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2
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Bdbbdb, issue 2: Two
May, 2008
contributors, guests, and staff:
Joel Dean
Dana DeGuilio
Michelle Grabner
Heather Guertin
Diego Leclery
Jason Loebs
Charles Mahaffee
Jeni Spota
Elizabeth Weiss
To change the pace of things, to make sure the compass needle hasn’t fixed
on a direction that implies stylistic or ideological momentum, let’s talk about me.
Let’s be personal, shall we? Let’s talk about me and my psychiatrist. Let’s talk
about me and my psychoanalysis. Let’s talk about religion and why I have trouble
being agnostic, even though I know better. Let’s talk about religion and how
actually I’m one of the most fervent believers. Let’s do that, let’s talk about
science and religion, and break down where I stand in relation to those. No. Let’s
talk about making sense and making sense of nonsense. Let’s talk about inverting that sentence, upsie-daisy with it, and how now it makes more sense. Perfect,
right? Let’s talk about talking, let’s talk about me, how I talk to myself constantly,
let’s talk about the voice that I use to talk to myself in. Let’s go over how I believe
that voice is me, but how actually there’s no there there. No, let’s completely skip
that part, that part is boring and gets me nowhere. Let’s talk about me, my
mother and father, and me, Mother and Father. Let’s talk about dodging bullets
and beating around the bush. Let’s talk about nailing things by accident, nailing
things by conscious accident and unconscious otherwise. Let’s review what we’ve
talked about so far. Let’s go over major points, of confrontation/avoidance, of
faith/disbelief, let’s talk business here, people. Let’s talk about malleable boundaries, let’s try to distinguish reality from unreality, and reveal how things are
donut-like sometimes, how they come around and bite their own asses. Or not.
Let’s definitely not mention Hegel. Instead, let’s talk about saying words. Let’s
talk about confession and psychoanalysis. Let’s talk about a clear boundary: the
said and the unsaid. Let’s concede that somnambulists and drunks, children and
others so mentally inclined are exempt from this, but that for conscious selfs, the
line between what is or isn’t said is as clear as any. Let’s follow with a looselyfounded claim of how this forms a juncture between Catholicism and Freudian
psychoanalysis. Let’s talk about superstition, let’s talk about perverse notions of
self-importance, let’s talk about these things. Let’s ask the reader to say something out loud, not necessarily something embarrassing or naughty, just something that demonstrates the energy generated when speech brings things out
from the intellectual level. Let’s ask the reader to differentiate the inside world
from the outside world and offer speech as the point of leakage between them.
Let’s refer to a faucet, that can be shut off and on. Let’s go lefty-loosey, rightytighty. Let’s humorously remark, in passing, how well that parallels contemporary
American political clichés. Let’s briskly flee from that last quip, dismiss it as
tangential and irrelevant. Let’s return to the power of speech, let’s mention the
undeniable power of prayer, even in a Godless world, then let’s disclaim that as a
whole other ball of wax, for another song, another time. Let’s hint that we’re
wrapping it to a close, but let’s linger on a few points. Let’s give some hint to the
reader that not everything has been figured out here yet and that there is excitement in following a kind of groove. Let’s imply that part of the idea is the subject,
part of the text is the idea and part of the subject is the text; in other words, let’s
confuse the hell out of the reader, just for a sec. Let’s return with almost careless
haste to dealing seriously with the heart of the issue. Let’s do that with such a
glaring disregard for rhythm as to disengage the reader entirely, giving room and
space for thinking, for picking up the pieces, while the final astounding revelation
is uncoiled in all its confounding perplexity. This is what I paid nothing for?
BDBBDB
in this issue:
Two scans
Jason Loebs
I took up drawing for the third time
a musical score by Charles Mahaffee
Ecstatic Captive
Dana DeGuilio
Hoop Dreams
Heather Guertin
Two
Joel Dean
Complicitance
Address given to prospective members of
a New Caladonian punk band. (as of yet
unformed)
Review:
Michelle Grabner is on a first name basis
Nonchala
Elizabeth Weiss
Potty Training
Bdbbdbabysteps
plus: selections from Ryan Richey’s
hosey, haikus, images by Jeni Spota,
bdbbdb staff
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theird timew. I took up drawing for the thriufdks time.w I kdtoook up drawing furoe
fthe third timew. I kdtoook uip drawqing for the a thirkld time. I
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thirid timew. I took up tderawing I took up drawing for the third time. I toookl, up
drawing forel the third time. I took up drarwinng wifotr tyh the thirc time. Ui took up
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up drawing for the the third ti me. I took up up ftseinh or for the athird tim.e. I toooik up
drawing for thwe the ird thime. I rtoook up ddarwinhg for the third tim.ew I took upo
draqind foer th te thirdf time. I took up drawing for thortthe thrird time. I took up
drawiqng for the third time. Iy oook up dreqqing for the the third time. I ytoook up
Master.
