2-27-2010
Sentences on Sentences on Conceptual Art  (also: a publicly editable version)


1-10-2010
An artwork is a series of disparate elements whose only connection is the activity of the artist.

In conceptual artworks this connection itself is probed for meaning or content.

By affirming this connection, by prioritizing the artist's activity, the thing of the thing becomes the intention of the artist, even if this intention may be claimed irrational;
on the contrary, when this connection is forced into irrelevancy, disparateness itself is laid bare.

Affirmed in their disjunct, these disparate elements insist upon a prima facie encounter, rather than submit to being judged in reference to their inception.

Points of departure are always arbitrary, therefore there is no reason to remain loyal to an originary caprice so as to foreclose a capricious change in direction.

There are no conclusions, only branchings off, abandonments and inertias.

Thought--even at its most convoluted--is always mechanical, and constitutes itself in being tampered with; it flourishes in logjams and whirlpools.

Thought is not disembodied--which is not to say it is fully contained within the body of the artist, but that it is a body partially constituted in the body of the artist, the body of the materials as well as other uncountable external bodies.

The execution of an idea is just as much an idea as the conceptual idea of which it claims to be a mere execution.

An artist should follow not only what the idea of the idea entails, but also what what the idea of the idea entails entails.


10-17-2009
From Slavoj Žižek's recent book, First As Tragedy, Then as Farce, p 107:

"One can and should entertain cynical doubts about the real consequences of Obama's victory: from a pragmatic-realist perspective, it is quite possible that Obama will turn out to be "Bush with a human face," making no more than a few minor face-lifting improvements.  He will pursue the same basic politics in a more attractive mode and thus possibly even strengthen US hegemony, damaged as it has been by the catastrophe of the Bush years.  There is nonetheless something deeply wrong with this reaction--a key dimension is missing.  It is in light of the Kantian conception of enthusiasm that Obama's victory should be viewed not simply as another shift in the eternal parliamentary struggle for a majority, with all its pragmatic calculations and manipulations.  It is a sign of something more."


10-11-2009

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Artist statement for "Visions" show:

My work does not believe in visions.  This is not to say that it does not grant their existence, but that it simply puts no faith in them.  Still my work has a great deal invested in the "spiritual" or "visionary," even if oppositionally.  There is a grand trajectory in the history of abstract art which sees itself granting access to transcendental realms and mystical truths.  My work does not attain to this.  Having no tolerance for the transcendent, my work seeks to eschew semantic reference entirely.   My attempt at this impossible feat is by means of iterated series by which the work is forced to deviate from itself.  A mutant, it does not believe in being faithful even to its own original idea.  A mutant, it can begin from anywhere because, very quickly, it no longer resembles itself.

Victory! begins from found video footage, re-recorded through an obfuscating screen which leaves it invisible.  This spontaneous gesture is then digitally altered in speed and layered in multiple exposures, growing and diversifying its repertoire of imagery.  I follow the work down its own path toward a new legibility, with chance and speed colluding to produce emergent color fields.  It is only in its continual disassociation from itself that the work can become quintessentially itself.  This newly formed body was always there, latent from the beginning, but unpredictable.

This, for me, is the only possible vision of the future.  Every moment is already contained in an infinity of its own successive moments, of which it can have no idea except to the extent to which these moments are, to some ultimate future body, already past.  This is the figure of death, unknown, unrecognizable, yet already real.  One can see this place only from its prespective, projecting its predestination backwards.  Appeals to higher or alternate planes of reality miss the point: we cannot exit time: we are nothing if not its products.


6-23-2009
Jason turned me on to this:  Streaming academic lectures.


5-2-2009
"Now the memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit.  And since Habit weakens everything, what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance and therefore left it in full possession of its strength).  That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or the first cracking brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again."
--Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 692.


1-19-2009
"It is quite true that certain things, namely ideas, exercise a mediating function.  But only a twisted and aborted logic can hold that because something is mediated, it cannot, therefore, be immediately experienced.  The reverse is the case.  We cannot grasp any idea, any organ of mediation, we cannot possess it in full force, until we have felt it and sensed it, as much as if it were an odor or a color."
--Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 124.

