Transubstantiation Studies

03.11

2011-03-11T09:34:00.000-08:00

Disputation of The Holy Sacrament

This is a fresco painted by Raphael during the High Renaissance in the Vatican's Stanze di Raffaello, commissioned by Pope Julius II in 1508.

The painting depicts The Church, including all its key members during the Renaissance, debating the doctrine of (can you guess?) Transubstantiation. It is paired with a depiction of The School of Athens directly opposite; The Western tradition's philosophers (Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes, etc) developing Humanism in parallel with the founders of the Catholic Church.

Besides being excited to discover the subject of this blog has been depicted in such a grandiose fashion I was pleased to note that Italy also is graced with ridiculous signage. There was a plaque below the Disputation saying "This fresco painted by Raphael is titled "The Disputation of the Holy Sacrament", but it should really be called "The Triumph Of The One Great Truth" as it depicts the founding of our great Holy Church."

Another highlight was the name of the company that made the pew benches in St. Peter's Cathedral. A small plaque on the back of each bench boldly declared: "GENUFLEX"

This is wildly appropriate, as an experience of High Renaissance religious painting (produced by some of history's most licentious characters) is robust, physical and mighty. The link between representation (in its most accomplished form, Renaissance Perspective) and the violence, the muscle required to establish a dominant rhetoric becomes immediately obvious. The environments are immersive, total, and completely overwhelming.

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02.17

2011-02-17T15:08:00.001-08:00

The beginnings of a found-image essay

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Bertolt Brecht - War Primer
Bertolt Brecht - War Primer
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/02/09/vatican-says-iphone-app-cant-forgive-sins/
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/confession-a-roman-catholic/id416019676?mt=8
Wellcome Trust "What Am I?" Exhibition at the London Museum of Science
John Stezaker
Modest Mouse "Blame It On The Tetons"

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02.04

2011-02-04T08:36:00.000-08:00

The 2 month disappearance has at last come to a close. Between going back to Canada for the holidays and a number of projects that have overwhelmed me, I've hardly had time to blink let alone come up with a post for this blog.

What I've been working on:

A collaboration with Samuel Keogh, titled Before Commandments, for an exhibition at Shudder Gallery in April.

An article that will be published in Poetry is Dead

An article that will be published in Under/Current Magazine

A language/food fast in the style of early reformation mystics (more on this in a later post)

Preparing a piece for the Chisenhale Residency workshop that will happen on February 21st

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the one article has been giving me a particular amount of trouble, and in the end, with the indispensable help of Yannis (working with an editor is such a luxury), I finally decided to split the article into two separate things. The bit I won't be using, sadly, is on Transubstantiation, but I will develop this into something larger for another project. Since it is relevant to this blog, here you go: a be-laboured definition of what Transubstantiation is (in case you were wondering this whole time):

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After religion lost its authority on suffering and reason to science after the enlightenment, a main project of art in the 20th Century has been to take over the tradition of mystical exploration from the church, being driven by a “…quest for a consciousness purified of contaminated language”* . It was first Duchamp, and later Conceptual artists who first made art’s obsession with language explicit, tracking the dispersion of mundane objects into an art discourse*.With Duchamp’s Fountain, a toilet became a conduit for the highest level of cultural thought just as a cracker previously provided a way to inject divinity into the body of a believer via Transubstantiation.

Transubstantiation is a doctrine belonging to the Catholic church and becomes an excellent device with which to identify the residue of religious ideology in art, and to re-purpose embodied ritual for use in contemporary art practice. According to the doctrine a person who receives the Host is spiritually transformed into the food he has eaten.

Transubstantiation? (or: I never went to Sunday School)

Transubstantiation is a theological belief associated with the practice of observing the Eucharist, also known as the Holy Communion. The practice is common to Protestants and Catholics alike, and is described by the Apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians (11:23--26) where he reminds the church of Jesus’ wish that they break bread and drink wine in remembrance of his sacrifice.

These instructions were first carried out by members of the early church in Rome
and continue to be enacted in the present day. What makes The Catholic approach unique is the ‘Host’, which represents the body of Christ and using the power of God’s presence, simultaneously is the body of Christ. The Host consists of bread (in today’s terms, wafers or soda crackers) and wine (or non-alcoholic grapejuice). Transubstantiation is an infinitely repeatable miracle where the act of consuming the Host deposits holy essence deep into the bowels of a believer. One doesn’t need to stretch the imagination very far to guess what obsessions this cannibalistic allegory generated with regards to saliva, oral hygiene, the state of the stomach and the quality of a believer’s digestion* .

The key component of Catholicism is observing these forms of ritual and bodily absorption to bring about salvation (blood, guts, glory), rather than in Protestantism where the body suddenly disappears in the 1600’s and salvation comes through personal choice, reason or hearing the ‘word’ (evangelism)*.

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*Susan Sontag - The Aesthetics of Silence Aspen Magazine, 1967
*Seth Price - Dispersion, 2002
*Camporesi - The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation & Salvation in Early Modern Europe
*CBC Ideas - The Early Modern Period

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12.12

2010-12-11T16:05:00.000-08:00

12.04

2010-12-04T14:08:00.001-08:00

The last post presented the problem of how structures, like language, or history, or reason, mediate the experience of an object and allow a person to communicate that experience to someone else. The limitations inherent in this strategy are met on my part with a certain amount of frustration.

In thinking about how to resolve this problem I happened to attend a Coney Island themed drag show at the Working Men's Club in London, Bethnal Green. The final act was a performer from Finland named The Baron. His relationship to objects was simple: he inserted them into his body while we watched.

He began by hammering nails into his nose.

From there he took two weights, each attached to a chain with a hook.

Using the hook, he suspended the weights from 3 locations:

1. A piercing in his nose

2. A piercing in his ears

3. A piercing in his nipples

4. His eye sockets

Witnessing these actions and sharing this experience of an object, all I could think was "This is where language leaves me".
Writing about it now is merely a residue, a report back from the singular field of experience.

pictures provided by Ayesha Moarif

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12.02

2010-12-02T09:29:00.000-08:00

Sir Isaac Newton's Prism

Object Encounter

Case 3: Rocks and Minerals
Enlightenment Room, British Museum

Description:

A mottled surface. Hatched markings, multi-directional.A network of tiny fissures enmeshing the stone, as if somehow a collection of scratches has been assembled into a form. As if it was built by a process of inverse reduction; if reduction were somehow additive.
The larger cracks are loosely bound together. A chalky print in negative revealing the darkness of the stone, a filmy white that allows only a hint of the black beneath to peek through.
Then, depending on what angle you look from a mother-of-pearl rainbow appears, emerging from the depths, breaking across the surface.
It is behind glass, in a mahogany box with a near invisible stand. It will last longer than the walls that contain it.