If you saw a bullet hit a Bird- and he told you he wasn’t shot- You might weep at his courtesy, but you
would certainly doubt his word.
One more drop from the gash that stains your Daisy’s bosom- then would you believe?…
(Second “Master” letter of E.D. 1861. Recipient unknown.)
Ecstatic Captive
Marina Abramovic’s performance Rhythm 0 (1974): six hours, Abramovic standing impassive near a table
that holds 72 tools including a feather, a Polaroid camera, a scalpel, paint, a gun, a bullet, also printed
instructions that invite each observer to perform an action on the artist. “Before long, Abramovic’s skin
had been cut and she was bleeding; a spectator had put the gun in her hand and cocked it against her
forehead.” At some point, the artist starts to cry, but continues for the duration.
Kaylee says you’re fuming aren’t you. Yes. Foolishly. Inflamed, expansive, magnanimous, pissed, foolish.
There’s a couch and people talking on it. Emotional life lacks adequate precision to interrupt anything by
belching or sneering a rebuttal. I’m waiting for the perfect time to make the phone call, a sitter accusing
the standers of tyranny.
Time passes.
Gave my old friend a painting the other day, not an art one, a soft one for my friend who was
going through some shit, whom I love, and she cried a little in my kitchen, and I said how everyone said I
couldn’t show it because it was too soft, and in this distinction checked by this fact of obduracy—that many
decent things (which I’m already calling softness) about myself are kept forcibly out of studio practice for
their alleged preservation. Tried to explain that if threshold breached it’s corrupted, alienated, sentimental,
ironic, bastard use of a professional’s tools; I mean, I was thinking of you, so not compelled to go against
myself. Usually all going against all self, what’s left is an obduracy and a spiteful grinning renunciation, a
vitriolic architecture of inhibition that conflates frigidity with rigor. This structure is dependent fiercely on
a leak: like a nail hole out of which charges all of art history from behind the white wall directly into your
eyeball, like the endless vortex navel of a Zurbarán crucifixion, dead center, an infinite hole with an eyeball
plugged in. Studio practice a list of no’s with hope located in resistant potential of what I forgot or failed to
prohibit. Mastery I argue is a structure against which to act, election and enforcement of authoritative terms
protect me, but I can’t really buy it all or remember when it started, and end up aping the blank I lack, hard
as I try, softness worms out. System failures happily a fissure in the hyperbolic sneer and twang of a dragperformance, out of which your thumb can dig the human, the universal. Empathy! Empathy! Eyes spit out
of skull, are nail holes. It’s the flaw in the mechanism, the soft spot in new skull, the biological fact of an
internal sex organ, into which you dig your thumb, and you’re right, that’s where the art is.
Never admitted the exertion this split requires, and I want out. Am caught and held. If I can’t get
out or find some other way to handle this, anticipate a future where sweetness and light in ungoverned
praxis are sugar shock (insulin stockpiles probably already rotting from disuse, splatter guilty love all over
the place, say words like impetuous) and the threat of the ointment someday all flies, to whom I’ll give
names, teach to sing. It’s the wrong era for this. What was irony is disaster. Mission Accomplished. You’re
right, computer, I didn’t mean to send that.
Fucking perfunctory, things artists say to eachother: We are on this tiny island; we have fallen
from tall buildings; we have read the newspaper in bed, looked up, said listen to this. But the worm in my
thigh is hungrier than yours, hungrier than I am. Someday I’ll be all worm. Or else I want out.
Worm thinks we could be persuaded to replace revolution with reform. Worm doesn’t know that
he’s only a nightmare from which I’m trying to wake up. So, for what? On whose terms this abnegation
that’s my own damn fault? How arrogant to suspect this problem particular to marginalized subjects?
