Teleportations #10
From Pret Stansted Airport (the small one nearest to Glorious Britain)
1 May 2024
06:44
I didn’t eat in (which makes teleportation impossible according to the rule that the cost of one trip would be equivalent to the Pret eat in tax) but rather sat on the benches between WORLD DUTY FREE and THE PERCH BAR & KITCHEN, with my back to the screens displaying flight and gate information.
Black Americano
Pret’s Proper Porridge with two sachets of Rowse (‘Rowse has developed a fully recyclable single-serve honey sachet made of paper for Pret's porridge pots’. The sachet’s squeeze function is poor.)
Cost: £7.55
Separately from the present text I wrote a 1,500 word account ‘Remembering 6 May 2024’, of a day spent in Vienna. This is only really shareable among close friends and contains several inaccuracies that I am working out whether and how to correct.
Marina passed away in Europe’s fifth largest hospital on 26 April at around 9pm Vienna time, surrounded by Danny and friends and the gifts she had accrued (notably a bat, a hedgehog, and Clemmie the Clam) since being told that she had weeks rather than months to live. I visited in the days prior and at the end of my flight back to London late on 24 April wrote the following poem-thing (please also read Kerstin Stakemeier’s cue, which she first ‘mistook for a bad poem’, at the bottom of ‘Marina’s Cues’), having just finished reading Hannah Proctor’s Burnout:
Vienna 20–24 April 2024
We do not know if our voices are appreciated as heard from the waiting area in the isolated room. Probably we should have been quieter for the benefit of other patients, many of them lacking visitors of their own
A man with a colostomy pack in the lift
A huge takeaway pizza box on floor 5, carried high, lid flapping
An attempt to buy bubblegum, thwarted, instead we bought strawberry Orbit
We tried to see a painting of poodles represented like clouds but the escalator led us elsewhere
Prater is where we went for release. I photographed Sam on a defunct ride turned into seating, the word Extasy behind him
We played shithead and I was twice (?) el presidente, Sam el pueblo unido jamás será vencido
Friends united, will always love Marina and Danny
On my phone on waking on Saturday 27 May was the news with which the previous paragraph begins. I messaged my partner, who already knew, and we spoke on the phone. It’s a true cliché that death entails a multiplication of phone calls. The middle part of my day was pre-planned: I caught the bus to a community hall in Hoxton and made a banner among three or so friends and a wider group of activists and interested people I had not met before. Home alone afterwards I dipped into emails with Marina and opened her book Speculation as a Mode of Production to read from various sections.
On Friday evening, during a Marxism in Culture about Cecilia Vicuña’s book Saborami, delivered by Luke Roberts and Amy Tobin, Luke had dedicated the following poem to ‘our comrade Marina Vishmidt’, which for its reference to the wings of a dove encouraged me to love a once regretted third tattoo I got in Amsterdam (traced, re-scaled, positioned and inked by Danny from Mexico on his way to a tattoo convention the next day) after visiting the General Idea retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum:
Later, I would hear from Marina that she would like to write something drawing on General Idea’s 1970s project Manipulating the Self (see photos of this project among many I took here). This stands as one of Marina’s unrealised writing hopes. She was prolific, and were it not for the cancer, in some ways just getting started.
On 2 May I made a Marina post to Instagram, reproduced at the foot of this Substack, in which I mentioned wanting to write at greater length soon.* This is the start of that. Slowly, slowly, Becca Abbe (designer of my Teleportation postcard – reply to this post if you’d like to receive on in an envelope in the mail) is building me a simple website which might one day include a newsletter function – I’d like to follow Cam Scott’s example and move away from this platform.
Larne Abse Gogarty concludes her Marina Vishmidt (1976–2024) remembrance in the June issue of Art Monthly, ‘In the days after she died, I found myself thinking I will never trust anything I write again without her input. In the weeks since, I feel awed by and grateful for all she left us to continue thinking with and learning from.’ The transition from the first to the second sentence is hard. I too feel that I have lost my best reader. Marina read voraciously and at great speed, with speed never knowingly compromising her depth of understanding or analytic precision. (On her admiration of precision, or ‘thoroughness’, in Cameron Rowland’s work, note Marina’s writing on the way it ‘puts one in mind of a crystal drill, if there is such a device: It creates sight lines by cutting through language, provenances, and histories, but the cutting apparatus is already a prism’.)