Aztec Obsidian Mirror, used for consulting the dead

Question:

What do you say to me as I sit here (inappropriately) and listen? I am here to lend you my ears oh labradorite. Your presence has spoken to me louder than all the other objects. In my memory I lent you a much more extravagant, yet typical form. In my mind you were a jagged clumps of crystals, like the New Age, like Superman, the image of a crystal rather than a humble rock, something somber when seen from a distance and expansive up close.

Enlightenment Room, British Museum

Interrogation:

My view of you is always interrupted by a bar, constantly reminding me of my forcible removal from the physical, the material, and my knowledge of how to engage with it. I can only look from a mediated distance, a tool brought to us in the enlightenment, by reason. After transubstantiation was dismantled, we were quarantined to a distant and immaterial understanding of the world. Quarantined to an understanding demonstrated through language rather than acts.
Here, now, I feel the echo of this strategy and wonder how it has mutated and come to be experienced in present times. What are the rock collections and taxidermies of late Capitalism? of Quantum Physics?
The brain in the jar has become the organic computer. We watch a re-mixed fan video of a scientist measuring a brain in a jar on youtube. The original file has been lost, or banned from viewing due to copyright infringement.

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11.22

2010-11-22T02:26:00.000-08:00

This Is Your Brain on Metaphors
By ROBERT SAPOLSKY

"Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath."
...
"This neural confusion about the literal versus the metaphorical gives symbols enormous power, including the power to make peace"

Full article here:

The implications of this article highlight my interest in language, and why I focus on its use in particular as an emancipatory device. It was while apprenticing with a shaman (2007-09) I began my interest in the power of metaphor to create physical realities. I knew I would never make a proper shaman, as the guides I kept getting were writers (notably: ee cummings and Simone de Beauvoir), and they would tell me to get out of my trance and go write, already. However, through the process of study, I saw numerous instances where people would use Shamanic techniques to access what I would describe as images or metaphors. I was always more blown away by the images, or stories that people would share after journeying, rather than assuming any kind of other-worldly presence. The main content of the journey would result in a metaphor shift (the bear came to me and gave me a tool that lets me adopt a mode of being that I desire). In a very powerful and physical way it enables someone bodily to inhabit a different story. I saw lifelong physical problems disappear after the right body-metaphor was discerned and a ritual was performed to release it.

In a similar vein, I have been thinking about my use of fabric when thinking about language and its connection to sovereignty. As a kid learning to sew my Grandmother would often condemn my fabric choices saying “Those types of fabric don’t work together. Their qualities are too different, they will pull apart if you try and put them together”.
As I have begun to develop my own practice in textiles, I have learned through the ingenuity required by quilting that any type of fabric can be joined to any other type of fabric, as long as you can figure out an appropriate stitch.

Like William Morris I am for a slowness in production as a form of emancipation, as a protest against the alienation of capitalist labour. I am for a language that acts as a stitch, one that will allow the union of two very different, seemingly incompatible ways of being, or views of the world.

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Last night I had a dream about the Reformation, except it was happening now. The IMF had come to London, and were assessing how it could save the economy. I waited in a cement parking lot with my friends. There were parallel meetings of academics, trying to figure out how to counteract whatever damage the IMF was planning.
Conclusions were reached, and we read the newspaper to find out what they proposed as a solution. I was horrified to discover that they didn't want to change anything other than getting rid of the zoo. I was weeping, saying "There aren't any animals left in the city anyway, and now they're taking away the only ones we have." I wondered if perhaps it wasn't such a terrible thing, as the animals were in cages, so at least they would be free. But then my friend reminded me that meant the animals would be killed, as an animal bred in captivity cannot survive when released in the wild.
I wondered about the dissolution of trade borders, and through this the dissolution of Nations, and how this is returning us to the way things were before the Reformation. Since the transformations of that time were in large part brought about by new technology, I wondered what technology it was that contributed the most to the current state of affairs.
In my dream the answer was Facebook. If it has not created it, FB at least exists as the largest symptom of the dissolve of the individual, of the border between public and private, which was one of the largest components of Modernity begun in the reformation (for more about this, read Richard Senet - The Fall of Public Man). Facebook allows for the simulation of an individual identity, while all components of the individual are collected by data agencies, and lumped into 'interest groups' or marketing categories. It is the biggest actor in this drama, mimicked in many smaller ways in the rest of culture. The notion of individuality is a romantic residue that is purely symbolic, exploited by the market. Even philosophy is positing the self as a construction that evolved to serve the function of allowing one organism to communicate with another, that can be dissolved by meditation or psychedelic drugs. (Thomas Metzinger)

I realized I was sitting in a cement parking lot, philosophizing, and that I wasn't getting any rest by dreaming about this. I made a note to remember these thoughts (I have to remember: ZOO, FB, IMF), and finally slept dreamlessly for the rest of the
night.

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11.17

2010-11-18T10:52:00.000-08:00

ersatz, bodily crystal ball

CBC Ideas: The origins of the modern public Sept. 17 2010

Episode 2 - The Reformation

CBC Ideas is the only reason I listen to the radio. I already was excited about the content of their programming, but just last week I stumbled on a series of episodes discussing “The Origins of The Modern Public”, which at first glance sounds about as exciting as watching paint dry. However, episode two deals with, unbelievably, the subject of Transubstantiation and how it contributed to the birth of the Modern notion of public.

To listen to the entire episode click here:

In an instance of academic synchronicity, I attended a lecture at Goldsmiths University on Monday (Nov. 15 2010) led by Michael Newman discussing the development of the Modern Public. The main part of the lecture focused on the public typically being represented after the French Revolution by images of a hand holding the decapitated head of the King, signaling the severance of the state's sovereignty from the head of the king and transferring it to the ‘Body Politic’.

All further writing in this post will be drawing from information contained in the lecture and radio series (episodes 1-9).

I should really describe the images in the lecture as the dis-embodied hand of the ‘body politic’, holding the guillotined head of the King, as it points out a fundamental paradox that seems to emerge in the 1600’s, or ‘early modern’ period (as it’s now being called by a group of researchers called “Making Publics” based at McGill University in Montreal). This paradox is the problem of sovereignty; where it goes and how it is expressed.

Before I elaborate on this I will give a cursory outline for the key components of the birth of the Modern Public presented by the CBC, and if you want more detail you can listen to the archived podcasts.

(click More for a very long history lesson)

More...

In the episode that interests me, Torrance Kirby, Matthew Milner, and Robert Tittler talk about a new form of consciousness that emerges out of a few interlocking factors: the new technology of maps and navigation tools, the distillation of regional dialects into an official, written language and the corresponding invention of Grammar, and the printing press. These technologies allowed people to create a new relationship between themselves and the world. Suddenly someone in France could compare the size, literature, language, or costume of their country to that of Italy, England, or anywhere else that had access to the same technology. Suddenly the idea of being a citizen in a Nation, with an Official Language that could be distributed and read came into being. There were also radical advances in science that proved many sacred doctrines of the church (like the humours, astrological notions, etc) to be false.