Much of the work I admire is activated by the force of what’s not there: the Pergamon Altar, Giacommetti,
Beckett, Martin, Ono, Sandback, Grabner, et al., but typically what’s not there isn’t there because it’s
vandalized, decayed, starved, thought, cut, dumbfounded, out, ending for whatever reason in an aesthetic
regime of force and lack, a present absence, empty but for a staring problem, a reduction of corporeal
potential as word prohibits action. Or action, one could say, is transcended. The problem of diverting
spectacle as indicated by Futurism’s relationship to Fascism, Busby Berkeley’s to Riefenstahl, is certainly
more unpleasant, and quiet spectatorial agency is good, right? Right. Except Hugo describes the endotic
condition as an asphyxia, a process of seeing the outside inside yourself, like deChirico’s gushy double
portrait of the eviscerated dummies, guts replaced with angles, bits of boat, other machinery. Saint Simeon
Stylite perched on that column for 37 years, is a lonesome exemplar for us all: after much meditation he
found he couldn’t escape the horizontal world and so went up, 15 meters up, but it’s not all the way.
Crouching above the world, (if he looked up, into the sun; if down, an exoscopic vantage point, as in
Berkeley, The Birds, mass gymnastics, Deuteronomy), people, even friends, were specks. A little further
up and he could’ve seen what God sees; 15 meters in the 5th century, though, was as high as you could get.
He shat and starved on that column, birds ate his mortal coil. Belief is a state, faith an act, but I think of it
here an in-act, or an exhaustive one-act followed by an almost infinite refusal, a list of no’s through which
softness (grace) might hopefully squeak. What is it to internalize an outside that you can’t ever be in?
What the hell is the problem? The problem is that endosis connotes a complicity in your own
subjugation without an understanding of the terms. The state of deferral and refusal, the obduracy and
abnegation, is encouraged I think by an entire bureaucracy of curse, scourge and punishment set up to
discourage utterance of the unspeakable: what the discourse can stomach, digest, shit out cleaner and more
compact, is not the body. So it edits, compresses, delimits, makes over: see Chapter 24: Feminism, Earth
Works, and Other Late 20th Century Movements. Basic linguistic units of meaning as in Mondrian are not
possible, because, from my position as a grateful guest, they are not linguistic; they are action, choked.
Am comforted, nearly vindicated, by the phenomenological’s arrival before language. Aesthetics
of resistance, for Virilio, are located at the level of the body-- materialism operates as revolt against the
infinite. Versus a cool, detached, objective and hieratic speech act like critique, demand too is manifest in
corporeality, especially in the grand old American pastoral tradition: taciturn farmer creaking to his feet at
the town meeting to declare with startling authority: we need a new well, it’s better, except he doesn’t say
anything, he nods, and everyone marvels at the wisdom of the speech act that does not occur. A couple
years ago they gave a Genius Award to a barber. Kristeva says genius is a therapeutic invention that keeps
us from dying of equality in a world without a hereafter. And so for the ladies of art (especially of abstract
painting).
For objectified (split) subjects, demand’s catalytic causal lineage drags backwards (away from
high reason) through a detection of disenfranchisement to frustration, to the inchoate, to the scatological.
Breaks my small heart thinking about the Ad Hoc Women’s Artist Committee and other feminist and antiwar groups of the 70s: they yelled, cursed, fucked with the Whitney, lipsticked the bathrooms of MOMA.
Past tense: pitchfork on the mirror a guttural antagonism reaching across the breach of Vassar, Smith, Yale,
and their codified language systems to the raw cry: participants educated, indoctrinated, but words fail:
action all sarcasm and hope, indicative of a painful unlearning, a roaring farting dinosaur using a claw to
pick its teeth, not killing anything that can’t be killed: it did not do what was impossible to do but it did do
what it did attempt. Like Courtney Love, these feminists are unforgivably, incomprehensibly, still alive; on
their behalf I graciously thank the resuscitated canon for Chapter 24.
