QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO: I have become utterly preoccupied by the work and thought of Jen Kutler, a sound based performer, sculptor and maker. She modifies found objects that are cultural signifiers of power, gender and intimacy to create atypical instruments. Her performances feature many of her instruments incorporated with immersive field recordings to explore common and discrepant experiences of familiar sound environments. Beyond this, her conceptual exploration of being-ness and existence, the manifestation/s of technology, and modes of navigating the cosmos have gripped me for quite some time. Her website itself – www.JenKutler.com – is a multiverse that is delightful to disappear into….but please don’t vanish there until you have read her contributions to Scry, which will linger in the consciousness for more time than can be adequately measured.

She joins me in a conversation in which I asked her to share a constellation of perambulations that keep her up at night and get her up in the morning. What she sent back to me was an exquisite series of questions that reminded me of Audre Lorde’s Self-Questionnaire. While my conversation with Jen will follow, I invite participants to scry into Kutler’s evocative questions and reply at your own pleasure…using our contact page if you wish!

Please scroll down for the conversation between Jen and me.

KUTLER: JEN KUTLER’S MURMURATIONS: AN APOCALYPSE SUPPORT GROUP:

((We are living in the end of the world and no one is talking about it as something that requires grieving))

((What lengths would you go to in order to ensure that you will always be loved?))

((I saw myself participating in things I found to be immoral in order to keep a family happy enough that they might adopt me.))

((I cannot survive without a familial love, even if its from a “chosen family”))

((Short term gestures to keep this love are often against my best interest in the long run))

((I don’t internalize the values of those I depend on, but the values I practice when trying to earn and keep their love))

((People often ask for things in desperation that are not what they want or need. Desperation clumsily encodes messages which are meant to be sabotaged))

((This might refer to a person who compulsively posts selfies on social media or a person who is involved in social justice causes more than they can emotionally, financially or physically afford and cannot manage their mental health properly))

((Attempts to decode desperation on social media could look like finding a question that the social media post would answer. What does the person attempt to satisfy internally by posting this selfie? You take the thing you they are trying to portray themselves as and you find the statement that asks the question they are trying to answer))

<<“Wait but in the end is she worthy of love?”>> Be authentic, don’t give up. Love yourself first.>>

((Is all compulsive/addiction behavior decoded as a need for love and to be lifted from isolation?))

((What is required for someone to open themselves up to emotional information?))

((What would an emotional information network look like? ))

((Emotional development and childhood exposure to healthy emotional practices are what dictate a person’s entire live, from grades in school, self esteem and success in relationships and career.))

((We learn to operate cars, computers, silverware, washing machines but never with our emotions))

((You learn from your family of origin or you don’t)) ((Or you learn wrong))

((What if a car would only go forward if you felt content))

((What if something required two people to feel the same emotion together in order to be operated?))

<< Art talk is too exclusive. In order to make artistic concepts accessible to everyone, we should be able to say the same thing in simpler terms. Art should be available to everyone regardless of economic standing and the same should go for how educated people speak about art, don’t you think? (I do not consider myself to be a stupid person but I never got a degree in art so I have trouble getting through books about art and manifestos by artists that use complex language for no reason >>

<< Economies of kindness — Small business owners that I know will stop engaging with a customer if the customer displays a lack of respect or empathy. Its downright inspiring. On a large scale this could be revolutionary >>

WIKSWO: And here follows my own responses and mumurations with Jen’s transmogrifying questions.

KUTLER: ((We are living in the end of the world and no one is talking about it as something that requires grieving))

QW: The grief is a vortex that spins in alternating directions – a whirlpool with a converse riptide. It seems to me a process of opposites, of the tearing of sutures or ligaments, this ripping of viscera from cavity, the subsequent craving of cavity, of viscera, of things that will no longer fit, contains that can no longer contain.

KUTLER: What lengths would you go to in order to ensure that you will always be loved?

WIKSWO: No lengths, in theory. In practice, the equation for me requires a lover. To always be loved by a lover, one must pace the length of one’s full true self. Or else it isn’t love.

KUTLER: ((I saw myself participating in things I found to be immoral in order to keep a family happy enough that they might adopt me.))