Alongside these technological developments was the cataclysmic emergence of Protestantism. In 1534 the Affair of The Placards shook France when radicals used a printing press to produce a denouncement of the Catholic Church and put up flyers around Paris and the surrounding area.
In Germany, 1517, Martin Luther nailed The Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Church of All Saints and was excommunicated by the Pope.
In England, it’s 1532 and Henry VIII wants to divorce Catherine of Aragon, and defects from the Church of Rome to found the Church of England, but only after publicly denouncing Martin Luther and being awarded the title of “Defender of The Faith” by the Pope.

The key issue that united these refusals of Rome was that of Transubstantiation. It refers to the practice of eating bread and drinking wine, as outlined at the Last Supper by Jesus before he is sacrificed. A person is considered to consume what is called the Host and the Eucharist, which in the Catholic tradition is thought to be not only bread (or cracker) and wine (or grape juice), but also the blood and body of Christ incarnate. Pre-modern minds treated the activity as an allegory; the deed and the idea were one.
Protestantism proposed that this was at best absurd, at worst evil, and that the Eucharist was an empty sign, referring to nothing other than the belief held by the person consuming. As their take on the doctrine developed, they became known as Iconoclasts (literally: destroyers of images) and throughout the Reformation destroyed Catholic objects, imagery and decoration in cathedrals.
For Protestantism, the rituals and objects stood between the believer and God, and the only way for someone to receive the Host was directly by The Word. This shifted culture from one of embodied practices to one of persuasion, or salvation through Evangelism (Etymological root: Good News).

This was bad news for the Monarchy. The sovereignty of the King was determined by his being appointed by God. He was literally the Host incarnate, the embodiment of Divinity. If Protestantism was right, then it would not be possible for the King to be possessed by the Host, and thus his sovereign right to rule was compromised. Also, since he was the living incarnation of the God-Head, he got to decide how the entire country would practice religion. Saying the King wasn’t possessed amounted to not only heresy, but anarchy as well.

This, alongside the technological developments, demanded that subjects begin to make up their own minds about what they thought was necessary for salvation and subjectivity. As Protestantism grew, the Monarchy needed to assert itself as still relevant. St. Paul's Cathedral in London began a series of what you could call public sermons, where groups of individuals came to listen to pastors preach about the falsity of Transubstantiation, and also the relevance of the monarchy in-spite of the King not being ordained by God. The interesting thing about these sermons was that they were not mandatory. Previously, if a subject did not attend Sunday Mass, they risked being imprisoned. For the first time in history, people were gathering on a basis of personal interest and investment. There was not as large a pedagogical effort in France, who preferred to kill off Protestants by burning them at the stake or by hanging. Riots broke out across Europe as leaders switched religions by the decade. A subject could no longer trust the ruler to decide how they would be saved, so they started to decide for themselves, to see themselves as an individual in a body of invisible, but likeminded ‘others’ who shared their belief, opposed by an (also) invisible group of people with an opposing set of values.

...

Through all this it becomes clear just how dependent the political sphere was on religious pedagogy, and how this defined the inner life of a subject. This brings me back to the idea that sovereignty moved from the head of the King to the Body Politic, which was just beginning to develop. For the first time society, and by extension subjectivity, was thought of as something to be discussed, or publicly debated.

The Body Politic became sovereign, and here lies the paradox that interests me. First, sovereignty was exclusive to men. Women were relegated to an increasingly restrictive and patriarchal domestic sphere (it didn’t always exist that way!) and the care of a newly invented class of citizens, children*. Servants were not considered citizens either, and thus both groups were denied access to sovereignty. It was limited to landowners, men. Queen Elizabeth even had to de-sex herself (referring to herself as a virgin, or with male pronouns) in order to have access to the sovereignty required to rule.

The second point of paradox is in the location of sovereignty. Both Politics and Religion were contained in the head of the King. After his head was cut off, Sovereignty was said to move into the Body Politic. However, this was in large part instigated by Protestantism, which, by attacking Transubstantiation, removed embodiment from politics and religion. In this way Sovereignty is still located in the head; the mouth for discussion and evangelizing, and the ears for hearing the Word.

Sovereignty was thought to be a lived practice, or embodied, and available to one person. From there it was abstracted into Language, and available to a few people. The key myths commonly preached during this time were the Tower of Babel, an example of language dividing, and the Day of Pentecost, where people are possessed by every different tongue (The Word), and unified through language. People were divorced forcibly from ritualized objects, and rigid forms of taxonomy began to develop, the kind typified later in the Enlightenment. The body was forgotten in favour of the mind, subjective experience replaced by reason, and Calvin burnt anyone who disagreed.

As it turns out, this was not a cursory post. Instead, I will consider this an outline for a further trajectory of inquiry. Where did sovereignty go? What does it mean now? Walter Benjamin wrote about the Melancholic - the sovereign who is overwhelmed by objects and unable to decide. He is joined by Agamben describing sovereignty as ‘he who decides the exception to the law’. Where is individual sovereignty located, regardless of gender? Where is sovereignty without exclusion? Can I locate sovereignty in my body, rather than in my head? Can I exorcise this possession of rhetoric, not hear the Word, but practice it in ritual?

To come: attempts at providing answers for these questions, especially in the context of what looks like a return to Feudalism for industrialized Western society, thanks to the WMF and the collapse of the economy.

*this is a topic that warrants many more essays.

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11.10

2010-11-10T15:51:00.000-08:00

I have come to realize that I have been suffering from what can only be described as culture shock, but rather than being caused by people or food, it is brought about by the architecture, planning of the city, and agriculture. London is a strange contrast of warm, welcoming people, and an absolutely brutal approach to public and private space. There are hidden gems, but more on that later.
It would be false to assert that the treatment of usable space is due to how small the island the United Kingdom is situated on. Vast quantities of land are wasted, paved over in concrete, inert and unusable. Many areas house abandoned factories whose presence have consequently prevented the land from being usable for anything else. All of the vegetables are pre-cut and wrapped in plastic.

I went from this:

to this:

I couldn't figure out if this was supposed to be a park, a square, or a parking lot.

there were signs saying that if you go on the beach you risk accidentally deploying an explosive or being shot

without irony I can say that my favourite part about London is the signage

10.30

2010-10-30T02:51:00.001-07:00

read the whole book here:

courtesy Marwin Bald

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10.27

2010-10-26T16:41:00.000-07:00

A Reading List

click below for notes on my working method and what I'm reading:
More... I would like to take this opportunity to delve a little into my working method. Attempting to understand the way I make art (a generally futile endeavour), I like to think of it as cyclical.

(this is flexible and open for revision, but for now I will record it in a semi-permanent format for the sake of communicability)

Stage 1:
Reading, researching, collecting, exploring. This involves taking long walks, going new places, reading as many books as I can get my hands on. This will rarely include films, but often include conversations, lectures. I like to refer to this stage as 'percolating' or 'simmering', where I put ideas on the stove to boil.