So, yeah, am vaguely, clumsily, newly, angry, oldly reactive: as in, thinking about some gals I
admire (and myself in emulation) swallowing alienating terms like how-to-be-a-serious-artist earnestly,
performing a masculine subjectivity for access to discourse; we exchange knowing looks, applaud
performances which effectively corroborate these terms of captivity. Building a fierce architecture of
resilience and then trying to operate freely within it (enjoying a freedom commensurate with lack of
power), and then courageously failing, which evinces a softness, exposes a flaw in her capacity to construct
an edifice according to the already legitimated systematized plan: this flaw being a diminutive, an
invocation to sympathy, a glory hole, and the occasion for her yelping will to reassert itself, which is where
the art is. And isn’t this fissure/failure also where the beauty is?
Beautiful, here, then, is an intractable criterion resulting from an elephantiasis of gesture and the
frailty of result, simultaneously a leak and a testament to the power of the worm. Abramovic playing St.
Simeon Stylite, Lozano playing St. Simeon Stylite, others, Dickinson; Austen’s Bertha (sic) literally on
fire, ecstatic in the attic. Nabokov locates behind ecstasy “the vacuum into which rushes all that I love.”
FEMA’s response to the hurricane. Women, other others, apparently have to blurt all the way to
sanctimony, to Sherri Levine, to avoid it, as it’s still (still) incommensurate with intellectual critical rigor.
But Weil says beauty “does what gravity does, out of love.” My friend says we have to kill the beautiful
before it kills us.
If a woman says something and another woman agrees, does that make it less true?
Recipient unknown. What sort of space is the studio? According to Klein, it’s obviously my
mother’s body, which is full of food, excrement, other children I want to eat. My mother’s house which is
my house and is adjudicated on from the outside, which I fuck up in animal resistance to its carceral terms,
its requirement to hostess. A Heimlich that looks unheimlich; women cannot experience the uncanny. Are
you free in there, lost, small? Free as any eunuch subject, lost as anyone effaced with absence, small as
expected when riddled with detritus, excrement, viscous materials against which I struggle and
courageously fail to enact the control enacted on me-- this material immediacy is intimacy, is ruthlessly
erotic, is not love. Humbled? Acquiescent. House obdurate, dependent on a gash for a leak. Can you say
yes to one thing affirmative? Several lady painters I asked said yes to humility, to humanity, yes to others,
also to immediacy, a good fight, surprise, control, decisions based on negations since certainties I love and
want to get at but do not always trust... to slow consideration and spontaneity with delimited edges… a
coherence between thought and hand or thinking and acting.1 Emphasis added. I said yes to renunciations
of fluency, homo canary in the Meinkampf, singing, singing, and to gravity. One affirmative Yes to gravity
which I cannot renounce.
Adorno repeats a (the) Nazi “joke”: No one must be hungry or cold. Anyone failing to comply goes
to a concentration camp. Aphoristics here unfold like an accordion, a bellows’ contract/retract, are not
vertical. Similarly: she shrieks out demands too innocuous to cause alarm, that merely make people smile…
the “reasonable” words—to which in any case she has access only through mimicry—are powerless to
translate all that pulses, clamors, and hangs hazily in the cryptic passages of hysterical suffering-latency.
Ontological claustrophobia, ethical agoraphobia.
What all this comes down to is a decision, another split: emancipation or a future. Free or lost,
homogenous time or heterogenous which means waiting. If emancipated, free and a lost that doesn’t
recognize itself, a constant present, an unlocked room walled with mirrors and the floor rotting out. If a
future, someday all worm, and there’ll be nothing left of the self that calls itself “self”, maybe it’s already
the worm calling whatever it isn’t “self.” When I say out I mean out of this moment. All shrapnel and
anthem, phantom and anchor, I only cry when I don’t understand. If I go will you go too.
-Dana DeGuilio
Thank you to KW, MG, AN, SD, JG, DL, RE, for helping me think, and especially to AA, AM, LW and MZ for talking it
out, for helping me.
Note
1.
Italicized response from Aliza Nisenbaum; answers of Michelle Grabner, Kaylee Rae Wyant, Lauren
Wolfe, paraphrased.
Addenda
Please see William Goyen’s “Arthur Bond,” from Had I A Hundred Mouths. It’s his worm.
From Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, 15:
Eurystheus, his cousin, tearfully recited poems, accompanying them, off-key, on the lyre, but when Linus, the
tutor, tried to inveigle Heracles into believing that the only existing freedom was the freedom of art, his pupil
yanked the man’s hat down so hard over his eyes that he broke his nose, and when the schoolmaster then
claimed that art was at all times to be enjoyed independently of the contemporary chaos, Heracles thrust him
headfirst into the cesspool, drowning him to prove that unarmed aestheticism cannot withstand the simplest
violence.
From Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 250:
In treatment of an institutionalized former ecclesiastic and madman, Pinel ordered the shackles removed and
for everyone to ignore (not address) the inmate. This prohibition produced upon the ecclesiastic (who was
locked up for his messianic complex, and refused to engage in group rehabilitative activities) an effect of
humiliation; so ignored, eventually he came of his own accord to join the group, without his Christ complex:
Deliverance here has a paradoxical meaning. The dungeon, the chains, the continual spectacle, the
sarcasms were, to the sufferer in his delirium, the very element of his liberty. Acknowledged in that very fact
and fascinated from without by so much complicity, he could not be dislodged from his immediate truth. But
the chains that fell, the indifference and silence of all those around him, confined him in the limited use on an
empty liberty; he was delivered in silence to a truth which was not acknowledged and which he would
demonstrate in vain, since he was no longer a spectacle, and from which he could derive no exaltation, since
he was not even humiliated. It was the man himself, not his projection in a delirium, who has now been
humiliated: for a physical constraint yielded to a liberty that touched the limits of solitude; the dialogue of
delirium and insult gave way to a monologue in a language which exhausted itself in the silence of others; the
entire show of presumption and outrage was replaced by indifference. Henceforth, more genuinely confined
than he could have been in a dungeon and chains, a prisoner of nothing but himself… The others are made
innocent, they are no longer persecutors; the guilt is shifted inside… the enemy faces disappear; he no longer
feels their presence as observation, but as a denial of attention, as observation deflected; the others are now
nothing but a limit that recedes as he advances. Delivered from his chains, he is now chained by silence to
transgression and to shame. He feels himself punished, and he sees the sign of his innocence in that fact; free
from all physical punishment, he must prove himself guilty. His torment was his glory; his deliverance must
humiliate him.
2
BDBBDB
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drawing for trhe tyhitrd time. Io t oook up drawing for the the ffthird time. I tioo
Master.
If you saw a bullet hit a Bird- and he told you he wasn’t shot- You might weep at his courtesy, but you
would certainly doubt his word.
One more drop from the gash that stains your Daisy’s bosom- then would you believe?…
(Second “Master” letter of E.D. 1861. Recipient unknown.)
Ecstatic Captive
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drawing for thwe the ird thime. I rtoook up ddarwinhg for the third tim.ew I took upo
draqind foer th te thirdf time. I took up drawing for thortthe thrird time. I took up
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Marina Abramovic’s performance Rhythm 0 (1974): six hours, Abramovic standing impassive near a table
that holds 72 tools including a feather, a Polaroid camera, a scalpel, paint, a gun, a bullet, also printed
instructions that invite each observer to perform an action on the artist. “Before long, Abramovic’s skin
had been cut and she was bleeding; a spectator had put the gun in her hand and cocked it against her
forehead.” At some point, the artist starts to cry, but continues for the duration.
Kaylee says you’re fuming aren’t you. Yes. Foolishly. Inflamed, expansive, magnanimous, pissed, foolish.
There’s a couch and people talking on it. Emotional life lacks adequate precision to interrupt anything by
belching or sneering a rebuttal. I’m waiting for the perfect time to make the phone call, a sitter accusing
the standers of tyranny.
Time passes.
