Fruit of the Loom (Without Stain)
The destabilization of textuality as dispersed in techno Gaia chaos, humming its splits, divisions, discontinuities and informalities in the language of being perfectly reasonable without the slightest sense of angst while instantaneously articulating a vision beyond any cosmogony yet dreamed of, I had no choice but to overnight it in the city and become the locus of my own measure, which felt like a most logical alternative to the steady impulse of ego-structure I had been weaned on so as to maintain the cruise-controlled holding pattern my entire persona had become submerged in. This may seem like a strange way to open a blog entry and is certainly not the direction I thought my new work would be going in, but this none-too-subtle need to succumb to an organic mode of thought that plays at the inner linings of a conceptual feasibility blanketing my entire body seems to be producing something coherent inside my head today. The fact that it feels perfectly coherent says something brutally real and honest about the state of nomadism in contemporary art practice or so I like to think so. Perhaps it signals (as far as the eye can see) the cut-and-paste open source lifestyle practice of the collage professor whose university of ruins entombs yet more iconoclastic potential.
Yet as one of my more assertive young disciples recently said, "You don't want to go there." And it's certainly true, I do not really want to go there. Still, the detour artist sometimes has no choice but to go there, diversions being his bread and butter, the sustenance of his primordial being, a tantric media zone of hyperimprovisational performance where the rubber hits the pavement while he materialistically disseminates loose transfigurations of thought in his field of expertise, a field that is so uncommon given the total lack of interest in playful metatourism but that enables him to quite easily meet his monthly nut, something that seems unimaginable given the current state of the economy.
My big revelation this past week, one that is not new but that seems to persist and feels fresh with each new iteration of screenal manifestation: in art, anything can happen. For example, I have a laptop, a Mr. Coffeemaker, and a bored workman outside my front window pressure-washing a brick building that looks as ugly as it did before he started dusting up his immediate surroundings. The industrial smackdown that kicks up the micro-debris so that it filters through my window screen and up into my morning nostrils creates something like a full body allergic reaction.
OK, got it, pressure-washing bricks, stagnant air, micro-debris, morning nostrils ... what does this have to do with art?
Let's just say that I decided I would use my allergies, and all of the [insert official word for snot] coming out in my continuous sneezing, as real material to spray on my canvas even as I laid on my back perched up on a couple of pillows in bed. Since all I could do was sneeze then why not just turn my hanky into a damp canvas (14" X 14") and then, looking at the ensuing patterns congealed in the cloth, do something with that as my latest siren song to the world? It need not be an appropriated readymade ("Why Not Sneeze?" Duchamp once asked .. my answer this morning though is "Why not indeed?"). Weirdly, I am calling the work "Fruit of the Loom (Without Stain)" and now it will clearly signal my mid-life "crisis of meaning" where I consciously "turn my back" on everything digital.
But that could never happen, could it?
These conceptual drawings are playfully etched into the keyboard and soon will be distributed over the Net as a pure figment of the imaginary. How can that ever not be digital? In these times?
"If you don't change direction, then you just might end up where you are heading."
That's my assertive disciple speaking up again. Suddenly, in a different tense than the one I thought I was operating in, I realize that I can close the window (which I do), shut out the noise and dust, and turn on Cy Twombly's latest album, not really an album, but a playlist in my iTunes app and listen to Narcissus, Poems to the Sea, Untitled, and Untitled. Some people think it sounds like kid's drawings. Anyone can compose these illegible sounds, transfer them to their iPod, and even upload them on ThruTube (they say this in unison, as if making critical sense is the only every God). Maybe so, but what's wrong with that? We can only wish that every kid would feel creative and free enough to scribble imaginary languages on to the medium of their choice (try scribbling on a laptop -- even with a digital sketchpad and optical stylus it somehow doesn't make sense as scribble, which is sad, since scribbling has its material sensibility already built-in like so much bloatware). Besides, anyone with a serious education would know that Twombly's latest mp3s touch on what Valéry, in Rolling Stone, calls "a lengthy hesitation between sound and sense." Maybe he means "sound and sensibility," but I won't quibble (would rather scribble and then move on to whatever comes next). Listening to the Twombly mp3s, I can't help but wonder: "Is there any doubt that the human qualities of multimania are seeping through my earbuds right now?"
One of the liner notes that came with the Twombly mp3 download kind of nailed it when he wrote that "each line is the actual experience with its own innate history" and has the potential to create a dreaminess that inevitably comes with ones continued violation of standard narrative sequencing.