Stage 2:
Developing, making. This involves long hours of tedious labour, usually making use of a method that is more complicated than it needs to be. I make room for at least 3 failures. More collecting.
This stage involves overcoming a lot of fear of the unknown.

Stage 2 a:
Getting Feedback, making revisions.

Stage 3:
Presentation, distribution. This is self explanatory. This is my least favourite part, and the one I have the most difficulty with.

Obviously, the boundaries between each stage are blurry, and sometimes I will revisit Stage 1 in order to complete Stage 3 (usually accompanied by lots of hair pulling, weeping, and gnashing of teeth). Sometimes Stage 2 comes before Stage 1, when I've made something that I need to explain and don't have a clue where to begin.

Often, I'll have different projects on the go, in which case I can be in any combination of Stages simultaneously.

I am thinking about all this because I am deep in the trenches of Stage 1, and I need to sort out the biggest reading list I have ever been faced with. I am trembling at the base the megalith.

Currently Reading:

Judgement and Contemporary Art Criticism - Artspeak / Fillip Editions
Story of O - Pauline Reage
Paper Monument 1

Bedside Reading:

The Gutenberg Galaxy - Marshall McLuhan
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu

Books I must read for my course:

Richard Sennett - The Fall of Public Man
Yve Lomax - Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature And Time
Edward Carpenter
William Morris - News From Nowhere
Pierre Bourdieu
Henri Bergson - Laughter: An Essay On The Meaning of the Comic
Kevin Hetherington
Falke Pisano
Aspen Magazine
Bertolt Brecht - Word Primer

Books that I want to read to help me keep my own interests + sanity

Susan Sontag - Against Interpretation
The Cloud of Unknowing
Zygmunt Bauman - Liquid Modernity
Science Poems - OK DO
N+1 9 - Bad Money
Fillip 10
Vito Acconci - Language to Cover A Page
Kierkegaard - Either/Or

Books I have finished since the beginning of the September

Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Material 2 - Summer 2010
FR David: With Love 2010
Gagarin no. 14 2006
The Mock & Other Superstitions 1, 2, 3
Fillip no. 12
Yve Lomax - Passionate Being
Nietzsche - Why I Am So Wise
Nietzsche - Human All Too Human
Cabinet - Fall 2010
Dot Dot Dot 8 - Set in Edinburgh, 2009
C Magazine 106 - The Supernatural
Griselda Pollock - Mapping The 'Bios' In Two Graphic Systems With Gender In Mind
Paper Monument 3 - Spring 2010
The Emancipated Spectator - Jacques Ranciere
The Celtic Way Of Seeing - Frank MacOwen
Walking - Henry David Thoreau
The Sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe

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*Note: this list does not include online blog content, predominantly lolcats and The Archdruid Report

as a final thought: after extreme bouts of reading, or information gathering, I have begun to notice that my head becomes extremely hot. This is a new sensation, I am curious to see how it develops.

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10.21

2010-10-19T15:11:00.000-07:00

An experience of "Bacchus and Ariadne", the 16th century painting by Italian painter Titian (Tiziano Vecellio).

to inquire about the object click here

Workshop #1: Adrian Rifkin

Art Writing As:

- why should I trust you?
- abuse of meaning
- being posessed by rhetoric
- language is a fabric of relations
- an obligation, a state of becoming
- not one, but two kinds of melancholy (once you start, you can't start again &
mourning the loss of the object)
- hysteria of combination
- a fabric of relations

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10.15

2010-10-15T11:49:00.000-07:00

There has been a lack of updates, which I hope to have successfully remedied beginning with this post. I have been in the process of re-locating to London to study under Maria Fusco (and others) in the Masters of Art Writing program at Goldsmiths University. So far it is blowing my mind. More on this later.

Too much has been changing at once and I don't know what to make of things yet, so for now I will merely document.

Item #1:

Business Cards! Made by Anette K Hansen, a designer possessed by absolute cunning and genius.

Item #2:

I have been featured on Semi-Domesticated Blog. Semi-Domesticated is a curated boutique and gallery, showing and selling hand-crafted, upcycled and vintage furniture, clothing and accessories. I made some things for them to sell, and they ask me how and why I use crochet in my artistic practice.

Item #3:

I don't know what to make of this, but for what it's worth my work has been featured in the Korean version of Elle Magazine, along with Anette K Hansen and Mirak Jamal. And David Shrigley. "That's my work there, the one between the tits n' ass."

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09.19

2010-09-19T15:31:00.000-07:00

Data is not information until it is processed by the mind and integrated as knowledge. Until then it is merely noise.

Internet as: Digital Feast / Vomitorium

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09.13

2010-09-13T15:34:00.000-07:00

http://london.craigslist.co.uk/vol/1952386293.html

I am serious about this. E-mail me at rlamarre@gmail.com if you would like to join my League of Grandmothers and be part of the team.

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08.22

2010-08-22T08:17:00.000-07:00

I am having a solo exhibition at Working™®© Project Space in Berlin from August 19th - September 2nd.

Soft Forms and Warm Gradients
(or, how to circumvent Naïve Realism)

This show is a series of works that are the culmination of a year of studying Transubstantiation. The word is not used in the sense of the religious, but of Alchemy. The effort was a study of things that turn into other things. Things that appear to be other than what they are. Words as Things. Things as Words.

...The final objects are texts that aid the circumvention of Naïve Realism. This is achieved through hallucinations or optical illusions - anything that de-constructs the image of reality and causes you to not perceive the apple as an object, but as a process of neural relationships that mean the experience ‘apple’. The goal is to break down the walls of one’s ‘ego-tunnel’ to reach a true understanding of one’s internal processing, how reality itself is a representation. The goal is to experience your world not as reality, but as a form of mental content.*

--

-

excerpt from a letter:

“… I imagine that’s why the invention of perspective was so appealing - a fixed point of view that locks objects into a consistent and fixed scale, a device to establish your position relative to the unstable world that surrounds you. God, the moral spectator, applauds your attempts to fix down meaning, to craft a fixed and consistent reality that can also, when applied correctly, allow you to make concrete decisions and experience the hallucination of a coherent self, the consistent, contigent ‘I’.”

The conscious brain is a biological machine, a reality engine that purports to tell us what exists and what doesn’t. it is unsettling to discover that there are no colours out there in front of your eyes. the apricot pink of the setting sun is not a property of the evening sky, it is a property of the internal model of the evening sky, a model created by your brain. the evening sky is colourless the world is not inhabited by coloured objects at all, it is just as your physics teacher in highschool told you. Out there, in front of eyes there is just an ocean of electromagnetic radiation, a wild and raging mixture of different wavelengths. most of them are invisible to you and can never become part of your conscious model of reality.*

info document designed by Easton West

*ideas proposed by Thomas Metzinger in “The Ego Tunnel - The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”

for images of the final work please visit my portfolio website

special thanks to Marwin Bald for helping install the show, Easton West for designing the flyers and handouts, everyone else at Working for suggestions/comments/moral support, and thanks to everyone that came to the vernissage!