Gave my old friend a painting the other day, not an art one, a soft one for my friend who was
going through some shit, whom I love, and she cried a little in my kitchen, and I said how everyone said I
couldn’t show it because it was too soft, and in this distinction checked by this fact of obduracy—that many
decent things (which I’m already calling softness) about myself are kept forcibly out of studio practice for
their alleged preservation. Tried to explain that if threshold breached it’s corrupted, alienated, sentimental,
ironic, bastard use of a professional’s tools; I mean, I was thinking of you, so not compelled to go against
myself. Usually all going against all self, what’s left is an obduracy and a spiteful grinning renunciation, a
vitriolic architecture of inhibition that conflates frigidity with rigor. This structure is dependent fiercely on
a leak: like a nail hole out of which charges all of art history from behind the white wall directly into your
eyeball, like the endless vortex navel of a Zurbarán crucifixion, dead center, an infinite hole with an eyeball
plugged in. Studio practice a list of no’s with hope located in resistant potential of what I forgot or failed to
prohibit. Mastery I argue is a structure against which to act, election and enforcement of authoritative terms
protect me, but I can’t really buy it all or remember when it started, and end up aping the blank I lack, hard
as I try, softness worms out. System failures happily a fissure in the hyperbolic sneer and twang of a dragperformance, out of which your thumb can dig the human, the universal. Empathy! Empathy! Eyes spit out
of skull, are nail holes. It’s the flaw in the mechanism, the soft spot in new skull, the biological fact of an
internal sex organ, into which you dig your thumb, and you’re right, that’s where the art is.
Never admitted the exertion this split requires, and I want out. Am caught and held. If I can’t get
out or find some other way to handle this, anticipate a future where sweetness and light in ungoverned
praxis are sugar shock (insulin stockpiles probably already rotting from disuse, splatter guilty love all over
the place, say words like impetuous) and the threat of the ointment someday all flies, to whom I’ll give
names, teach to sing. It’s the wrong era for this. What was irony is disaster. Mission Accomplished. You’re
right, computer, I didn’t mean to send that.
Fucking perfunctory, things artists say to eachother: We are on this tiny island; we have fallen
from tall buildings; we have read the newspaper in bed, looked up, said listen to this. But the worm in my
thigh is hungrier than yours, hungrier than I am. Someday I’ll be all worm. Or else I want out.
Worm thinks we could be persuaded to replace revolution with reform. Worm doesn’t know that
he’s only a nightmare from which I’m trying to wake up. So, for what? On whose terms this abnegation
that’s my own damn fault? How arrogant to suspect this problem particular to marginalized subjects?
Much of the work I admire is activated by the force of what’s not there: the Pergamon Altar, Giacommetti,
Beckett, Martin, Ono, Sandback, Grabner, et al., but typically what’s not there isn’t there because it’s
vandalized, decayed, starved, thought, cut, dumbfounded, out, ending for whatever reason in an aesthetic
regime of force and lack, a present absence, empty but for a staring problem, a reduction of corporeal
potential as word prohibits action. Or action, one could say, is transcended. The problem of diverting
spectacle as indicated by Futurism’s relationship to Fascism, Busby Berkeley’s to Riefenstahl, is certainly
Complicitance (Passive complicity)
Recipient unknown. What sort of space is the studio? According to Klein, it’s obviously my
mother’s body, which is full of food, excrement, other children I want to eat. My mother’s house which is
my house and is adjudicated on from the outside, which I fuck up in animal resistance to its carceral terms,
its requirement to hostess. A Heimlich that looks unheimlich; women cannot experience the uncanny. Are
you free in there, lost, small? Free as any eunuch subject, lost as anyone effaced with absence, small as
expected when riddled with detritus, excrement, viscous materials against which I struggle and
courageously fail to enact the control enacted on me-- this material immediacy is intimacy, is ruthlessly
erotic, is not love. Humbled? Acquiescent. House obdurate, dependent on a gash for a leak. Can you say
yes to one thing affirmative? Several lady painters I asked said yes to humility, to humanity, yes to others,
also to immediacy, a good fight, surprise, control, decisions based on negations since certainties I love and
want to get at but do not always trust... to slow consideration and spontaneity with delimited edges… a
coherence between thought and hand or thinking and acting. Emphasis added. I said yes to renunciations
of fluency, homo canary in the Meinkampf, singing, singing, and to gravity. One affirmative Yes to gravity
which I cannot renounce.
Adorno repeats a (the) Nazi “joke”: No one must be hungry or cold. Anyone failing to comply goes
to a concentration camp. Aphoristics here unfold like an accordion, a bellows’ contract/retract, are not
vertical. Similarly: she shrieks out demands too innocuous to cause alarm, that merely make people smile…
the “reasonable” words—to which in any case she has access only through mimicry—are powerless to
translate all that pulses, clamors, and hangs hazily in the cryptic passages of hysterical suffering-latency.