I was faintly astonished when Marina wrote to me one day to let me know that she was exploring all of the hyperlinks in Teleportation #5 – she was listening to some Hannah Weiner tracks on Bandcamp. In bed on the night of 4 June I felt Marina’s absence as a single reverberating thud: I would not be able to message her with news of the BDS victory of Pret cancelling plans to open in Israel, following a successful threat of boycott led by Palestine solidarity campaigners. I would not be able to establish living contact ever again, in fact, on this or any other subject. And Marina’s correspondence, via WhatsApp and Telegram but more notably by email, is the most enduring and lengthiest I have known.
Sven Lütticken comments in his ‘Memories’ the frequency with which Marina was signing open letters in support of Palestinian liberation, and how she had written to him about ‘the necessity and difficulty of boycotting disgraced magazines such as Artforum and Texte zur Kunst’. I had similar exchanges. For instance, on 31 October Marina linked me to this ‘Letter from Berlin: On the situation in Germany in the wake of October 7’, following prior conversation about UKRI and the Artforum boycott protesting the firing of David Velasco. I linked Marina to ‘An Attestation for Editorial Independence’, ‘In case you want to sign!’ ‘If only there were funding and infrastructure to set up a new magazine with these contributors’, I said of the signatories to the latter. ‘So clear the whole thing had to do with not threatening advertising revenue from gallerists’, Marina said, and of the ‘new magazine’, ‘We'll call it October Surprise’.
Anyone questioning the ongoing relevance of the Artforum boycott, or persuaded by e.g. Barry Schwabsky’s deliberations in The Nation and near graphomaniac continued contributions to the magazine, should read Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) and take PACBI’s endorsement of the boycott and former commissioning editor of international reviews Kate Sutton’s words into account, as published by Hyperallergic: ‘It’s disappointing to think that new staff would so readily buy into the idea that my colleagues and I would give up our dream jobs over “protocol,” just as it is disappointing to see writers actively undermine the solidarity of their fellow writers by contributing to a publication that is under boycott.’ Not only did Kate Sutton resign after David Velasco was fired, so too did the consistently patient and scrupulous Chloe Wyma and Zack Hatfield, who have by now found roles at the New York Review of Architecture and at Aperture magazine.
In ‘Memories’, Lütticken also highlights his role in commissioning Marina’s 2014 essay ‘All Shall Be Unicorns’, which I read while trying to think through questions of time as raised by Sam Keogh’s CCA Goldsmiths exhibition.** Kate Sutton did some heavy editorial lifting on an initially fragmented draft of a review I produced in response to Keogh’s show. When Barry Schwabsky came to edit the same piece, he was at first amused but then insisted I remove from my copy an allusion to David Cameron’s alleged pig-fucking via a quote from a poem by Huw Lemmey, on the grounds that it was non-sequitur.***
***
Around 23:00 Friday 7 June, riding the overground from Gospel Oak with Hannah P, I bumped into Tom and Freya who had been at Aces and Eights near Tufnell Park. Tom said this part of the overground is his favourite, and that we were travelling ‘the Goblin line’ (Goblin = Gospel Oak to Barking line). A teleportation story: I once described ‘Love and Teleportation’ as having to do with public transport; as ‘part of an effort to think and talk about time and space and the conditions of loving relations, as mediated by different speeds of movement and communication in the city. In an image of a near future London, Pret offers teleportation as a form of public transport (in partnership with TFL).’ Tom (a former Dalston Lane housemate) and I collaborated on a teleportation radio show broadcast by Montez in February 2022 (listen here).
At 18:28 I had taken the train in the opposite direction from South Tottenham, and on my journey read a chunk of Marina’s 2012 review for Mute, ‘Everyone Has a Business Inside Them’. It was curious to find, among the works in this review, Pil and Galia Kollectiv’s Co-Operative Explanatory Capabilities in Organizational Design and Personnel Management, 2010 – in December 2013 I sought Pil and Galia’s permission to project the same film as part of a multi-floor exhibition at Farringdon Factory, in which I participated as an artist with the sound piece Are You Busy? (I can’t locate Steve Chappell’s final and exhibited edit but some raw recordings are here, here, and here.)
David Panos and I made a visit to Farringdon Factory after he’d introduced me for the first time to Marina and Danny and also Jacob at UCL.
