CRITICAL DOCUMENTS

Piers Hugill
on the church – the school – the beer

cris cheek’s work represents a concerted, and often bewilderingly multifarious, effort to think through the political implications of language as discourse and praxis, as opposed to language as a collection of tokens, as authoritative truth-telling, or as the exclusive property of Microsoft Corp. This is an anarcho-utopic struggle for the earthly commons, where authentic communication is guaranteed under the sign of noise as radical democracy; it is an arena of micropolitical gesture that opens interfaces onto otherwise undisclosed social practices; it is a form of research into all the joyous choreographies of the tongue as the supreme organ of capture and escape.

In the church – the school – the beer cheek makes one of his most impressive and serious efforts to provide a mise en scène of the act of writing as performance. So, as previous material is worked into subsequent improvisations, the text performs and translates itself, just as cheek engages in various forms of ‘automatic listening’ while walking through the centre of Norwich, thereby dramatizing the very act of writing as necessarily a moment of engagement in discourse, and therefore also necessarily a social and political activity.

Furthermore cheek critiques any vestigial notions of the authority of presence in performance and in speech. As in the ‘talk’ pieces of David Antin or Steve Benson, the poetics of transcription problematises both the sites of speech and writing. The subsequent notation of improvised speech in these texts cannot be understood as a complete, or total, representation of that performance. Instead, it opens up another form of mediation, or interface, between one aspect of the performative (talking) and the other (writing). Readers of these texts are treated to a supremely conceptual writing, but one that also promises moments of lush density as well as a strangely delicate lyrical iridescence. An absolute joy, and certainly one of cheek’s finest books to date.

For more on this work, see Piers Hugill's essay at Readings

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See also: Caroline Bergvall
on the church – the school – the beer