WIKSWO: The morality of love is Solomonic. Solomon’s second name was Jedidiah – the divider named both “peace” and “beloved” holds the knife to bisect an infant.  He was said to be able to speak the language of animals. As a child, I spent sleepless winter nights in the freezing doghouse attempting to learn the language of my dog so that, if necessary, I could live in her society if my family abandoned me. I also had two names. These are the two parts of us – one which will sacrifice anything at any cost to attain love; the other which experiences [dis/honorable] pain over the [ruthless?] sacrifice that the [desperate?] pursuit entails…

KUTLER: ((I cannot survive without a familial love, even if its from a “chosen family”))

WIKSWO: What are the tactics you employ for your survival?

KUTLER: ((Short term gestures to keep this love are often against my best interest in the long run))

WIKSWO: When you say your best interest, does that interest include, or does it dismiss, the interests of your beloved? When you say “short term” and “long run,” what role does time have in the earning of love, or its sustenance?

KUTLER: ((I don’t internalize the values of those I depend on, but the values I practice when trying to earn and keep their love))

WIKSWO: Practice, earn and keep are a form of discipline. Time over space, action over time, the occupation of space and time as a job. The job is to gain love, but one succeed with or without ethics. The ethics of love are something we consider often in a mechanical manner – calibrated off a system of religion, learned values, experience, control and power – without deliberately taking time to distill our own actual values of love. These are often values revealed in action, and if we cannot see our actions, we cannot see how we love. Perhaps because of this short term thinking – the emergency thinking in which we do not use our higher or peripheral vision/s – there is not sufficient time to really become deliberate. And to me, love may be an instinct, it may be a compulsion, but it must certainly be a deliberate act. An act that requires deliberateness, and deliberation.

KUTLER: ((People often ask for things in desperation that are not what they want or need. Desperation clumsily encodes messages which are meant to be sabotaged))

WIKSWO: Saboteurs engage in deliberate subversion, destruction, impedance. If desperation is inherent in this deliberate act, where does clumsiness come in? Is clumsiness the most likely result of desperation? Or is it a willful refusal to see, a deliberate refusal to analyze the benefit-to-risk ratio? I consider the suicide bomber as a deliberate act, but somewhat clumsy.

The message encoded includes, but is not limited to:
(a) my life is not worth living without what I want or need
(b) my life is so important that I value it equally to what I want and do not have, and thus must die
(c) the lives of others are unimportant in comparison to what I want or need
(d) the lives of others are so important that they must be sacrificed for me to get what I want or need

And what you say of the desperate, clumsy message encoded for the purpose of being impeded – the cry for help, in simplistic terms. But in part, I think perhaps it is a test. Of whether there is any force or entity (the beloved, a deity, the enemy, the family, the desired) that will take the time to pick through the bloody carnage of that clumsy desperation to see what is truly being demanded.

KUTLER: ((This might refer to a person who compulsively posts selfies on social media or a person who is involved in social justice causes more than they can emotionally, financially or physically afford and cannot manage their mental health properly))

WIKSWO: Something that emerges for me is how we consider the degree of consciousness behind this compulsion. Is this unconscious action, semi-conscious, sub-conscious, conscious? A compulsion deliberately exiled to a box which the person refuses to unlock, much less acknowledge, yet built the box and opened it and put something in it and then locked it away? Is this an automatic act? And is the act one towards which we are sympathetic – i.e. there is too much pain in confronting the compulsion, and we feel empathy for that pain. Or perhaps we think that their pain would be a luxury, like a bigot refusing to examine their behaviors that harm others. How much does a witness or outsider need to know the impetus behind the compulsion?

This idea of the motivational lacunae of others is fascinating, because we can pick apart someone else but largely based only on supposition and our own theories, and we have our own lacunae that go into that process of analysis. The assumptions inherent in believing we know someone better than they know themselves. Jung versus Freud, perhaps: the dream that has the pre-determined meaning, or the dream whose meaning can only be known to the dreamer.