***
On perhaps several occasions I have referred to the genesis of this teleportation project as my collaboration with Daniel Neofetou on a screening, 15 April 2018, of Troy McGatlin’s Love & Teleportation, 2013, at my then home on Dalston Lane. But when searching, on 5 June for of all things my dad’s postal address (since my parents’ separation in 2010/11, I still haven’t been to his house, will maybe rectify this year?) I came across an email from David P, recalling that we had once envisaged collaborating on a teleportation film that might have been inspired by Hal Hartley and set on Long Island (an email from David dated April 2015 concludes: ‘PS - still excited about teleportation. If i have time I’m going to write up a synopsis of what we have so far to get started. There’s lots of holes but lots of potential!’)
Marina responded to my invitation to the Love & Teleportation screening with a suggestion that I add to my list of teleportation films (thus far The Projected Man, Portal: The Disappearance of Francis Lain, The Fly, The Prestige, They Live, Stargate, Space is the Place, Jumper, Event Horizon, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Looper, Star Trek, Primer, La Jetée, 2026, World on a Wire) Leonid Gaidai’s Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession, 1973, ‘my family favorite when was growing up’. She said also to include Groundhog Day and The Navigator, and from there ensued a discussion about the difference between time travel and teleportation, and between space and time. Towards the end of this exchange, Marina: ‘Clearly a reading group on the paradoxes of time qua Deleuze in Difference and Repetition could accompany!’
When I eventually started writing more about teleportation and Pret, in May and June 2023, Marina responded to a post documenting a journey from Pret Shoreditch High St to Veggie Pret Great Eastern St:
Looking forward to your next Teleportation post. Of course, after reading the second post, I didn’t realise how absolutely saturated your workplace proximity is with Prets. I remember there was once a tiny fancy lingerie shop not far from that Veggie Pret (maybe it was even in the same place?) quite a few years ago. I went there once, to get a present for a friend, and accidentally shoplifted something (just by picking it up and absent-mindedly putting it down – in my bag – as those things go), still have that underwear, which is now too big for me and can’t be worn with everything lest it succumb to gravity.
Something I can’t find in my inbox, that no search for ‘soup’ or ‘Russell Square’ or ‘Senate House’ will reveal, is the reference Marina made to the soups she’d been getting at lunchtime at the Pret opposite Russell Square, surely while working at Senate House Library in a rented private study carrel. One soup in my inbox: ‘The parsnip soup, which I just finished at lunchtime today, I prepared to these songs. I followed this Jamie Oliver recipe but used a tin of coconut milk instead of cow's’ (email from me to Marina while cat sitting on Powerscroft Road, 21 April 2021).
I’ve also been saddened not to be able to share with Marina this video of Bernadette Mayer reading her Hibernation Collaboration with Marie Warsh and Phil Good, 4 May 2014, as circulated via the Tender Buttons Press newsletter as part of a celebration of Mayer’s birthday this year. The reading brings together bats (‘Marina, in those last four weeks you were obsessed with bats, with the “bats to adopt” on some blatantly fraudulent charitable website called “bat world” that asked you to pay $35 dollars to adopt bats (“benga the avenger”, “little ernie”) that surely died in 2007 already, which was when the site looked like it was last updated’ – May 2024, email from Danny), owls, teleportation, speculative philosophy, and fairgrounds.
As I proceed with my PhD research on Bernadette Mayer, I’m progressively realising the social-reproduction theory shaped mountain of a gap in my reading, and think of Marina’s specialism in this area. Sitting in the audience at The Common House in Bethnal Green to hear a paper co-delivered by Marina with Zoe Sutherland (when? At Academia.edu I find ‘Some Considerations on Social Reproduction Theory: Integrative or Diffuse?’, given at the ‘Anti-Social Reproduction’ symposium, 4 November 2017, but am convinced I am thinking of an earlier event), I missed a lot of the finer points.
When theory comes to seem daunting to me, I will try to remember the connection Marina made between theory and description, for instance in this talk with Ima-Abasi Okon at Chisenhale on 20 August 2019, and in her 2020 Radical Philosophy article ‘Bodies in Space’ (Marina had previously presented her thinking on ‘bodies’ in ‘Art Criticism & the Pandemic: Whose Body?’)