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08.11

2010-08-11T05:05:00.000-07:00

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than a work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.

- Henry David Thoreau "Walden"

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08.10

2010-08-09T14:17:00.000-07:00

wool 1 x 1.5 m

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08.09

2010-08-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

Artist at Work

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07.20

2010-07-20T05:23:00.000-07:00

My work was recently included in "Exhibition IV", a show curated by 10/2/10, a Berlin based curatorial collective. It was part of "Who Cares Redux", a show hosted by the artist group Triple Canopy.

"In the winter of Late Capitalism we are going to need blankets"

(ongoing series - 100% wool blankets, pre-existing monumnets, photographic prints,)

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07.17

2010-07-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

07.16

2010-07-16T05:38:00.001-07:00

QR Code for: it could always be worse

QR Code for: why not? / might as well

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07.12

2010-07-12T13:07:00.000-07:00

"Why are we doing this?"
"... I don't know. It feels important."

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07.07

2010-07-07T12:10:00.000-07:00

This is Pfaueninsel, located in Wannsee, the Southwestern part of Berlin.

The earliest recorded use of the island was by the alchemist and glassmaker Johann Knuckel. He was sponsored to carry out his experiments by Elector Friedrich Wilhelm until there was a mysterious fire in 1689 that burned the laboratory to the ground. Neighbours to the area were said to be relieved, as it was a common belief that Knuckel was practicing black magic.

In 1793 the Prussian king Frederick William II decided that the abandoned island would make a great location for housing his numerous romantic liaisons. He built a castle in-the-style-of its own decay, an ersatz ruin, made of cheap wood and plaster painted with colours that belong on a cardboard representation of a castle in Disneyland.

True to the Romantic Period and its obsession with taming the unattainable exotic, William also installed a menagerie of foreign birds and peacocks who were able to wander through the island as they pleased. Today peacocks are still kept on the island, though the menagerie seems to have fallen out of use.

++ photos

More...

“On Rabbit Island neither the merest tree nor bush may ever be felled again!”

Frederick William II declared this when he purchased the island, but it was not an invitation for the forces of nature or entropy to flourish. Just as it was popular to think of a Romantic garden being set ‘en scene’, the island became a stage, captive, a taxidermied presentation of what the King had conquered. It is carefully cultivated artifice masquerading as untamed nature.

The present day island is confounding. There are ochs (oxen) roaming in fenced fields next to peacocks. There is a mausoleum dedicated to the German Queen Louise built in the style of a Roman temple. There is a garden that looks like it hasn't changed its presentation since the 1800's, boasting a long promenade crowned with a banana tree.
There is a geometric, metal sculpture installed by Olafur Eliasson. The castle itself is built in a Neo-Classical style, but as a ruin, out of wood painted to resemble stone. Truly, William must have been possessed by the future ghost of Postmodernism, or at the very least a healthy appreciation for the absurd.

An architect inspects the construction of the building. He declares "This cannot possibly be designed by an architect! No architect would sign their name to this, it must have been a construction worker." The building was in fact masterminded by Frederick William's head carpenter.

There are many overlapping elements from radically different periods in time and space. It is hard to tell how much has changed from the original(copy), and what interventions have been made by conservators. It is particularly bizarre to learn that decisions I would attribute to a mis-guided architect in the 80's would actually be the decision of a King in 1793.

Everything on the island seems to amount to a non-representational image of itself, a performance of historicity, but a history that was from the very beginning a childish fiction. For William the castle was pretending to be a ruin, while for us it still pretends to be a ruin while simultaneously a ruin; a ruin that pretends to be a ruin. It is a forged historicial document experienced as a themepark display.

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06.30

2010-07-01T11:02:00.000-07:00

A meditation on why Facebook is Evangelizing

On June 27th I attended a conference about Communism featuring Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. Having only read excerpts from the Communist Manifesto during my BA, most of what was discussed was lost on me. However, through the dim fog of my understanding I did pick up an interesting idea that Žižek briefly outlined. The discussion was an attempt to answer the question "What purpose could Communism serve today, if it were ever to function according to some approximation of its ideal? (apologies for past permutations included in the bargain)"*

Žižek argued the answer to that question could only ever be a matter of what he called objective belief. To elaborate he told a story about the Tibetan practice of tying pieces of paper with prayers on them to tree branches. He called it objective belief in that "you can go off and think about sex and beautiful women (sorry for the sexist bullshit), and have your prayer keep working for you."

The other example was a professor who was a staunch atheist. He was reputed to keep an exotic religious artifact on his bookshelf that was supposed to bring luck, or productivity, or [insert desirable effect here]. When asked why he was stooping to such low levels of superstition he responded "I have it there because I was told it works even if you don't believe in it."

--

I'm not interested in making any proposals about the future of Communism. What interested me was the blurring of political, superstitious and religious knowledge. I am intrigued by the conflation of political ideology with religious practice, an overlapping of thought and action structures when each structure vehemently denies having affiliation with any of the others. His response to a political and ethical question was essentially a dodge of personal responsibility and authority, a double-appeal to superstition (in other words: "I don't want to be the expert that says an ideal Communist state is possible, but I believe in it, even though I don't believe in belief.").

Responding to a question that is unanswerable by one person or a singular authority with meta-prayer is a result of something John Greer calls 'Magical Thinking'. It is making an intellectual incantation in an attempt to dispel the difficulty of putting a plan into practice, usually a plan that was never meant to be realized in the first place.**

More importantly, the director of The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Lorraine Daston argues that styles of knowing are moral, and that each system of thought implies an ethics***. Political-thought systems, like Communism, are fundamentally inseparable from the ethical principals that are associated with their implementation in the world, much like a Religion. This is the same for Scientific or Economic views of reality, whose lack of ethical consideration is becoming starkly apparent.

Three small examples:

1. The global collapse of the economy, partly stemming from the deliberate mystification of the economic process****

2. the lack of planning and foresight that resulted in the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico

3. a proposal to let the three month old, first form of synthetic life (a computer generated bacteria) try to eat the oil in the Gulf of Mexico, presented as a reasonable an expedient solution *****

Another solution to the problem of the spill was proposed by Sarah Palin and followers; why not drop a nuclear bomb into the Gulf of Mexico? In the face of atrocity and an uncertain future it seems the only utterances we can make are absurd.

It would seem that the grand-narratives of Modernism (The Future, Communism vs. Capitalism, Progress, Endless Prosperity etc.) are finally drying up with the last of the oil. I don't mean this to invoke the myth of progress vs the myth of apocalypse, I do not believe the world is going to end. I'm trying to use it as a way to think about why, when the future is closing in and it doesn't look the way we hoped, when we no longer believe in old systems that have proved faulty, we collectively disassociate and expect the internet to absolve us.