Ontological claustrophobia, ethical agoraphobia.
locked up for his messianic complex, and refused to engage in group rehabilitative activities) an effect of
humiliation; so ignored, eventually he came of his own accord to join the group, without his Christ complex:
Deliverance here has a paradoxical meaning. The dungeon, the chains, the continual spectacle, the
sarcasms were, to the sufferer in his delirium, the very element of his liberty. Acknowledged in that very fact
and fascinated from without by so much complicity, he could not be dislodged from his immediate truth. But
the chains that fell, the indifference and silence of all those around him, confined him in the limited use on an
empty liberty; he was delivered in silence to a truth which was not acknowledged and which he would
demonstrate in vain, since he was no longer a spectacle, and from which he could derive no exaltation, since
he was not even humiliated. It was the man himself, not his projection in a delirium, who has now been
humiliated: for a physical constraint yielded to a liberty that touched the limits of solitude; the dialogue of
delirium and insult gave way to a monologue in a language which exhausted itself in the silence of others; the
entire show of presumption and outrage was replaced by indifference. Henceforth, more genuinely confined
than he could have been in a dungeon and chains, a prisoner of nothing but himself… The others are made
innocent, they are no longer persecutors; the guilt is shifted inside… the enemy faces disappear; he no longer
feels their presence as observation, but as a denial of attention, as observation deflected; the others are now
nothing but a limit that recedes as he advances. Delivered from his chains, he is now chained by silence to
transgression and to shame. He feels himself punished, and he sees the sign of his innocence in that fact; free
from all physical punishment, he must prove himself guilty. His torment was his glory; his deliverance must
humiliate him.
You know that the world is a lie and you choose to believe it anyways. At the very heart of your
life, the core of your belief, nestled somewhere near that little thing you may or may not call your soul,
you participate in and encourage the fiction of the world. Everything that you pretend to be certain of
is a lie, and you know it, and you go anyways. If you faced the facts, if you looked the world in its
metaphorical eye, you would freeze up, turn into metaphorical stone just as if the world was a basilisk,
a medusa, or any of the other 'fictional' creatures that we have invented to tell us that looking too
closely at certain things will kill you. We know that the world is a cockatrice, but it is our cockatrice,
and we dance with it anyways.
more unpleasant, and quiet spectatorial agency is good, right? Right. Except Hugo describes the endotic
condition as an asphyxia, a process of seeing the outside inside yourself, like deChirico’s gushy double
portrait of the eviscerated dummies, guts replaced with angles, bits of boat, other machinery. Saint Simeon
Stylite perched on that column for 37 years, is a lonesome exemplar for us all: after much meditation he
found he couldn’t escape the horizontal world and so went up, 15 meters up, but it’s not all the way.
Crouching above the world, (if he looked up, into the sun; if down, an exoscopic vantage point, as in
Berkeley, The Birds, mass gymnastics, Deuteronomy), people, even friends, were specks. A little further
up and he could’ve seen what God sees; 15 meters in the 5 century, though, was as high as you could get.
He shat and starved on that column, birds ate his mortal coil. Belief is a state, faith an act, but I think of it
here an in-act, or an exhaustive one-act followed by an almost infinite refusal, a list of no’s through which
softness (grace) might hopefully squeak. What is it to internalize an outside that you can’t ever be in?
What the hell is the problem? The problem is that endosis connotes a complicity in your own
subjugation without an understanding of the terms. The state of deferral and refusal, the obduracy and
abnegation, is encouraged I think by an entire bureaucracy of curse, scourge and punishment set up to
discourage utterance of the unspeakable: what the discourse can stomach, digest, shit out cleaner and more
compact, is not the body. So it edits, compresses, delimits, makes over: see Chapter 24: Feminism, Earth
Works, and Other Late 20 Century Movements. Basic linguistic units of meaning as in Mondrian are not
possible, because, from my position as a grateful guest, they are not linguistic; they are action, choked.
Am comforted, nearly vindicated, by the phenomenological’s arrival before language. Aesthetics
of resistance, for Virilio, are located at the level of the body-- materialism operates as revolt against the
infinite. Versus a cool, detached, objective and hieratic speech act like critique, demand too is manifest in
corporeality, especially in the grand old American pastoral tradition: taciturn farmer creaking to his feet at
the town meeting to declare with startling authority: we need a new well, it’s better, except he doesn’t say
anything, he nods, and everyone marvels at the wisdom of the speech act that does not occur. A couple
years ago they gave a Genius Award to a barber. Kristeva says genius is a therapeutic invention that keeps
us from dying of equality in a world without a hereafter. And so for the ladies of art (especially of abstract
painting).