KUTLER: ((Attempts to decode desperation on social media could look like finding a question that the social media post would answer. What does the person attempt to satisfy internally by posting this selfie? You take the thing you they are trying to portray themselves as and you find the statement that asks the question they are trying to answer))

WIKSWO: There is a sleuth quality to being the bystander on social media. I think of it as a spy network, with the intention of each player being somewhat opaque. There is the Stasi, which we think of as watching and action upon the behaviors of others with ill intent and fatal judgement. And there is the French Resistance, which we think of as based in liberation, freedom, justice. I will take us back to Solomon and Jedidiah, and the baby – who let’s say was actually cut in half. How can we make the attempt to decode desperation on social media without cutting people into halves, whereas the geometry and mathematics of intent are more complicated on a moral level.

KUTLER: <<“Wait but in the end is she worthy of love?”>> Be authentic, don’t give up. Love yourself first.

WIKSWO: Exactly. The bystander, actor, witness, agent, spy – the enterprise is one of judging, asking questions from the outside, such as is this [person] authentic, or is this [person] a performance of authenticity? You ask the question, “wait, but in the end is she worthy of love?” and I wonder whether there are any answers to be given. If it’s a pale green room with a door that locks only on the outside, can those answers be given by force? I think of prison or captivity writing, and all the words that have been scribed by people who are in a limbo of being proven guilty of something, or are waiting to be proven innocent or guilty, dependent on the justice system. Are all of us worthy of love? and by whom? By ourselves? Is General Sherman and President Andrew Jackson worthy of love – with or without factoring in the Trail of Tears, or the pillaging of the south for the end of slavery which resulted in a pillaging of the ideal of freedom?

Maybe it is less important to be loved than to be questioned. Maybe it is more important to question from within a state of love for self and others. Maybe love is, in fact, something that we must earn based upon our actions, deliberate or otherwise. Perhaps unconditional love requires the box of secret monsters that cannot be let out. The monsters are isolated. Must they be disciplined and punished for love to proceed as planned?

KUTLER: ((Is all compulsive/addiction behavior decoded as a need for love and to be lifted from isolation?))

WIKSWO: This assumes that love and an end to isolation are universal goals. I cannot imagine that such goals are shared by all humanity, unless we are talking about sadism. Sadism is a kind of love – the love to hurt, the love to cause injury and pain. But sadism is not by definition an addiction, it is an act which may or may not be an addiction. Is the genocidal architect a compulsive addict in their love to design death camps and their desire to unite with those who also want to design death camps? I don’t believe that love is universal. To my thinking, love is simply one of the elements on the periodic table and can be included or excluded as a pure element or one which combines with others, or does come into the equation at all…many people can live an entire life devoid of that element.

KUTLER: ((What is required for someone to open themselves up to emotional information?))

WIKSWO: To be suspended over the infinite abyss. And to have believed, for enough time to matter, that there was no escape from the infinite plunge into the infinite abyss.

KUTLER: ((What would an emotional information network look like? ))

WIKSWO: The nervous system, but with sensory inputs and outputs that are not yet known to human beings. We are operating in a vast lacunae in which we assume that our knowledge and information is complete until we find something that suggests a more distant event horizon. And we either shut our eyes and hide in the closet, throw things, or figure out how to move on with humility and curiosity. I enjoy reading out of date science books not because I like to gloat, but because I like to be reminded that much of what surrounds us, controls us, navigates through and to us, is inaccurate. And this messiness is comforting. We aren’t yet, as a species, at a point where we find that chaos a comfort. Perhaps we will have to be more comfortable with chaos in order to access an emotional information network. 

KUTLER: ((Emotional development and childhood exposure to healthy emotional practices are what dictate a person’s entire live, from grades in school, self esteem and success in relationships and career.))

WIKSWO: I had a therapist who said that each year a child survives without trauma means that normal human development will occur unimpeded. This was quite disheartening. And then one must question the idea of normal. And so perhaps self-esteem, healthiness, success are also terms that require questioning. Surviving – or not surviving – attempts at destruction are measured by calipers of normalcy. And yet none of us are truly healthy or normal. I would like to disrupt the entire assessment system – of all cultures, because I haven’t found one yet that seems to give sufficient succor to those in the most pain – and find a new one in which we aren’t measured by our functionality. We are not machines.

KUTLER: ((We learn to operate cars, computers, silverware, washing machines but never with our emotions))

WIKSWO: In my households, everything has always been primarily operated by the emotions. I’m not sure what implications that entails. 