Let's tie a ribbon on the tree for Communism and wait for the fall of the Global Capitalist Democracy.

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* this was probably not the real question, but my very slanted interpretation of the question. Under Communism my great-grandfather was sent to the Gulag by Stalin. My grandmother grew up working in forced labour camps first under Communism, then under the Nazis when the Russian government gave up citizens of Belarus to German rule after the country was bombed in the Second World War. Needless to say I am suspicious of how effectively theoretical ideology can be implemented.

**
Magical Thinking and The Gulf of Mexico (aka - Sarah Palin, go away)

*** for more on this and the history of science listen to the CBC Ideas radio series "How To Think About Science"

****
This American Life explains the economic crisis

***** Craig Venter unveils his discovery of the first synthetic form of life on Ted Talks

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06.24

2010-06-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

another warm gradient

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06.20

2010-06-22T12:06:00.001-07:00

Germany *as* Mexico

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06.18

2010-06-22T11:57:00.000-07:00

culture/nature collaborations

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06.14

2010-06-14T03:37:00.000-07:00

How can a text, which consists of language, be outside languages? ...

the answer, of course, is transubstantiation. Read more behind the cut.

More... How exteriorize the world's jargons without taking refuge in an ultimate jargon wherein the others would simply be reported, recited? As soon as I name, I am named: caught in the rivalry of names. How can the text "get itself out" of the war of fictions, of sociolects? - by a gradual labor of extenuation. First, the text liquidates all metalanguage, whereby it is text: no voice (Science, Cause, Institution) is behind what it is saying. Next, the text destroys utterly, to the point of contradiction, its own discursive category, its sociolinguistic reference (it's "genre"): it is "the comical that does not make us laugh," the irony which does not subjugate, the jubilation without soul, without mystique (Sarduy), quotation without quotation marks. Lastly, the text can, if it wants, attack the canonical structures of the language itself (Sollers): lexicon (exuberant neologisms, portmanteau words, transliterations), syntax (no more logical cell, no more sentence). It is a matter of effecting, by transmutation (and no longer only transformation) a new philosophic state of the language-substance; this extraordinary state, this incandescent metal, outside origin and outside communication, then becomes language, and not a language, whether disconnected, mimed, mocked.

Roland Barthes - "The Pleasure Of The Text"

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06.07

2010-06-07T09:35:00.000-07:00

A visit to the grave of James Joyce, north of Zurich, Switzerland.

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05.31

2010-06-02T10:47:00.000-07:00

Olafur Eliasson - Innen Stadt Außen

Olafur Eliasson's work has taken over a wing of the Walter Gropius-Bau in Berlin from April 29th to August 29th. The show was curated by Daniel Birnbaum, an art critic and curator at the contemporary art space Portikus in Frankfurt Am Main.

The show involves many mirrors, lenses, and strange lights that change the way one experiences colour in a room. This is exceptionally difficult to do, as the human eye boasts a very sophisticated process called metamerism which usually prevents a shift in one's perception of hue. Essentially, metamerism causes a red apple to look red under the bright mid-day sun, and also red in the deep orange-yellow of evening, regardless of the change in wavelength produced*.

One of the key pieces in the exhibition was a large room with a table covered in experiments that look like a sci-fi marriage of early Bauhaus studies and Buckminster Fuller. Geodesic domes, fractal structures and geometric chaos abounds. The messy scene is lit by a strange orange light that seems innocuous at first glance. However, after a short while the eyes adjust and I was surprised to discover I was seeing in black and white. It was a deeply unsettling sensation.

There are other orange-yellow filters throughout the exhibition, and flashes of light and colour that shock the system; by overwhelming the visual sense the other senses are temporarily suspended*. This hypnotic effect coupled with unexpected mirrors disassociates the viewer, vaulting them outside of themselves, observing their experience of the museum as an immediate history, the viewers as actors, and the work as archeological experiments that recall a notion of a nostalgic future.

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* as explained in "The Ego Tunnel" by philosopher Thomas Metzinger
* more on this in "The Guttenberg Galaxy" by Marshall McLuhan

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05.27

2010-05-27T07:12:00.000-07:00

My work is going to be on display at Blim Gallery in Vancouver, BC. The show "What Does Info Want?" is curated by Emiliano Sepulveda and Ray Hsu and runs from June 4th - 25th.
The opening is on June 4th and is part of a week of art, music and general shenanigans known as Music Waste. If you are in Vancouver you should check it out, especially for me since I can't be there.

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05.20

2010-05-20T06:26:00.000-07:00

a warm gradient

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05.12

2010-05-12T11:18:00.000-07:00

Why Not?

Woodhenge - markers indicating prehistoric trees planted in concentric circles, geographically aligned with Stonehenge and the Sun during Beltane

Through a series of unexpected coincidences, I stumbled across a van full of astrologers, psychics, mediums and school teachers doing a tour of sacred, prehistoric England. They had a spot available, so I asked to come along since I didn't have anything else to do.

With the moon still visible, we watched the 4:00 sun-rise at Stonehenge (an ancient temple dedicated to the Sun); we experienced the union of Isis and Osiris. They told me this was cosmically significant. These are people that study the stars and planets the way my dad watches the stock market, so I assume they know what they're talking about even though the workings are just about as mysterious and opaque as the economy.

A theme that seemed to be woven throughout the trip was that of a collapse between myth and history. The region of Britain known as Avalon is home to the legend of Arthur. Many people will assert that Arthur was real, while others steadfastly believe he was only a myth. For certain stories there is historical evidence that seems to corroborate what supposedly happened; that being said, there are at least 4 different castles that claim to be Camelot.

Any sense that can be made from the overlaps between story and history points to the notion that the actions of 'Arthur' refer to several kings at the time who engaged in driving out the Anglo-Saxons, stamping out pagan Druidic practices and unifying Britain with Christianity.

In a similar vein, my time at Stonehenge could be described as spanning the range from sacred to the very, very mundane. On one hand there was a palpable sense of history, thousands of years of worship and religious activity, and millions of people that believe in the power of the location. On the other hand, I could feel my feet slowly freeze, and in my early morning stupor hallucinated the thousands of tourists streaming through, taking 3 megapixel photos and drinking Starbucks.

a security guard protects the monument

Merlin's Cave

Glastonbury Abbey - home of the first church, built by Joseph of Arimathea

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More...

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04.29

2010-04-29T01:23:00.000-07:00

After Caspar David Friedrich in Rügen, Germany

click for more photos

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04.24

2010-04-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

A visit to the Devil's Mountain

Philip K. Dick talks about a gnostic interpretation of the Devil in a speech titled "How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later"

"My theory is this: In some certain important sense, time is not real. Or perhaps it is real, but not as we experience it to be or imagine it to be. I had the acute, overwhelming certitude (and still have) that despite all the change we see, a specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change: and that this invisible underlying landscape is that of the Bible; it, specifically, is the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts.

