendolyn Albert, Ali Alizadeh, Ian Almond, Bjarte Alvestad, Robert Archambeau, Louis Armand, Marc Atkins, Tim Atkins, Zbyněk Baladrán, Stephanie Barber, Charles Bernstein, Felix Bernstein, Edmund Berrigan, Johannes Birringer, Vít Bohal, Ken Bolton, Amaranth Borsuk, Nicole Brossard, Pam Brown, Finn Brunton, Justin Bryant, Pascalle Burton, David Buuck, Robert Carrithers, Sean Carswell, Jim Chaffee, Abigail Child, Adrian Clarke, Wayne Clements, Tim Conley, Clark Coolidge, Vincent Dachy, Steve Dalachinsky, Ailbhe Darcy, James Davies, Jeremy M. Davies, Mark Paul Divo, Johanna Drucker, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Lori Emerson, Vadim Erent, Vincent Farnsworth, Michael Farrell, Nathaniel Farrell, Allen Fisher, Toby Fitch, SJ Fowler, Ulli Freer, Chris Funkhouser, Thor Garcia, Miranda Gavin, Nada Gordon, Helen Grace, Stephanie Gray, Lisa Gye, Catherine Hales, Matt Hall, Alan Halsey, Robert Hampson, Philip Hammial, Susan Hawthorne, Ian Hays, Yasmin Heisler, Lyn Hejinian, Matt Hetherington, Jeff Hilson, Bob Holman, Jana Horáková, DJ Huppatz, Paul Ingram, Mark W. Jacobs, Peter Jaegger, Harold Jaffe, Carol Jenkins, Gareth Jenkins, Tom Jenks, Travis Jeppesen, Doug Jones, Keith Jones, Pierre Joris, Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, Trevor Joyce, Justin Katko, Vincent Katz, John Kinsella, Virginia Konchan, Alena Kotzmannová, Zsolt Láng, Hank Lazer, Jane Lewty, Manuel P. Lopez, Niall Lucy, Anna Macdonald, Jan Macháček, Richard Makin, Jane Malcolm, Sophie Malleret, Adrian Martin, Aidan McCardle, Anthony Mellors, Erika Mikkalo, Drew Milne, Nick Montfort, Sarah Moriarty, Ian Morris, Bill Mousoulis, Vicky Mousoulis, Ken Nash, Jeroen Nieuwland, Mette Norrie, Damien Ober, Andrew Oldham, Julian Oliver, Kirby Olson, Fábio Paiva, Holly Pester, Eva Ulrike Pirker, Vanessa Place, Rachelle Rahme, Kit Robinson, Nathan Roche, Jerome Rothenberg, Lou Rowan, Jim Ruland, Kaia Sand, Gordan Savičić, Larry Sawyer, Seekers of Lice, Daniella Seel, Phil Shoenfelt, Lucie Skřivánková, Adrian Slatcher, Linus Slug the Younger, Philippe Sollers, Alan Sondheim, Jasper Spoelstra, Brian Kim Stefans, Lesley Stern, Stephanie Strickland, Holly Tavel, Sonny Rae Tempest, Philip Terry, Lotto Thiessen, Darren Tofts, Jáchym Topol, Adam Trachtman, John Tranter, Matt Trease, Lawrence Upton, Danja Vasiliev, David Vichnar, Ann Vickery, Divya Victor, Melchior Vischer, Mark Waldron, Corey Wakeling, Lewis Warsh, Marjorie Welish, Elaine Whittaker, D. Harlan Wilson, Kyoko Yoshida, Ali Znaidi.

663 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 25, 2015

About the author

Louis Armand is a writer and visual artist who has lived in Prague since 1994. He has worked as an editor and publisher, and as a subtitles technician at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and is an editor of VLAK magazine. He is the author of eight novels, including Breakfast at Midnight in 2012, "a perfect modern noir, presenting Kafka's Prague as a bleak, monochrome singularity of darkness, despair and edgy, dry existentialist hardboil" (Richard Marshall, 3:AM), CAIRO (Equus Press, 2014; short listed for the Guardian's Not-the-Booker Prize), and THE COMBINATIONS (Equus Press, 2016). Described as "Robert Pinget does Canetti (in drag in Yugoslavia)," Armand's third novel Clair Obscur was published by Equus in 2011. His previous novel, Menudo (Antigen), was described as "unrelenting, a flying wedge, an encyclopaedia of the wasteland, an uzi assault pumping desolation lead... inspiring!" (Thor Garcia, author of The News Clown).