KUTLER: ((You learn from your family of origin or you don’t))

WIKSWO: Agreed. I would also say that we have a few junctures to learn: first from our family of origin, then after the exodus from family household, we learn from the families we choose or who choose us. My second family of origin was African American civil rights workers. My third family of origin was drag queens and combat vets. Family over spacetime, learning over spacetime.

KUTLER: ((Or you learn wrong))

WIKSWO: I learn wrong almost always. Because what I think I am supposed to learn is rarely what I actually end up learning. Mostly this is unrest. The frictions between expectations (my family will provide me with security and safety) versus actuality (my family will provide me with a variety of tactics for navigating trauma). It’s possible that we work from the assumption that comfort results from learning, and discomfort results from learning wrong. When it’s probably the opposite. The most learning occurs with the most anxiety and upheaval, messiness and grief. 

KUTLER: ((What if a car would only go forward if you felt content))

WIKSWO: I feel that that directly pertains to contemporary America, where the craving for comfort is so intense that if cars would only go forward if we were content, we might not go anywhere. Is contentment desirable? What if one person’s contentment comes as a result of suffering – or, worse, exploitation or perpetration of injustice – of someone else? 

KUTLER: ((What if something required two people to feel the same emotion together in order to be operated?))

WIKSWO: That would frighten me. I am uncomfortable with unity. This is not inherently a positive attribute. I get worried when a multiplicity of humans are urged into systems where cohesion is a requisite of functionality. Where we must be all of a kind, or all on the same page, or all for one one for all. 

KUTLER: Art talk is too exclusive. In order to make artistic concepts accessible to everyone, we should be able to say the same thing in simpler terms. Art should be available to everyone regardless of economic standing and the same should go for how educated people speak about art, don’t you think? (I do not consider myself to be a stupid person but I never got a degree in art so I have trouble getting through books about art and manifestos by artists that use complex language for no reason).

WIKSWO: This is thorny. The good things about thorns is that there is lots to get caught on, tangled on, where one has to pause and sort oneself out of the snarl. I would again say that ideally art is a fundamental form of self-expression, and barriers should not be erected with the sole purpose of exclusion. Either excluding someone from the right to self-expression, or to the access of self-expression. There is zero doubt that the rules of the art world (and each discipline and institution and industry of the art world has its own rules) are mostly intended to sort people. What you wear, how you speak…

I got an MFA later in life, but earlier in life I went through extensive accent eradication so that I could speak proper English. Thus, when I turned to the MFA in Creative Writing seeking an enhancement of my abilities and thereby greater enfranchisement, I was often criticized for my unconventional forms of English useage. So what was at first intended to make me less excluded (learning to speak and pronounce proper upper class American English) was completely seen through and derided when I went out to be enfranchised. There is an intentional segregation that I think is more about mobs controlling what is proper and improper.

Maybe this brings us back to intention. The use of complex language is actually enjoyable, necessary, and pleasurable to some people. Other people use complex language as a locked gate – you can only enter the sublime enfranchised art place if you can both understand and articulate in this arcane form of proprietary language. It perhaps depends upon the intention of the system of people who use any kind of language – is their goal to exclude, or does exclusion simply happen because one cannot run without first walking and before that crawling. I would like to understand quantum physics but it requires some physicists writing at a complexity that is beyond me so that they can expand their field, and it requires other people taking the time to make quantum physics something moderately comprehensible to someone without special training.

The worrisome thing about art talk is that if one believes, as I do, that art is self-expression, then all barriers must be addressed in some form or another for a diversity of folx to engage in human interaction. Most artists who are not interested in erecting barriers are interested in a sort of generosity. Where the exchange is not about having the money to pay the entrance cost, but some other form of currency.

KUTLER: Economies of kindness — Small business owners that I know will stop engaging with a customer if the customer displays a lack of respect or empathy. Its downright inspiring. On a large scale this could be revolutionary.

 

 

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háádą̀ą̀, hádą́ą́’ ałkʼidą́ą́ʼ

ੴ ਸਤਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਕਰਤਾ ਪੁਰਖੁ ਨਿਰਭਉ ਨਿਰਵੈਰੁ ਅਕਾਲ ਮੂਰਤਿ ਅਜੂਨੀ ਸੈਭੰ ਗੁਰ ਪ੍ਰਸਾਦਿ ॥

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