Parmenides would be proud of me. I have gazed at a constantly changing world and declared that underneath it lies the eternal, the unchanging, the absolutely real. but how has this come about? If the real time is circa A.D. 50, then why do we see A.D. 1978? And if we are really living in the Roman Empire, somewhere in Syria, why do we see the United States?

During the Middle Ages, a curious theory arose, which I will now present to you for what it is worth. It is the theory that the Evil One—Satan—is the "Ape of God." That he creates spurious imitations of creation, of God's authentic creation, and then interpolates them for that authentic creation. Does this odd theory help explain my experience? Are we to believe that we are occluded, that we are deceived, that it is not 1978 but A.D. 50... and Satan has spun a counterfeit reality to wither our faith in the return of Christ?"

click for more photos

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04.20

2010-04-24T13:23:00.000-07:00

I have always been a romantic

04.12

2010-04-12T05:13:00.001-07:00

The Why Not / Might As Well:

In March I traveled to Switzerland in order to visit The Emma Kunz Center. It is a small refuge tucked in behind a suburb of Zurich; the only indication it exists were randomly placed, unassuming signs pointing in various directions. The center was established by the artist and mystic Emma Kunz. It is home to a permanent exhibition of her large scale pendulum drawings, an old roman rock quarry said to possess extraordinary levels of electromagnetic energy, and a conference room for medical practitioners learning to use Aion A, a powder derived from the rock in the quarry.
My skepticism was aroused by claims about the healing properties of the rock and a lack of documentation to show how, exactly, the invisible properties of the rock were measured. However, Aion A is a widely recognized therapeutic product used throughout Switzerland and is sold in drugstores. It is used primarily for treating inflammation and damage to ligaments or muscles.
Also, visitors to the grotto are only allowed to be in the actual cave for a maximum of half an hour for fear of damage from the intensity of whatever is present in the rocks.

As for a subjective experience, after sitting in the grotto for about 10 minutes I started to have a sharp pain in my lungs and a dizzying sensation of nausea. I moved to a different spot, the pain subsided and was replaced by a delicious sensation of relief and relaxation coursing through my nervous system. I could feel my circulation distinctly, and when my eyes were closed there were two bright dots flashing in the center of my vision. As a child my parents had brought me to a pentecostal church. There would always come a point in the service when the congregation would be speaking in tongues and 'laying-on-hands', and the pastor would start to yell "The spirit of the Lord is here!". The sensation I experienced in those moments was very close to what I felt at the Emma Kunz Center.

I was disappointed by the lack of concrete information about what exactly is the cause of the phenomena. My research is hindered by my lack of German, so for now I suspend final judgment of what transpired and hold my subjective experience and my rational skepticism in equal light.

Anticipating the question of how I spent my time in Switzerland, the simplest answer became "I sat around in a cave hidden in a suburb of Zurich." When asked "why", the answer is very clearly,

... why not?

Connecting The Dots:

Friend and contemporary of Emma Kunz: Rudolf Steiner, founder of Waldorf education and Bio-dynamic Agriculture

Joseph Beuys' + Emma Kunz's work is presented together in a show at the Kunsthaus Zürich (01.08.1999)

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04.05

2010-04-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

Which Of These Things Is Not Like The Other?

A trip to visit die schwarze Maria at Kloster Einsiedeln, about 30 km SE of Zurich.

The Kloster (or monastery) is famous for housing a shrine to Black Mary, a legendary phenomena that occurred through hundreds of years of burning candles under the statue; the figure was slowly covered in centuries of soot, turning the features from marble white to a deep black. A few years ago the church decided to clean the statue, believing that due to the miracle, this would have no effect on the color. Naturally, the colour was removed in the process, so the church decided to paint the statue in order to return it to it's prior state, although this time, minus the miracle.

More...

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03.30

2010-03-30T15:10:00.001-07:00

1.
I experience alternately two nights, one good, the other bad. To express this, I borrow a mystical distinction: estar a oscuras (to be in the dark) can occur without there being any blame to attach, since I am deprived of the light of causes and effects; estar en tinieblas (to be in the shadows: tenebrae) happens to me when I am blinded by attachment to things and the disorder which emanates from that condition.

Most often I am in the very darkness of my desire; I know not what it wants, good itself is an evil to me, everything resounds, I live between blows, my head ringing: estoy en tinieblas. But sometimes too, it is another Night: alone, in a posture of meditation (perhaps a role I assign myself?), I think quite calmly about the other, as the other is; I suspend any interpretation; I enter into the night of non-meaning; desire continues to vibrate (the darkness is transluminous), but there is nothing I want to grasp;... estoy a oscuras: I am here, sitting simply and calmly in the dark interior of love.

2.
The second night envelops the first, the Darkness illuminates the Shadows: "And the night was dark and it illuminated the night." I make no attempt to emerge from the amorous impasse by Decision, Enterprise, Separation, Sacrifice, etc.; in short, by gesture. I merely substitute one night for the other. "To darken this darkness, this is the gate of all wonder." "

Roland Barthes - A Lover's Discourse, Fragments

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03.19

2010-03-19T05:19:00.000-07:00

A Love letter from Barthes:

"A Buddhist Koan says: "The master holds the disciple's head underwater for a long, long time; gradually the bubbles become fewer; at the last moment, the master pulls the disciple out and revives him: when you have craved truth as you crave air, then you will know what truth is.
The absence of the other holds my head underwater; gradually I drown, my air supply gives out: it is by this asphyxia that I reconstitute my "truth" and prepare for what in love is Intractable."

Related Searches
Intractable pain
Intractable vomiting
Intractable migraine
Intractable back pain
Intractable seizures
Intractable epilepsy
Intractable nausea

Pothos: desire for the absent other
Himeros: burning desire for the present other

Visual oscillation between the sublime and the abject

03.14

2010-03-14T10:05:00.000-07:00

Perverse Triangle

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03.12

2010-03-14T09:09:00.000-07:00

Now You Don't Have To Read It:

"Story of the Eye (Histoire de l'oeil)" - Georges Bataille

Translated from French by: Joachim Neugroschal
Published by: Penguin Books, London 1928, 2001

Contents:

Part One - THE TALE
Part Two - COINCIDENCES

"The Pornographic Imagination" by Susan Sontag

"The Metaphor of the Eye" by Roland Barthes [translated by J.A. Underwood]

"The wind had died down somewhat, and part of the starry sky was visible. And it struck me that death was the sole outcome of my erection, and if Simone and I were killed, then the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars, fully unrelated to any external gazes and realizing in a cold state, without human delays or detours, something that strikes me as the goal of my sexual licentiousness: a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating."

More...

This book defies description. You actually do have to read it yourself in order to have an affectual experience of the narrative, which is where the power of the work lies.

