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 Peñalosa’s understated filmic style (in part due to much of the video’s status as workplace footage unobtrusively obtained) as well as on the performance of the labor being filmed. Akin to the iterations of hyphenated enjambment, “the hands that pertain to the arm / and the arms that belong to the shoulders” grammatically echo Peñalosa’s own explorations of labor’s dysintegral alienation, “an un-suturing of labor / / from its place- / meant,” its repression of “what we call the mind or the self” that is nonetheless also present. The poetry also collaborates with and extends the video’s attention to, for instance, the fly’s guest performance by imagining in a negative register the proletarianization of every element of these scenes. It responds to the beautifully whimsical, reflexively gratuitous video segments by repeating, as though in a children’s book, the question of the legibility of being outside capital’s labor regime: “the grass serenading the hillside does not have a job so what does it do?” The speaker’s later litany of epistolary addressees likewise personifies, using the quaint figure of the letter to establish such a meaningful counterworld. Yet a mournful mise-en-abyme characterizes his final lyric section written in the persona of the hapless worker, capturing the void in wage labor in a compressed sestina.

The impetus for “CCTV” was the Live Magazine Show performance event in 2021’s sixday Lit y Luz Festival (Chicago), a yearly translingual gathering bringing artists and writers from Mexico and the United States into conversation through cross-arts collaboration.⁷ Paired with Peñalosa without their being previously acquainted, Moctezuma urged her to send selections from existing work. Responding as well to the festival’s theme of “Structure,” “CCTV” recycles outtakes from a number of her videos, such as La rutina de un tenedor [Fork routine] and Amberes [Antwerp], made during her artist residency in Antwerp and later shown in an exhibition of artworks focusing on Roberto Bolaño’s eponymous 1981 novella (Moctezuma, “Conversation”).⁸ In part through Moctezuma’s poetic intervention, the resulting montage of self-citation becomes itself an integral work, drawing out commonalities of concern, approach, and aesthetics across her oeuvre. While in Peñalosa’s case the title “CCTV” alludes ironically to her act of turning the camera on her workplace, CCTV is also a trope in Moctezuma’s major first book of poems, Place-Discipline, much of which theorizes how the interpenetration of digital capitalism, algorithmic governance, and surveillance racializes the urban space of Chicago. Mid-poem here, Moctezuma concatenates the trope of CCTV with other figures of involuted closed circuits: border enclosure, black box, camera as la cámara (in Spanish also “chamber”), and poetic stanzas, perhaps a recessed allusion to Dante’s theory of stanza and the canzone structure in De vulgari eloquentia (the Italian word stanza means “room”).⁹ Meditating on the segment that features the port of Antwerp, Moctezuma reveals its history as a colonial entrepôt that continues into its present as a global nexus that exceeds its locale—a bravura iteration of a micro-genre germane to political economy in which a single point is dilated into the full fan of its capitalist capillarity.¹⁰

It’s perhaps not clear whether a set of fingers walking up and then down the switchbacks of a mountain path, through a trick of scale and perspective, is meant to emblematize Sisyphus. In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus sees any act as capable of producing a friction of confrontation with meaninglessness that yields what he calls the “climate of the absurd” [“le climat de l’absurdité”], yet he also singles out artistic creation as particularly revelatory, a “dogged revolt against [the human] condition . . . All that ‘for nothing,’ in order to repeat and mark time” (85). Art should be anti-redemptive, a matter of disciplined, focused emulation of existential absurdity: “A little thought estranges from life whereas much thought reconciles to life. Incapable of refining the real, thought pauses to mimic it” (75). Art “adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape” (84). Peñalosa’s practice might be considered conceptualist insofar as it often involves a verbatim annexation of “reality,” whether in video or in words, that Camus, with his focus on philosophy and the novel, would not recognize or imagine as potentially paradigmatic of the art he valorizes. The last passage from “CCTV” quotes from the final section of Camus’s essay, which offers his forcibly ironic, counterintuitive interpretation of the myth. Intriguingly, Peñalosa cites Camus’s description of Sisyphus’s embodied labor of perpetually pushing the rock, rather than the passage just following it, here:

The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. . . . Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition . . . If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. . . . One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. . . . This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. (90–91)

One is struck, too, by the essay’s relation to Moctezuma’s responsive radical apostrophizing: “The absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up” (Camus 91). In its too-close human tracings that open onto the inhuman, “CCTV” may not offer a manual of happiness. But it does model a bracingly lucid futility speaking our contemporary.