For instance, while listening to one particular mp3 crayon drawing with heavy ballpoint pen tracks mixed in the background (the name of the composition eludes me, something like "Delian Ode,") I realized that a loose and untimely verb-person, that is to say a swift ghost of electronic money energy, had made its way into my latest video remix just as I was drifting off into another one of my pixelated daydreams. The ghost, referring to itself as a "ghost note," was quick with its delivery: "Dear Trance-Artist...How to Cusp Your Sex on My Calloused Lips") and so to counteract any urges that may have started pulsating in my future repertoire, I too began scratching illegible markings on a thin piece of so-called "paper" just to see what a handwritten wave-poem that was "not-me communicating verbally" would look like.
What came out was not really a drawing per se (though I would market it as such) but a secret code that I would use to confuse myself about which way was up and which way was down and it felt like I was discovering a kind of infantile yet iconic status of "becoming" that related to my direct presentation of the thing, this time an intransitive sign that had no trouble declaring itself an error, an error masquerading as a phantom figure in the time slot of history, even as I knew no such history existed and that for the phantom figure it always comes down to the simple dictum of "space or nothing"!
But then what about the past as source material remixologically inhabited by the artist-medium whose job is it to postproduce the present? Is there no historical sense to be found in that most human of telling gestures? Eliot said that historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence and that as much as we may carry our own contemporary context deep inside our bones, there is still the simultaneous existence of everything that came way before we even knew how to hold a crayon in our tiny little hands.
How vital is this sense of historical perception to the throbbing intensities of our collective memory thriving amid the network of associations we immerse ourselves in when reinventing the latest version of our avatar-portrait? Transmitting our ghost energy from the heart to the line should be the most natural thing in the world. Twombly's liner notes suggest that he too wants to avoid anything "that looks arbitrary or self-consciously placed. To me, it looks as if it happened naturally, and that's the point I strive for."
A mosaic of quotations then, a point further emphasized by her gorgeous dream which she (uncharacteristically) recalled in vivid detail as soon as I finished my drawing / writing / listening this morning: according to her deep data dub, we drove our deceased 1984 Honda Civic back to Colorado from Hawaii (note: we did not ship it, we drove it), the car was loaded with all of our worldly possessions, and soon after she dropped me off at "home" (an undisclosed location) she stopped by the place she no longer worked to pick up her mail but there was no mail there, and none of the people looked familiar, except for the Swami who we both saw yesterday morning meditating in front of the same brick wall on North 1st Street in Williamsburg that AT THIS VERY INSTANT was still being pressure-washed by the workman while we ate our Goji Berry Granola with sliced banana and Trader Joe's organic soy milk along with a glass of organic orange juice (no pulp).
Knock-Knock?
Who's there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock-Knock?
Who's there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock-Knock?
Who's there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock-Knock?
Who's there?
Orange.
Orange who?
Orange you glad I didn't say banana?
Metadata: Williamsburg, June 26-29, 2009
Yet as one of my more assertive young disciples recently said, "You don't want to go there." And it's certainly true, I do not really want to go there. Still, the detour artist sometimes has no choice but to go there, diversions being his bread and butter, the sustenance of his primordial being, a tantric media zone of hyperimprovisational performance where the rubber hits the pavement while he materialistically disseminates loose transfigurations of thought in his field of expertise, a field that is so uncommon given the total lack of interest in playful metatourism but that enables him to quite easily meet his monthly nut, something that seems unimaginable given the current state of the economy.
My big revelation this past week, one that is not new but that seems to persist and feels fresh with each new iteration of screenal manifestation: in art, anything can happen. For example, I have a laptop, a Mr. Coffeemaker, and a bored workman outside my front window pressure-washing a brick building that looks as ugly as it did before he started dusting up his immediate surroundings. The industrial smackdown that kicks up the micro-debris so that it filters through my window screen and up into my morning nostrils creates something like a full body allergic reaction.
OK, got it, pressure-washing bricks, stagnant air, micro-debris, morning nostrils ... what does this have to do with art?
Let's just say that I decided I would use my allergies, and all of the [insert official word for snot] coming out in my continuous sneezing, as real material to spray on my canvas even as I laid on my back perched up on a couple of pillows in bed. Since all I could do was sneeze then why not just turn my hanky into a damp canvas (14" X 14") and then, looking at the ensuing patterns congealed in the cloth, do something with that as my latest siren song to the world? It need not be an appropriated readymade ("Why Not Sneeze?" Duchamp once asked .. my answer this morning though is "Why not indeed?"). Weirdly, I am calling the work "Fruit of the Loom (Without Stain)" and now it will clearly signal my mid-life "crisis of meaning" where I consciously "turn my back" on everything digital.
But that could never happen, could it?
