• Climates of the Absurd in Chantal Peñalosa and José-Luis Moctezuma’s “CCTV”
• Judith Goldman (bio)

Embedded in an unassuming point on the 1,952-mile Mexico-US border, the scene of counter-surveillance that ends “CCTV”—the collaborative video-poem by Mexican multimedia artist Chantal Peñalosa and Xicano poet José-Luis Moctezuma presented here—subverts through an aestheticized, albeit still uncanny surreality. Rising to the pro-voyeuristic height of the cop car on the hill, the rooftop sitter stages a standoff that, in this landscape, parodically echoes a Western shootout, but more so invokes a laser-like Magrittean absurdity, suggested even more strongly by the perpetual cloud panel of the dual-channel video.¹ The cross-border filmic perspective from the Mexican side meets the surreal with the surreal, drafting the border patrol into an Ionesco anti-play that exposes the police’s own theater of the absurd. The real abstraction of the border is taunted by what Moctezuma calls “system of cloud,” continually asserting its impertinent, blissful autonomy from nation states and their would-be compartmentalization. Elsewhere in the piece, Peñalosa verbally reports a cognate scene: blaring the US national anthem as a sonic duel, the US border patrol aggresses through a cacophonous miasma inversely made of nationalism. If the hourly musical interludes of the town clock help create a shared habitus and specifically Mexican identity for inhabitants, that acoustically grounded form of life is degraded by a trespassing neo-imperial counterblast.² Another of her prose passages registers yet further Yanqui climate control, weather modification through cloud-seeding: “son los americanos, ya están otra vez tirando hielo para que llueva.”³ At the end of this closing segment of inside-out domestic arrangements, a new shot captures a street sweeper raising dust, the dingy street, and the mere serviceability of the domicile: the aesthetic is desublimated, and we end by viewing its supports.

Such a focus on the revelatory “back-of-the-house” echoes the moments in the poem-video that feature service labor in a typical café, or rather the ritualized, compulsive doubles of such tasks. In this sousveillance video, Peñalosa works her actual day job as a subversive form of maintenance art, treading an infra-thin line between work and work-like tasks that points to the hollowness of alienated service labor through repetition, hypertrophied duration, and useless perfectionism (even if, in the case of polishing a spoon, it produces a version of Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror). If “la perruque,” as theorized by Michel de Certeau, is a form of time-theft as an employee does work for themself in the guise of work for an employer, surely by surreptitiously turning her wage labor at the café into sessions in an artist studio, Peñalosa engages in the practice; yet since her art, made on the boss’s clock, assumes the mode of an exaggeration of her work tasks, it also forces la perruque into a paradoxical form.⁴ Over against a perverse, excessive, messy, inefficient attention to saltshaker levels (Duchamp anyone?, and don’t the other workers [managers?] seem on the cusp of noticing?), Peñalosa’s miniature theater of hand and object nonetheless also possesses a certain tenderness. It seems to sacralize these mundane tasks and to make real and felt the time in which they are performed, as in the care with which the entire surface of a copy of Chihuahuan novelist Jesús Gardea’s novel Sóbol (1985) is painted with coffee grounds by gloved hands and then wiped clean— taking up almost a minute and a half of the ten-minute piece—an act of inoperative undoing saturated with intention.⁵ With her commentary on interior ambience and an external ambient, Peñalosa also keeps the atmospheric in focus.

José-Luis Moctezuma’s poetics of interaction with the video seek neither to frame nor to explicate the visual feed.⁶ The relation of his poetry to the video is further complicated by Peñalosa’s own verbal contributions to the piece, which consist of excerpts from her work diary. The ekphrastic mode of some of Moctezuma’s verse mimics and signifies on...

• Chantal Peñalosa 和 José-Luis Moctezuma 的“CCTV”中的荒诞气候
• 朱迪思·戈德曼（生平）

在墨西哥-美国边境 1,952 英里的一个不起眼的地方，结束“CCTV”的反监视场景——墨西哥多媒体艺术家 Chantal Peñalosa 和 Xicano 诗人 José-Luis Moctezuma 的合作视频诗在这里呈现——颠覆了一种审美化的，尽管仍然不可思议的超现实主义。上升到山上警车的亲窥癖高度，屋顶保姆上演了一场对峙，在这个景观中，戏仿地呼应了西方的枪战，但更多的是唤起激光般的马格利特式荒谬，更强烈地暗示了双通道视频的永久云面板。^1个墨西哥方面的跨界电影视角与超现实相遇，将边境巡逻编入 Ionesco 反剧，揭露警察自己的荒诞剧场。边界的真正抽象被 Moctezuma 所谓的“云系统”嘲弄，不断宣称其不受民族国家及其可能的划分的无礼、幸福的自治。在这篇文章的其他地方，Peñalosa 口头报告了一个同源场景：美国边境巡逻队将美国国歌作为声波决斗，通过与民族主义相反的刺耳的瘴气进行侵略。如果城镇时钟每小时的音乐插曲有助于为居民创造共同的习惯，特别是墨西哥身份，那么这种以声学为基础的生活方式就会被侵入的新帝国反击所破坏。²她的另一篇散文段落记录了进一步的 Yanqui 气候控制，通过播云改变天气：“son los americanos, ya están otra vez tirando hielo para que llueva。” ³在这个由内而外的家庭安排的结尾部分，一个新镜头捕捉到了扬起灰尘的清道夫、肮脏的街道以及住宅的实用性：审美被贬低了，我们以观看它的支持结束。

这种对具有启发性的“后台”的关注呼应了诗歌视频中典型咖啡馆中服务劳动的时刻，或者更确切地说，这些任务的仪式化、强迫性双重。在这段监控视频中，Peñalosa 将她实际的日常工作作为一种颠覆性的维护艺术形式，在工作和类似工作的任务之间划出一条细线，通过重复、过度的持续时间和无用的完美主义指出异化服务劳动的空洞（即使在抛光勺子的情况下，它会产生一个版本的凸镜自画像）。如果“ la perruque”，正如 Michel de Certeau 所论证的，是一种时间盗窃形式，因为一名雇员打着为雇主工作的幌子为自己工作，当然是通过暗中将她在咖啡馆的工资劳动转变为艺术家工作室 Peñalosa 的会议参与实践；然而，由于她的艺术是根据老板的时钟创作的，采用了夸大其工作任务的模式，这也迫使la perruque成为一种矛盾的形式。^4个与对盐瓶水平的反常、过度、混乱、低效的关注（有人杜尚吗？其他工人 [经理？] 难道没有注意到这一点吗？）相反，Peñalosa 的手和物体的微型剧院仍然具有一定的温柔。它似乎神圣化了这些平凡的任务，并使它们变得真实并感受到了它们执行的时间，就像奇瓦瓦小说家赫苏斯·加迪亚 (Jesús Gardea) 的小说《索博尔》( Sóbol , 1985) 的整个表面都被戴上手套的人用咖啡渣精心绘制手，然后擦干净——在十分钟的片断中几乎占了一分半钟——这是一种充满意图的无效撤销行为。⁵通过对室内环境和外部环境的评论，Peñalosa 还关注大气。

何塞-路易斯·蒙特苏马 (José-Luis Moctezuma) 与视频互动的诗学既不寻求构建也不试图解释视觉馈送。⁶他的诗歌与视频的关系因 Peñalosa 自己对作品的口头贡献而变得更加复杂，其中包括她工作日记的摘录。Moctezuma 的一些诗句的 ekphrastic 模式模仿并表示......