Now the shadow of the column —
as it stretches diagonally across
the square, the bronzed figure falling
slowly, as if in newsreel
or slower still: a painting, a litho-
graph, to be printed and posted
on the boarded-up windows —
the shadow slicing clocks in two
divides the corresponding square,
dust-covered reds on one side
on the other, the cops,
the emperor, perched atop
his collapsing concrete mount,
glazed in bronzed afternoon
light, the moment between
the crash and the crowd’s roar
an epic silent gap, film-stilled,
an historical engraving
upon the bodies of those
who roped and pulled
a millisecond-long victory
over art and anti-art both
nostalgia or history
or a painting of the same name
its first line from A Project
for a Revolution in New —
its last, Courbet:
“The essence of realism
is its negation of the ideal.”
Thus the coins minted from
the smelted brass horses,
rubbed clean of their markings
by the partisans of negation,
for the image comes after —
even as it’s ever always
in the present tense.
*
for the writing comes after —
debt — to what or whom,
scrivened on the column,
a tagger’s quick retort:
now whose life’s in pieces —
as the connoisseurs rush about
price-tagging each cold chip,
morgue’d for the toe-tagged index
as the television skycam snaps
tomorrow’s front page pic —
in shards, remains, whatever,
the square a minefield peopled
by ghosts, by artists’ models,
by narcs and turncoats greasy
the painter waits for tomorrow
’s news, tagged to the grid
point and click and dab and smear
and paste the concrete dust to bear
the weight of just-now’s consequence
in some history painting’s future frame
the square, rectangled, frenzy turned
to math, then scanned for hi-rez prints
while the handheld blocks of brok-
en concrete arc through gas-laced air,
ever hung there between
the photo and its subjects
until “you hear the sirens
through the speaker-phones”
*
or words on the page, read,
in video art voice-over
at the museum of the riot
built with cobblestones and spit
like a youtube video
made with stolen gear
and unliked by everyone
til the algorithm splits itself
in two, one the true demo-
graphic, the other its shadow
falling across the spreadsheet
like a TED talk in reverse
the graphs and pie charts bleeding
as the smug smiles crossfade out
til all you see’s the money
cultured in petrified design
pulsing earning ratios and
quarterly arrest reports
pixels falling from the sky
ticker taped the market crash
onto those still stuck in
the plaza, or the painting, or
panting on the treadmill,
reading the liner notes
wiki’d to my sense of red
history, red scrims, re-read
threats to shut down the port,
the airport, the port-a-potty,
whatever it takes, like, what-
ever it takes to find a copy
*
of Jean Nuchtern’s review
in the Soho Weekly News
of Rainer’s anti-dance or since
I can’t find that, why not,
Rainer Werner’s unshot script
for A Project for a Revolution
starring, oh, I dunno, every-
body? all the gender-outlaws,
set to simmer, in exposition or
occupation or hotel-lobby-bars,
is that a gimlet or a knife,
a fake security pass or what
might pass for leaflets
in “an era of online doubt”
handing out the paper cuts
and a lifetime supply
of wheatpaste for all
that oozes beyond our means
to represent, to make anti-art
and unmake art, to shatter —
to rope and pull, to smash
the present, chalky with the dust
that never settles, noise
in the face of every apologist
for corporate lobby art,
high-concept design — budgeted
against the breaking point, of
sculpture, of plate glass, of friends
caked in pigpen grit, burnt doc-
ument scraps rising, shadowed
’gainst the columns of the fallen,
yet to be built, never to be but —
*
febrile pixelations, spec-
ulative reps, printers ink,
the scream that propels,
teaches, stretches, transmits
across “domains for going
astray,” essaying athwart
the smashed column, riprap
for barricades, fodder for
a monograph on looking back,
the crowd in reverse, running
towards what it could become,
its power in that swell of
radiant expression, destructive,
how to have descriptivized it,
in oil paint, grease paint,
gas lines, water lines, figures,
it’s “not just the cops — it’s
the geometry” — kettled
mass ornament, mass canvass
stretched across the square
ash-can realism of the re-
hearsals for the water riot
and now in the face of
all that, all that is
the still-falling column, cropped
horses loosed from their owners’
leather-bound portfolios, straps
round wrists and waists
pull it down — pull it down,
shadows casting shapes, recast
the form that’s yet to forge
beyond the shattered frame —
— David Buuck : Oakland : 2014