Anwen Crawford - No Document

Anwen Crawford

Published by Transit Books

2301 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California 94612

www.transitbooks.org

First published in Australia by Giramondo Publishing, 2021

Anwen Crawford 2021

ISBN: 978-1-945492-61-7 (paperback) | 978-1-945492-63-1 (ebook)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2022930467

DESIGN & TYPESETTING

Justin Carder

DISTRIBUTED BY

Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

(800) 283-3572 | cbsd.com

Printed in the United States of America

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All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

You could say an event in history is over, the way a book is slapped shut when it is done. But where is the marker?

Fanny Howe

Georges Franjus documentary Le Sang des Btes begins with the slaughter of a white horse.

Or so I had remembered.

A man leads a horse by its bridle through the gates of an abattoir. The horse and the man stand together in the courtyard of the abattoir.

The pressure applied by the man as he places a captive bolt gun to the head of the horse appears gentle, as the touch of ones lips upon the face of a person to whom you are saying goodbye, and perhaps for a long time.

I was young for a long time. Nobody died. Perhaps I wanted to die, or thought that I did, but that is not the same.

As the man drives the bolt through the brain of the white horse its legs buckle instantaneously. It seems to bounce from the pavement into the air before crashing onto its flank.

To be stunned.

The word comes from thunder.

What I really mean is that no death had overturned me.

During the second semester of my first year at art school you bring a sequence of black-and-white photographs to class.

Our first year at art school. Some years after your death I find a notebook in which you have written MY WORKin blunt pencil, as you always wroteand then crossed out the MY for OUR. Our work.

I think of the way in which the horse turns its head in order to face the man who holds the captive bolt gun.

Or the texture of the back of your hands and the ways in which you moved them.

The photographs you bring into class show you kneeling at night on a pavement, digging through the concrete till it cracks, and then planting a sapling in the new wound.

Sous les pavs, la plage!

Thats when I know we have to be friends.

Your white skin tanned; your brown panelled nylon zip-up jacket; the rats tail of red hair that ran below your shoulders, till you cut it off; your hands

Or does the man who holds the gun pull upon the horses bridle?

On my laptop I watch a contemporary drama set in London, featuring two women who are asylum seekers from Syria. Only, it transpires that the women are not Syrian, they are Iraqi, and this makes them economic migrants, not asylum seekers, and so they are taken into detention. At the detention centre, a guard observes to a cop: Its a lot like a slaughterhouse. You need to calm the animals.

The first thing we make is a fence / on Wangal country, unrolling the wire mesh across the width of the gallery.

For an instant, with its forelegs drawn into the air, the stunned horse recalls a statuary horse on a carousel.

The borders of present-day Iraq have existed only since 1920, when the Treaty of Svres allowed the victorious Allied Powers of the First World War to partition the Ottoman Empire. The Treaty of Svres was signed at the Svres national porcelain manufactory, in the suburbs of Paris.

Aux porte de Paris, reads the opening caption of Le Sang des Btes: At the gates of Paris.

At each end we staple-gun the mesh to the walls.

August Macke, the German painter, was killed by French artillery fire on 26 September 1914, during the second month of the First World War. He was twenty-seven. His compatriot and fellow artist, Franz Marc, who had also been drafted, did not learn of Augusts death for nearly a month. Oh dearest, Marc wrote to his wife Maria, on 23 October, the naked fact will not enter my head.

I think the horse isnt dead when it hits the ground; it is concussed, catastrophically.

When its throat is cut its blood makes vapour as it spills from the warm interior of the body, to meet colder ground.

The year before we met I spent a week in the psychiatric ward, on suicide watch. In the interview room, when I lifted my jumper, the admitting doctor winced at the crosshatch along my torso.

You remove your shirt as we workstupidly bare-handed!to top the fence with barbed wire, and I watch you, surprised by your visible strength, and for a moment consider you in desire, but the moment passes and I never return to it.

Through the windows of the wards lounge I saw a billboard edging a nearby four-lane road; it read ESCAPE

You will die a decade later in the same hospital.

The development of the abattoir as a site beyond the boundaries of the city was motivated by a desire on the part of public health inspectors, among others, to remove unregulated private butcheries and slaughterhouses from heavily populated urban areas. It was believed that the visibility of animal slaughter had a morally corrupting effect upon the citizenry, young men in particular.

It felt like we were going crazy then: everyone around me, everyone young. I was eighteen. It was the first year of the new century.

It occurs to me you learnt the same year that you had cystic fibrosis, which should have been diagnosed when you were a baby. At nineteen you were adjusting to a truncated sense of your lifespan.

My housemate had a psychotic break. Friends phoned late, on the landline, self-harming and hazily suicidal. A hospital psychologist advised me to distinguish my own moods from the state of the world.

But what if the problem, I said, is capitalism?

The fact that we are shaken together.

I check the word torso in the dictionary and it says: An unfinished or mutilated thing.

In the spring, after the hospital, I went to Melbourne to protest a meeting of the World Economic Forum / on Wurundjeri country. 20,000 people showed up, though the cops said half that number.

If our natural curiosity hadnt been carefully repressed, we should quite naturally be very interested in what happens in slaughterhouses, and go and have a look, and not need films like Le Sang des Btes

A temporary fence had been raised around the whole perimeter of Crown Casino, where the World Economic Forum was scheduled to hold its meeting over three days.

On the first day, a comrade from Chile showed us a tactic theyd used during the years of the junta. Form a circle: it takes less people that way to block a space than it would to block the same with a straight line.

The carousel, or merry-go-round, has its origin in training games practised by Arabic horsemen during the time of the Crusades, from which the idea of circular jousting enters Europe.

It was the era of summit protests, as they were called. In 1999, major demonstrations had taken place in Seattle, outside a meeting of the World Trade Organisation. In 2001, 200,000 people would confront the G8, in Genoa.