Repeatedly, in these past couple of months, I’ve been thinking back to Danny’s distinction in Wound Building, 2021, between the difference between a break-up and a death. I have felt humbled and stupid in the knowledge that I’ve reacted in sometimes extreme ways to crises in romantic relations. Here’s a part of that distinction, via Fassbinder, p. 186:
A quotation from Fassbinder that had been doing the rounds on the internet got stuck in my head:
People haven’t learned how to love. The prerequisite for loving, without dominating the other, is your body learning, from the moment it leaves the womb, that it can die. When you accept that a part of life is death, you have no more fear of it and you don’t fear any other “conclusions.” But as long as you live in terror of death, you react likewise to the end of a relationship, and as a result, you pervert the love that does exist.
There’s a sense of cliché in all of this. Death as a part of life: a bohemian’s exercise in titillating the sub-editors. But I had begun to feel fear of death (not only of my own) perverting my thinking about politics too, and I wanted to challenge that habit, to think openly about some of the possibilities that I had shut myself up against.
I think I’ll leave this post now. Or almost. First I would like to share a link to the audio of a recording from the launch of the book Bad Feelings, 2015, by Arts Against Cuts, to which Marina contributed a short entry about social media and affect, ‘STUPOR, OR, AFFECT AT A STANDSTILL’. This was one of the first books I worked on as an employee of Book Works, and one I remain complicatedly proud of helping see to print.
With thanks to Danny for reading.
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*As so many have been saying, and as @roseannegush put it on Twitter, ‘this reality is not ok’. Since 16 April I’ve been thinking a lot of a walk that Marina and I went on together, across Hackney Marshes, in summer 2021. Having tried to grapple with overwhelming loss during earlier parts of the pandemic, we were both moved when Dawn Foster died (known to neither of us personally, although she had spoken at a Goldsmiths picket M had been part of) in close coincidence with the passing of Callie Gardner. Towards the end of this walk, having examined the blackberries and admired the cows and talked about M’s editorship of the Whitechapel Speculation reader, approaching Millfields Park, we noticed a ‘Dawn Foster Forever banner’ strung across a bridge was falling down, so we untied and retied it to make it legible again. Marina Vishmidt Forever. In Paris a couple of months ago, Dawn Foster made an appearance in a long poem Danny Hayward read, perhaps as Marina’s distant spiritual comrade. I have so many thoughts and memories and there’s also so much I do not know. I want to write at greater length soon. @doubledisaster1 introduced me to Marina and Danny, at a UCL real abstraction symposium in 2014. I sat next to @prolapsarian in the dark wood lecture theatre. I had heard of Marina previously through her work with Anthony Iles on Full Unemployment Cinema. These pictures show Marina and I (and @cherrysmythpoet) as photographed by @chriskbmccormack when we appeared together on the Art Monthly radio show in early 2015. The second shows Marina next to Erica Scourti in August 2020, at a PCS culture workers against the Covid cuts rally, gathering Southbank Centre workers together at the same time as Tate United were organising. (M wears a yellow dress, @erica_scourti is in shorts.) Erica and Marina spoke about the Goldsmiths wildcat marking boycott and Justice for Cleaners. Travis Alabanza and Jemma Desai spoke after them. I remember Marina’s speech as being inflected by her recent writing on Cameron Rowland’s ICA exhibition and the BLM uprisings as she spoke about the need for extra-legal means.
After writing about my own illness, I asked Marina if she’d thought about writing about hers. She said she wouldn’t be able to put down anything that @anne_boyer_thirteen hadn’t already written so brilliantly in The Undying, which Marina reviewed.
M had earlier called herself a ‘police whisperer’ — equipped with the power to make the police go away by talking to them outside Gee St Court earlier still in the pandemic at a @hackneylru protest to extend the evictions ban.
Thank you @larneabsegogarty for your beautiful post and to @raeblodmas @avigailmoss @kairostina @what_else_an and others of the 17th floor and so many others still.
** Update 21:52 10 June 2024: I somehow missed until today that CCA Goldsmiths is occupied. More power to the occupation. Strike Outset.
*** The removed passage went: ‘After David Cameron, the former UK Prime Minister who called the Brexit referendum, was alleged to have placed his penis in the mouth of a pig as part of an initiation ritual during his studies at Oxford University, journalist Dawn Foster called for poetry in response. Writer Huw Lemmey offered a W.H. Auden parody: “Silence the press and with muffled drum / Bring out the porker, let David Cameron cum.”’ The review as printed is here.