Reviews

[Thor Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The conventions and clichés of all the dead avant-gardes weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

That’s the message delivered by the seemingly incongruous duo of Spock and Winston Churchill, each flashing “V” signs, at the beginning of VLAK 5.

Issued in 2015, VLAK 5 turned out to be the swansong of the VLAK journal from Litteraria Pragensia, based at the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory at Charles University in Prague. It was said that the university bean-counters, the wise and exacting men of higher education, could not be persuaded of the value of continuing it.

It’s a shame, too, because we’re not likely to see the likes of VLAK again anytime soon.

The journal’s mission statement read (in part): “VLAK represents a desire to extend our understanding of what is possible; to pose questions about the prevailing attitude of norms; to explore the ramifications of contemporary culture & attempt new critical and creative methods.”

In this, VLAK never stinted in slamming home ye olde turkeyneck: The five editions of the journal are thick, bounded compendiums of the ruins and reflections of avant-gardes past, present and future. They are cornucopias and conjurations of cunning catharsis and confused caterwauling and conflagration, certain to inspire future avant-gardes.

The numbers alone put VLAK V in its own ambitious class: A colossal 664 pages’ worth of words and images from around 150 writers and artists.

Their contributions can perhaps be boiled down to:

· the cryptically obsessive

· the desperate for approval

· the whimsically equivocal

· the casually brilliant

· the deliberately offensive

· the apparently sincere

· the abrasively unsettling

· the strenuously coy

· the simply awful

· the willfully obscure

· the clumsily overwrought

· the inexpressibly incoherent

And one becomes painfully aware: Thousands of words have been hurled, but in most cases, not one has hit a target worth points. Some folks have obviously tried too hard. Others, it seems, barely bothered.

Yet the cumulative impact is nevertheless guaranteed to fascinate and flummox the brains of the living (if indeed any non-undead are still to be found on this pitiable platform of the spooked, neurotic and scatterbrained).

Flip the pages of VLAK 5 and we find:

· Story: “First glimpse out the wombwindow into the arsehole of it all.”

· An excerpt from a translation of H, the 1973 novel by muy serious French avant-gardien Philippe Sollers, husband of famed semiotician/feminist/psychoanalyst/accused undercover Bulgarian communist intelligence agent Julia Kristeva (red flag alert!).

· A staged, artistic photo of young boys preparing to snort lines of cocaine.

· Boobs.

· A collage of clothed French bulldogs holding signs saying “3 wrongs don’t make a right,” “free gluten” and “I blame my mother.”

· An interview with Jáchym Topol and Jan Macháček.

· Picture of Vacláv Havel at Vaclávské Naměstí: “Havel Navždy.”

· Poetry: “Now for the future: the twenty-somethings / implode into their / ghettos of one.”

· A topless blond.

· An excerpt from Melchior Vischer’s Second Through Brain (1920): “Upon a bottleround imaginary hairs glowed down between flesh. Why’s it only the horses give a devout greeting? And a brook was heard trickling.”

· Story: “He visualized the fragments bursting into flame, melting and smoking and swirling out a vent on the top of his head, mixing with the polluted mall air, joining with the air as it was flushed through the filthy mall filters and recycled back into the system.”

· Photo of condom-covered erect cock, sticking from side of frame into empty desert landscape.

· Photo of another cock with some kind of leash tugging at it. A photo of something that appears to be a wide-open vagina.

· A contemplative article about the old Stalin monument at Letná Park, Prague, whose designer, Otakar Švec, reportedly committed suicide before the colossal “thing” was unveiled in 1955.

· Spooky photographs of the old nuclear bunker at Parukařka, Prague.

· Photo of a dead rat.

· Poetry: “inner life not as good / as well-written prose”

· Story: “One falls asleep on the bare earth, back pressed against a tree, limbs crammed above a wedge of mud, apple resting in palm, sex erect.”

