Jazmine Linklater
Tryst
17h00 à 17h05 (Prologue)
Is she or is she not in love.
Has she been in love, or will she be in love.
Even if she is alone, she has been in love
or she should be or she would like to be in love.
17h05 à 17h08
On the stairs of her apartment building she trains herself to walk
with slow slow-motion precision
down the steps towards a final pose and lazily delivered line.
Pose allows time to denaturalise the body.
17h08 à 17h13
In a formal, classical style
in E major and in regular 4/4 time
imagined perfection attained, eyes
unconnected
entre 5 et 7 de la soir.
A line in itself says nothing.
But if you use it to say something
it says what you wish.
17h13 à 17h18
She orchestrates gestures around moments of pose.
Pulls up her shoulder strap in a performance
of disorder of dress, completely
at odds with the mechanical
precision of this and each gesture.
17h18 à 17h25
I halt, grab, keep the precarious moment
between the young woman's
appearance and the cut in
/ between, in the line. Cut, like a poem.
17h25 à 17h31
She pulls up her shoulder strap.
A mechanical gesture of disorder
asserting continuous ‘now’, stillness
resonating ‘then’ to the surface. Shakes off
indexical light.
17h31 à 17h38
Can we find a situation in which you do not fool the audience
and still entertain them?
17h38 à 17h45
The developed gesture unfolds
until it finds a point of pose (that death
has passed, just not yet), re-baptism
new name, symbol.
17h45 à 17h52
La marge, c’est ca qui tient le livre
in the games of art and chance. She’s
anomalous. Hasard, hasard,
hazard.
17h52 à 18h00
A preserved fingerprint
/ a sundial's shadow.
So what is the function of woman.
Replaced so easily – so what is.
18h00 à 18h04
I’m making it
like an apple you want to eat.
It's the workers who have a bourgeois outlook.
They dream what the bourgeois have.
18h04 à 18h12
The male figure extracted
from dominating the action
merges into the image.
He remembers his shirt, his shoes.
And he doesn't remember who he was.
18h12 à 18h15
I’m trying to make it
in which people are not stolen.
I don't steal you.
I still participate in a bourgeois culture
in which art is made by an artist.
(Not modest enough. Nor militant enough. And too egotistical.)
18h15 à 18h30
What is a song? How long does it last.
Tryst follows the structure of Agnès Varda’s 1962 film, Cléo de 5 à 7, and borrows text variously from commentary around the film, interviews with Varda and Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second (2006).
Jazmine Linklater is based in Manchester, UK. Poetry can be found in places like a glimpse of; Hotel; Stride; Zarf; Datableed; Paratext. A recent critical essay is up at The Text Art Archive & her first pamphlet is forthcoming with Dock Road Press.