"Since man succeeds only as he adapts his behavior to the order of nature, his achievements and victories, as they ensue upon resistance and struggle, become the matrix of all esthetic subject-matter; in some sense they constitute the common pattern of all art, the ultimate conditions of form.  Their orders of succession become without express intent the means by which man commemorates and celebrates the most intense and full moments of his experience.  Underneath the rhythm of every art and work of art there lies as a substratum in the depths of the subconscious, the basic relations of a live creature to its environment."
--Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 156.

"Censorship and super-ego are to be located in the same register as that of the law.  It is the concrete discourse, not only insofar as it dominates man and makes all kinds of fulgrations appear, [...] but insofar as it gives man his own world, which we, more or less accurately, call cultural.  It is in this dimension that censorship is located, and you can see in what way it differs from resistance.  Censorship is neither on the level of the subject, nor on that of the individual, but on the level of discourse, insofar as, as such, it consitutes, all by itself, a full universe, and at the same time there is something irreducibly discordant about it, in every one of its parts.  It takes very little at all, being locked up in the toilets, or having a father accused of Lord knows what crime, for the law all of a sudden to appear in its lacerating form."
--Lacan, Seminar 2, p. 130.


1-10-2009



12-7-2008
A New Type of Human Being and Who We Really Are.


11-22-2008
pretty rad.  Mary Heilmann is wonderful.


11-5-2008
BARACKOBAMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!


11-2-2008
Basically everything at P.S.1 is good right now.  Especially this.


7-17-2008
M. C. Escher and the Temple of Doom


4-21-2008
The Color of Plants on Other Worlds
plus DJ Jason Orrell spins May 3 in Brooklyn:



3-30-2008
Stan Brakhage's last interview


3-16-2008



3-15-2008
"Thus in a simple physical feeling there are two actual entities concerned.  One of them is the subject of the feeling, and the other is the initial data of the feeling.  A second feeling is also concerned, namely, the objective datum of the simple physical feeling.  This second feeling is the 'objectification' of it's subject for the subject of the simple physical feeling.  The initial datum is objectified as being the subject of the feeling which is the objecive datum: the objectification is the perspective of the initial datum.

    A simple physical feeling is an act of causation.  The actual entity which is the initial datum is the 'cause,' the simple physical feeling is the 'effect,' and the subject entertaining the simple physcial feeling is the actual entity 'conditioned' by the 'effect.'  All complex causal action can be reduced to such primary components.  Therefore simple physical feelings will also be called 'causal' feelings.

    But it is equally true to say that a simple physical feeling is the most primitive type of an act of perception, devoid of consciousness.  The actual entity which is the initial datum is the actual entity perceived, the objective datum is the 'perspective' under which that actual entity is perceived, and the subject of the simple physical feeling is the perceiver.  This is not an example of conscious perception. (...)

    Thus a simple physical feeling is one feeling which feels another feeling.  But the feeling felt has a subject diverse from the subject of the feeling which feels it.  A multiplicity of simple physical feelings entering into the propositional unity of a phase constitutes the first phase in a concrescence of the actual entity which is the common subject of those feelings."
--Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 236.


2-16-2008
"It's not at all that Spinoza conceived love like he conceived digestion, he conceived digestion like love as well."


2-10-2008
Ethics and Second Order Cybernetics

And  here's this, which I have not yet watched but will soon.

1-19-2008
Another good one.

1-13-2008
Magic & Images/Images & Magic, The Brooklyn Rail from July 2006.

1-11-2008
The Met currently has installed, next to Damien Hirst's shark, a large, concave mirror tessellated from small hexagons by Anish Kapoor--a giant inverted compound eye that is worth a look into.

12-24-2007
"The principle I am adopting is that consciousness presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness.  It is a special element in the subjective forms of some feelings.  Thus an actual entity may, or may not, be conscious of some part of its experience.  Its experience is its complete formal constitution, including its consciousness, if any."
--Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 53.

11-16-2007


11-3-2007
Saw this the other night.  You should too.


11-1-2007