However, an injust, terse description of the contents has best been phrased by Susan Sontag:

"The emphasis in Histoire de l'Oeil is on fantasy first, and then on its correlation with some spontaneously "invented" act. The development of the narrative follows the phases of acting out. Bataille is charting the stages of the gratification of an erotic obsession which haunts a number of commonplace objects. His principle of organization is thus a spatial one: a series of things, arranged in a definite sequence, are tracked down and exploited, in some convulsive erotic act. The obscene playing with or defiling of these objects, and of people in their vicinity, constitutes the action of the novella. When the last object (the eye) is used up in a transgression more daring than any preceding, the narrative ends...
Bataille has written an erotics of agony... obscenity for Bataille simultaneously revives his most painful experiences and scores a victory over that pain."

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"The Pornographic Imagination" - Susan Sontag

On Pornography as a form of art:

"To put it very generally: art (and art-making) is a form of consciousness; the materials of art are the variety of forms of consciousness. By no aesthetic principle can this notion of the materials of art be construed as excluding even the extreme forms of consciousness that transcend social personality or psychological individuality.
...If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society - it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there. Being a free-lance explorer of spiritual dangers, the artist gains a certain license to behave differently from other people; matching the singularity of his vocation, he may be decked out with a suitably eccentric life style, or he may not. His job is inventing trophies of his experiences - objects and gestures that fascinate and enthrall, not merely (as prescribed by older notions of the artist) edify or entertain. His principal means of fascinating is to advance one step further in the dialectic of outrage. He seeks to make his work repulsive, obscure, inaccessible; in short, to give what is, or seems to be, not wanted. But however fierce may be the outrages the artist perpetrates upon his audience, his credentials and spiritual authority ultimately depend on the audience's sense (whether something known or inferred) of the outrages he commits upon himself. The exemplary modern artist is a broker in madness.

Connecting the dots:

Dash Snow
Terence Koh
Tracey Emin
Paul McCarthy
William S. Burroughs
The Art Museum As Ritual - Carol Duncan
Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction - Boris Groys

"What a human being possesses deep within him of the lost, of the tragic, of the 'blinding wonder' can be found again nowhere but in bed" - Georges Bataille

On Religion as a form of Pornography:

"Normally we don't experience, at least don't want to experience, our sexual fulfillment as distinct from or opposed to our personal fulfillment. But perhaps in part they are distinct, whether we like it or not. Insofar as strong sexual feeling does involve an obsessive degree of attention, it encompasses experiences in which a person can feel he is losing his "self"...

One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not. That few people regularly, or perhaps ever, experience their sexual capacities at this unsettling pitch doesn't mean that the extreme is not authentic, or that the possibility of it doesn't haunt them anyway. (Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds. Yet among the multitudes of the pious, the number who have ventured very far into that state of consciousness must be fairly small too.)"

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03.06

2010-03-06T06:27:00.000-08:00

A soft, light-permeable structure that will keep you warm

03.04

2010-03-04T10:07:00.000-08:00

Now You Don't Have To Read It:

Simone De Beauvoir - "The Ethics of Ambiguity"

Translated from the French by: Bernard Frechtman
Published By: Citadel Press, New York 1948, 1976

Contents:

I Amibiguity and Freedom
II Personal Freedom and Others
III The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity

1. The Aesthetic Attitude
2. Freedom and Liberation
3. The Antinomies of Action
4. The Present and the Future
5. Ambiguity

“... It is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom.”

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More...

“The Ethics of Ambiguity” is an argument for existentialism as a system of individualist ethics and is a direct pre-curser to “The Second Sex” where Beauvoir elaborates ideas about anti-oppression and the Hegelian notion of the Other.

She talks at length about failure pitted against success, and the negative aspect of existentialism being essential for a positive experience of selfhood. Most of the book is spent illustrating different ways a successful projection of subjectivity can be aborted, or fail altogether. Also, the necessity of the possibility of failure in a philosophical system; without it success would be impossible. Examples outline how when faced with ambiguity, rather than being furnished with a sense of infinite possibility, The Serious Man, The Passionate Man, and The Adventurer will experience fear and will flee from the implied responsibility of a totally free existence. Instead they will set their existence against the backdrop of a culturally decided narrative, succumbing to what she calls ‘facticity’, the element of life existentialists define as absurd.

On Ambiguity:

“To declare an existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must constantly be won...
So it is with any activity; failure and success are two aspects of reality which at the start are not perceptible. That is what makes criticism so easy and art so difficult.”

On The Serious:

“It is in a state of fear that the serious man feels this dependence upon the object; and the first of virtues in his eyes, is prudence. He escapes the anguish of freedom only to fall into a state of preoccupation, of worry. He will always be saying that he is disappointed, for his wish to have the world harden into a thing is belied by the very movement of life.”

On Love:

“It is only as something strange, forbidden, as something free, that the Other is revealed as an Other. And to love him genuinely is to love him in his otherness and in that freedom by which he escapes. Love is then renunciation of all possession, of all confusion.”

On Art:

“Science, technics, art, and philosophy are indefinite conquests of existence over being; it is by assuming themselves as such that they take on their genuine aspect;
...
As for art, we have already said that it should not attempt to set up idols; it should reveal existence as a reason for existing... Art reveals the transitory as an absolute; and as transitory existence is perpetuated through the centuries, art too, through the centuries, must perpetuate this never-to-be-finished revelation. Thus, the constructive activities of man take on a valid meaning only when they are assumed as a movement toward freedom.”

Nagging, Unanswerable Question:

“Every war supposes a discipline, every revolution a dictatorship, every political move a certain amount of lying; action implies all forms of enslaving, from murder to mystification. Is it therefore absurd in every case? Or, in spite of everything, are we able to find, within the very outrage that it implies, reasons for wanting one thing rather than another?
...Morality resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning... Ethics does not furnish recipes any more than do science and art. One can merely propose methods.”

Freedom is a word that has been shamelessly abused in the last decade so it is important to make a distinction: the kind of freedom elaborated in the book is contingent on the freedom of others. Within De Beauvoir’s system, the pursuit of freedom through tyranny is inadmissible. Freedom cannot be won at the expense of another subject, and it cannot be abstracted into the worship of an Object otherwise it ceases to exist.

Bottom Line:

Only the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardening into the absurdity of facticity. The goal is not unconscious flight, but a willful, indefinite projection of ourselves into an open future.

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03.03

2010-03-03T13:02:00.000-08:00

soft forms

03.03

2010-03-03T12:56:00.000-08:00

02.24

2010-02-24T13:16:00.001-08:00

A perfect example of the kind of transubstantiation I'm pursuing (#1).

What Do I See Here?

Sunscreen blocking light waves, burning skin to create text

Inscription of a structure onto real bodies (see: Kafka - In The Penal Colony)

Art intercepting the serious 'facticity' of someone's beach experience

Art confronting the public sphere, met with apparent hostility

I wish I was on the beach

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