· The Zsolt Láng Cookbook: “Berlin restaurants go big on partychokes during electoral campaigns; the cheapest dish is the Socialists’ frankfurter in tomato sauce, while the most expensive one is the Liberals’ cured salmon in yellow sauce.”

· Story: “Heads must be itchy because there’s some serious scratching happening.”

· Review of Dr. Franklin’s Dream America: “As entertaining as this book might be, it has no serious message to deliver regarding freedom or technology; missed opportunity or resounding endorsement of the ridiculous notion of social networks as facilitators of democracy, whatever that word actually implies, who can say?”

· The autobiography of Bruno Adams: “As a child I thought cats and dogs were different genders of the same species. Dogs being male, and cats female. Our family dog was male and our family cat was female and they would have regular impasses that would erupt into intense violence, just like with mum and dad.”

· Article on Švankmajer: “Is a theory of animation the true centerpiece of a theory of film itself?. . . Theory is, in short, pulling away from the primacy of the camera and moving toward the importance of painting and drawing as a basis for the cinematic image.”

· Review of The Turin Horse: “We no longer wish to be transported, all our longings have come to an end, stasis is the new world order. Instead, we have invested all our desires into a false god—technology—a false, outwardly-positioned vehicularity that provides little more than a dim superficial impression of motion, movement through the cosmos.”

· An article on Krista Ludwig’s kidnapping and eight years of rape, beatings and starvation by Wolfgang Priklopil (until she was 18).

· Four pages of collage art (Jesus crucified to an airplane)

· “Absolute Terror,” an article about the group known as Islamic State (“Or What Do You See Behind the Masks?): “After the blessed kenosis of contemplation, one sometimes suffers nihilism and bitterness. This leads to entrepreneurship, which leads to advertising.”

· Illness as Metaphor: “Rude jests fly back and forth,” I tell them, “as the patients gnaw beef and thrust their muzzles deep into ale jugs.”

· Poetry: “there are rules & then there are ways of doing things”

· Collages using cut-up book pages

· Story: “As Reverend Gaylord offers an impromptu eulogy, they climb atop the coffin and try to stomp it into the earth with oversized, untied construction boots, and they keep tumbling onto the grass.”

· A series of bleak, desolate pictures from somewhere.

· Handwritten words that form shapes.

· Story: “Trout pooped in a rest area bathroom in southern Missouri. Annie counted the money.”

· More bleak, desolate pictures from somewhere else.

· Poetry: Words floating in vast white spaces. Clue provided: “hidden themes unspoken.”

· Article/pictures about the Canon Cat “advanced work processor” of the 1980s

· Picture of a stripper under a neon sign saying “Bitch.” This appears above an article on conceptual poetry by Vanessa Place, the conceptual poet and controversial bad-girl republisher of Gone With the Wind on Twitter. (Bad girl, Vanessa!)

· An interview with Vanessa Place, the saucy pizza pocket of conceptual poetry.

· Images of computer messages between Vanessa Place and Felix Bernstein about an article in CIA-controlled Vice (motto: We’ll Provide the Hoop. You Jump Through It.) about a celebrity “he-to-she” transgender (something more than just a goofball transvestite?—oh, definitely, yes!)

· Poetry: “How do ducklings suckle?”

· Pages of handwritten words in the shape of a teddy cat, perhaps meant to tell a story.

· Article: “P.S.—Is it because Hitler said that the serious painters of his time had actual glaucoma that people consider ACTS OF JUDGEMENT about whether poetry is good or not to be FASCISTIC?”

· Article: “The Poetics of Hate”: “Be mine, be me, or die: the Catch-22 of a claustrophobic, homosocial, cinematic imaginary staged by Rene Girard’s triangulation of desire: we only desire what we see others desiring, mediated by the Big Other’s panoptic eye, thematically designed around the operatic suffering and death of women or the underclass.”

· Poetry: “Never put a Cossack in a cassock”

· “Toward an Aesthetics of Camp”

· “The Metamodernist Manifesto”

· Photos of microbes on mirrors with peoples’ faces in them.

· A video still of that plane whose wing broke off/disintegrated while crashing into a bridge in Taiwan in 2015 (leaving the bridge fully intact and putting the lie to those magic, fantastical airplane wings that sliced into the World Trade Center, leaving holes perfectly shaped like airplane wings).

