In its earliest years, Michael Jackson & Mickey Rourke committed the Ambiente Hotel’s shadowy but powerful Theory Cadre to a regime of Crowleyism, mechanical engineering & systemic self-doubt. This docufictional image restages a crucial moment from the 1948 May Day Phenomenology Camp: an anonymous member of what was then little more than a clique retreats down the Watkins Path from “a sudden organic lurching movement half-glimpsed along the lowering ridgeline”. “Several hanging cubical structures,” AE Fenell was later to recall, “were observed briefly during a lightning storm around the isloated peak of Yr Aran.” On the same day some younger members of the Camp, tragically decoding Rourke’s shopping list as an instruction, became disoriented & committed political suicide by simultaneously immersing one another in one of the deeper pools of the Afon Cwm Llan. [Photograph & text courtesy Alice E Fennel, both from her forthcoming monograph "Actioning the Optimal: The Theory Cadre in Wales".]
2 Comments
July 1, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Of course one recognizes the competing, paradoxical imperatives which the Theory Group has identified as being presented by the face. Though one is always behind it oneself, it is yet the thing first thrust into the world as the badge of selfhood. Is it any wonder that Jackson and Rourke sought, in their several ways, to mutilate, to control, to mould, to transcend, this dictatorship of the visage?
Mindful of the myth of Narcissus, what other mode of action is appropriate, but to present one’s face to some abysmal looking glass (with a name in a language not one’s own), and to step through it? It is to face the fact that, for the individual, his face is not his face, but the face that others give him. It is the clearest and bleakest glimpse of the void.
Altogether now: “I’m talking ’bout the man in the mirror… “
July 1, 2009 at 1:31 pm
“Do a dance, on the floor, in the round – ” I always thought there was more than a hint of Thelemic ritual there. Now we know the dark and awful truth.
The mechanical engineering came in handy, too:
http://static.guim.co.uk/Guardian/music/gallery/2008/aug/27/michaeljackson/1995-London-EMP-1013732-7215.jpg
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