Judith Goldman is the author of four books of poetry, most recently agon (Operating System 2017), and a number of articles on contemporary poetry and poetics; she has performed her work nationally and internationally. In 2019–2020, a collaborative, multi-media installation Open Waters [Northwest Passage + Open Polar Sea + Arctic Plastic] was exhibited at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY. Goldman is Associate Professor in the Department of English at SUNY, Buffalo, where she directs its Poetics Program. She is also the Poetry Features Editor for Postmodern Culture.

Footnotes

1. Many paintings by René Magritte use a cloud motif (for instance, Le faux miroir [The False Mirror] (1929); La condition humaine [The Human Condition] (1933); La vengeance [Revenge] (c.1938–9). The constant presence of the cloud channel in the work was a collaborative decision of the artists, and connects with a photographic diptych by Peñalosa, in which a cloud formation is imaged from Tecate, California, USA and Tecate, Baja California, Mexico.

2. I adopt this thought from Corbin, Village Bells.

3. For a brilliant discussion of this issue, see Weizman and Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline.

4. See De Certeau’s discussion of “la perruque” in The Practice of Everyday Life, 24–28.

5. Núria Vilanova discusses Gardea’s textualization of the border and literary aesthetics organized and motivated by the desert landscape over a number of novels in “Another Textual Frontier”; Sóbol is known for its sonic experimentation.

6. “Explicitation” is a term used by literary theorist Antoine Berman in “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign” (1985) to name a translator’s deformation of a text through the incorporation of explanatory language that destroys a work’s style, its intended opacity, reticence, or sense of mystery. I stretch this term here to cover how ekphrastic verse can overexplain its visual instigator.

7. Information about the Lit y Luz organization and festival schedules quoted from their website www.litluz.org.

8. For more on this exhibition, see the website at Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp: https://www.muhka.be/programme/detail/1316-amberes-.

9. See, for instance, the epigraph from the second book of De vulgari eloquentia that heads Giorgio Agamben’s Stanzas: “And here one must know that this term (stanza) has been chosen for technical reasons exclusively, so that what contains the entire art of the canzone should be called stanza, that is, a capacious dwelling or receptacle for the entire craft” (vii). A longer form of “CCTV” (still related to, but not choreographed with the video) written by Moctezuma plays extensively on sonic and conceptual puns around chamber, stanza, and a camera that films. Undoubtedly, many of my thoughts on the collaboration discussed here derive from reading Moctezuma’s longer work; many thanks to the author.

10. The port of Antwerp is still one of the largest in Europe. The city opened the first bourse in 1531 and remained a center of finance through much of the sixteenth century; it was the “sugar capital” of Europe, importing from Spanish and Portuguese plantations, and is still known for its diamond industry. See “Antwerp.”

Works Cited

• Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Translated by Ronald L. Martinez, U of Minnesota P, 1993.
• “Antwerp.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antwerp. Accessed 2 Mar. 2022.
• Berman, Antoine. “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign.” The Translation Studies Reader, edited and translated by Lawrence Venuti, 2^nd ed., Routledge, 2004, pp. 276–289.
• Camus, Albert. Le myth de Sisyphe. Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1942. Faded Page, https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20160912/html.php. Accessed 3 Mar. 2022.
• ———. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien, Vintage, 1955.
• Corbin, Alain. Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside. Translated by Martin Thom, Columbia UP, 1998.
• De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, U of California P, 1984.
• Moctezuma, José-Luis. Place-Discipline. Omnidawn, 2018.
• ———. Personal communication with author. 28 Jan 2022.
• Vilanova, Núria. “Another Textual Frontier: Contemporary Fiction on the Northern Mexican Border.” Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 21, no. 1, Jan. 2002, pp. 73–98.
• Weizman, Eyal and Fazal Sheikh. The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert. Göttingen, Steidl in association with Cabinet Books, 2015.