THE MANIPULATOR magazine was born in 1984 into a world almost unimaginable today: no cell-phones, no internet, no Adobe Photoshop, no digital cameras. In those quondam times, it was the cordless phone, the fax machine, the colour-copier and the Apple IIc that defined the technologically savvy.
Johnno du Plessis

THE MANIPULATOR’s WEBSITE

If I lived those days, I’d be missing them.

Whitin my young dance students, the paradox of wishing to be free of unruly and uncovenient bodily demands so that one might live peaceably from within one’s body recently seems to be intensified. Bodies are experienced as menace. From this perspective, they cannot but fail. Bodies seem to be bound to be wrong. No space for a shared problematic such as seeing our stance towards the body as problematic… Instead, they feel that the problem lies in the ineptitude of our individual endeavours.

Have we failed to create the body as it should be or how we want it to be?

It seems that we only have a temporary peace, with the next opportunity to take “it” in hand and attempt to keep refashioning it emotionally, physically, medically… around the corner.
There is no such thing as a body that can simply be.

Images by Rasha Kahil

Some thoughts. Roughly summarized and laid here without arguments.


The art/entertainment world, more than ever uses and recycles signs and references belonging to historical and/or contemporary political/social/cultural movements, but at the same time, any kind of debate or speech seems to have completely disappeared. There are many reasons I can see for this state of fact, here is something to start with.


It seem completely obsolete if not irrelevant to keep using notions like left- or right- wing. More than irrelevant, these notions contain historical connotations and associations interfering with an objective understanding and positioning towards today’s main social/economical/environmental entities such as political parties, movements, lobbies, companies. In order to re-establish a public debate and allow citizens to efficiently affiliate themselves, it is time to develop new criteria, classifications and nomenclature for the entities that retain a critical power on our societies. First of all, like mentioned previously, should be definitely be included in any kind of classification any kind of NGO, company, media, with an established social power/influence. That influence could be rated on a progressive scale. Then at least 3 dimensions of classification should then be used:
— position on social organization: power dynamics, domination, submission, micro-economic organization, supra-national structurations, military & diplomatic relations, …
—position on economic organization (especially macro-economic): regulations, limitations, structuration and underlying values/ethos
—position on environment: exploitation of natural resources, energy, and socio-geographic dynamics, territory management, …
The classification should be supervised by an official international evaluation office.






IMAGE: David Thorpe, Pilgrims, 1999, Collection Laura Steinberg and Bernardo Nadal-Ginard (Photo: Courtesy Maureen Paley, London)

according to genesis P’Orridge

Of course, those who work in pain management quite properly want to bring relief to those who suffer unbearably.
Of course, chronic pain is debilitating.
Of course, the effort to find drugs to neutralise the pain are comprehensible and laudable.
…
Is it the transhumanists’ wish to do away with pain that is a curiosity, as it seems to deny–along with so much else–the ordinary experience of being alive?

Above: a leg being taken care of by Thomas Hooper.

The Skin exhibition opens at the Wellcome Collection in London on June 10th and includes a collection of dry-prepared tattooed human skin specimens amassed by Dr ‘La Valette’ in the 19th century. Mostly homemade stuff but with some early machined pieces too. Shown to explore the fascination criminologists at the time had with tattoos as visual codes, seen as the harbinger of social degeneration. I’m more interested in how he got his hands on them…