These conceptual drawings are playfully etched into the keyboard and soon will be distributed over the Net as a pure figment of the imaginary. How can that ever not be digital? In these times?
"If you don't change direction, then you just might end up where you are heading."
That's my assertive disciple speaking up again. Suddenly, in a different tense than the one I thought I was operating in, I realize that I can close the window (which I do), shut out the noise and dust, and turn on Cy Twombly's latest album, not really an album, but a playlist in my iTunes app and listen to Narcissus, Poems to the Sea, Untitled, and Untitled. Some people think it sounds like kid's drawings. Anyone can compose these illegible sounds, transfer them to their iPod, and even upload them on ThruTube (they say this in unison, as if making critical sense is the only every God). Maybe so, but what's wrong with that? We can only wish that every kid would feel creative and free enough to scribble imaginary languages on to the medium of their choice (try scribbling on a laptop -- even with a digital sketchpad and optical stylus it somehow doesn't make sense as scribble, which is sad, since scribbling has its material sensibility already built-in like so much bloatware). Besides, anyone with a serious education would know that Twombly's latest mp3s touch on what Valéry, in Rolling Stone, calls "a lengthy hesitation between sound and sense." Maybe he means "sound and sensibility," but I won't quibble (would rather scribble and then move on to whatever comes next). Listening to the Twombly mp3s, I can't help but wonder: "Is there any doubt that the human qualities of multimania are seeping through my earbuds right now?"
One of the liner notes that came with the Twombly mp3 download kind of nailed it when he wrote that "each line is the actual experience with its own innate history" and has the potential to create a dreaminess that inevitably comes with ones continued violation of standard narrative sequencing.
For instance, while listening to one particular mp3 crayon drawing with heavy ballpoint pen tracks mixed in the background (the name of the composition eludes me, something like "Delian Ode,") I realized that a loose and untimely verb-person, that is to say a swift ghost of electronic money energy, had made its way into my latest video remix just as I was drifting off into another one of my pixelated daydreams. The ghost, referring to itself as a "ghost note," was quick with its delivery: "Dear Trance-Artist...How to Cusp Your Sex on My Calloused Lips") and so to counteract any urges that may have started pulsating in my future repertoire, I too began scratching illegible markings on a thin piece of so-called "paper" just to see what a handwritten wave-poem that was "not-me communicating verbally" would look like.
What came out was not really a drawing per se (though I would market it as such) but a secret code that I would use to confuse myself about which way was up and which way was down and it felt like I was discovering a kind of infantile yet iconic status of "becoming" that related to my direct presentation of the thing, this time an intransitive sign that had no trouble declaring itself an error, an error masquerading as a phantom figure in the time slot of history, even as I knew no such history existed and that for the phantom figure it always comes down to the simple dictum of "space or nothing"!
But then what about the past as source material remixologically inhabited by the artist-medium whose job is it to postproduce the present? Is there no historical sense to be found in that most human of telling gestures? Eliot said that historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence and that as much as we may carry our own contemporary context deep inside our bones, there is still the simultaneous existence of everything that came way before we even knew how to hold a crayon in our tiny little hands.
How vital is this sense of historical perception to the throbbing intensities of our collective memory thriving amid the network of associations we immerse ourselves in when reinventing the latest version of our avatar-portrait? Transmitting our ghost energy from the heart to the line should be the most natural thing in the world. Twombly's liner notes suggest that he too wants to avoid anything "that looks arbitrary or self-consciously placed. To me, it looks as if it happened naturally, and that's the point I strive for."
A mosaic of quotations then, a point further emphasized by her gorgeous dream which she (uncharacteristically) recalled in vivid detail as soon as I finished my drawing / writing / listening this morning: according to her deep data dub, we drove our deceased 1984 Honda Civic back to Colorado from Hawaii (note: we did not ship it, we drove it), the car was loaded with all of our worldly possessions, and soon after she dropped me off at "home" (an undisclosed location) she stopped by the place she no longer worked to pick up her mail but there was no mail there, and none of the people looked familiar, except for the Swami who we both saw yesterday morning meditating in front of the same brick wall on North 1st Street in Williamsburg that AT THIS VERY INSTANT was still being pressure-washed by the workman while we ate our Goji Berry Granola with sliced banana and Trader Joe's organic soy milk along with a glass of organic orange juice (no pulp).
Knock-Knock?
Who's there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock-Knock?
Who's there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock-Knock?
Who's there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock-Knock?
Who's there?
Orange.
Orange who?
Orange you glad I didn't say banana?
Metadata: Williamsburg, June 26-29, 2009
posted by Professor VJ at 3:00 PM
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