Yes, about the only thing missing, really, is a tasteful portrait of a skinhead’s mother. . . . Or perhaps a few shots of male models in garish pink police uniforms, standing guard outside some cement Ministry of Truth-style building of the brutalist school. . . .

But wait. Flip the pages and . . . the glorious release we’ve been waiting for suddenly appears on page 485—

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ: BALKAN EROTIC EPIC

We are agape. Is there any other combination of words more likely to get synapses twitching, wiggling, throbbing, shuddering, pulsating and vibrating?

What the heck is the lovely Marina, spawn of Satan, doing in VLAK? Sparks ignite as connections are made in the frontal lobe. Impulses race down the spine, pool in the groin, tingle in the fingertips. . . .

Look, it’s Marina Abramović, the “grandmother of performance art.” Marina Abramović, Ms. Occultic Avant-Garde Herself! Yes, that Marina Abramović—the O.S.C., the Original “Spirit Cooking” queen of Operation: Pizzagate fame. Marina Abramović: Red-carpet pal to red-flag characters like Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, James Franco and other agency-approved arbiters of art, taste and fashionable tasty art.

Abramović: The Serbian firestarter who loves to go topless. Abramović: the keeper of the avant-throne who “pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on ‘confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body,’” according to our Wiki masters.

· “In Balkan,” says Marina’s text, “during a difficult child delivery, the husband would kneel next to his wife, take out his phallus and use it to sign the cross between her breasts. It was believed that this would facilitate fast and easy delivery.”

· “To make a man love her, a woman would take a small fish and insert it into her vagina and keep it there overnight. The next morning she would extract the fish, dry it, then grind it into powder. By mixing a small amount of this powder with her lover’s coffee, it was believed that the man would never leave her.”

· “To save her child from the evil eye, before leaving the house a mother would put her hand under her skirt, rub her vagina and with the same hand she would gently rub the face of her child for protection.”

· “To distract the enemy on the battlefield during battle, a woman would undress and show herself, making obscene movements.”

· “On the wedding day, as part of the ceremony and to protect the groom from impotence, he would make three holes on a wooden bridge. He would then take his phallus and stick it in all three of the holes, while repeating: ‘In the same way I penetrate the holes in this bridge with my phallus, I will penetrate my wife.’”

· “If the crops, especially cabbage, were being destroyed by larvae, the man would grab a larva early in the morning, before the sun rose, and tie it to the child’s phallus with a black thread. The larva would be left there until it died. It was believed that this would kill all the larvae for the summer in all the land.”

Yes—finally—something sensible about the functional deployment of the genitals beyond screwing and a lascivious show. This Abramović lady—she’s all over it. That’s right, Marina—that’s how you do in Balkan.

You turn the page, begging for more Marina. VLAK 5 does not disappoint.

Immediately: Boobs. A woman showing her boobs and holding a skull. But she has somehow twisted her neck so that the back of her head, featuring her long black hair, is now the front of her. Yes. Next is a lineup of nine dudes wearing Balkan costumes, erect phalluses sticking out of their pants. Ah, yes. These dudes can hardly wait to fertilize your soil. Turn the page—yes. Peasant vaginas writhing in a downpour. The women are writhing on the soil, flashing their vaginas in the downpour, hot and eager to be fertilized. Next page: Boobs! A peasant woman in a scarf massaging her boobs! Absolutely pulchritudinous!

Abramović, of course, has long been well-known in modern art circles. But she only became truly famous in 2016, after her name spread like wildfire as a curious tangent of the CIA-controlled Pizzagate fiasco.

Which raises the question: What other superstars-to-be are lurking in the pages of VLAKs 1–5?

Read, gawk and learn. No, you never know what to expect with VLAK. I’ve stayed busy for years just picking up an issue and randomly flipping through it. Next thing I know, a couple hours have gone by and my head’s been chewed like bubblegum.

Pick up a paper copy of VLAK if you can. They are rare, splendid artifacts of publishing and will be collector’s items. If you can’t get one, the entire archive is available for download here:

https://vlakmagazine2.wordpress.com/

Editor's Note: Thor Garcia’s story “Intended for Pleasure” appears in VLAK 4, available here:
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

Thor Garcia’s story “Eat the Rotten Eggs” appears in VLAK 5, available here:
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...