For objectified (split) subjects, demand’s catalytic causal lineage drags backwards (away from
high reason) through a detection of disenfranchisement to frustration, to the inchoate, to the scatological.
Breaks my small heart thinking about the Ad Hoc Women’s Artist Committee and other feminist and antiwar groups of the 70s: they yelled, cursed, fucked with the Whitney, lipsticked the bathrooms of MOMA.
Past tense: pitchfork on the mirror a guttural antagonism reaching across the breach of Vassar, Smith, Yale,
and their codified language systems to the raw cry: participants educated, indoctrinated, but words fail:
action all sarcasm and hope, indicative of a painful unlearning, a roaring farting dinosaur using a claw to
pick its teeth, not killing anything that can’t be killed: it did not do what was impossible to do but it did do
what it did attempt. Like Courtney Love, these feminists are unforgivably, incomprehensibly, still alive; on
their behalf I graciously thank the resuscitated canon for Chapter 24.
So, yeah, am vaguely, clumsily, newly, angry, oldly reactive: as in, thinking about some gals I
admire (and myself in emulation) swallowing alienating terms like how-to-be-a-serious-artist earnestly,
performing a masculine subjectivity for access to discourse; we exchange knowing looks, applaud
performances which effectively corroborate these terms of captivity. Building a fierce architecture of
resilience and then trying to operate freely within it (enjoying a freedom commensurate with lack of
power), and then courageously failing, which evinces a softness, exposes a flaw in her capacity to construct
an edifice according to the already legitimated systematized plan: this flaw being a diminutive, an
invocation to sympathy, a glory hole, and the occasion for her yelping will to reassert itself, which is where
the art is. And isn’t this fissure/failure also where the beauty is?
Beautiful, here, then, is an intractable criterion resulting from an elephantiasis of gesture and the
frailty of result, simultaneously a leak and a testament to the power of the worm. Abramovic playing St.
Simeon Stylite, Lozano playing St. Simeon Stylite, others, Dickinson; Austen’s Bertha (sic) literally on
fire, ecstatic in the attic. Nabokov locates behind ecstasy “the vacuum into which rushes all that I love.”
FEMA’s response to the hurricane. Women, other others, apparently have to blurt all the way to
sanctimony, to Sherri Levine, to avoid it, as it’s still (still) incommensurate with intellectual critical rigor.
But Weil says beauty “does what gravity does, out of love.” My friend says we have to kill the beautiful
before it kills us.
If a woman says something and another woman agrees, does that make it less true?
We fear the dark, the unknown, the places where mold grows and fills the air with fetid scents
that we convince ourselves must be poison. We forge differences between the dark and the light. We
speak of darkness as a thing that can be counted, we imbue it with degrees of being and claim that there
can be more darkness here, less there, and ask it to have a substance so that we can place it in a box.
We pretend that darkness grows, that it exists in the positive, when night 'falls' we claim that darkness
'gathers'. Yet darkness does not exist. If there is anything, in the proper sense, there is only light.
Darkness is not a thing, it is an absence, a lack, that can be felt more or less keenly but all those
differences in value are made of 'feeling'. We speak of sensibilities as though they were senses.
It is fear that grows, it is mystery, uncertainty, it is a pronounced awareness of our fundamental
and absolute lack of perception that 'falls' at night and 'gathers' in the gloom. Darkness is simply the
fiction we use to pretend that it is some force or object outside of ourselves that makes us blind.
We only speak of darkness as though it were evil because the slight slice of perception that we
have comes from the fraction of the light spectrum that we can actually see. We describe darkness as
the unknowable and yet it is only unknown in a highly specific way. Sharpshooters have goggles to
compensate for such things. If you did not demand so much of light then you would not fear the dark.
Bats 'see' with sound. They scorn the light. To a bat it is of no consequence except that they become
more visible to their prey, light is an inconvenience not a phobia. It is the embodiment of the
unknowable that generates fear, the thing that forces you to acknowledge the crutch you have so long
relied upon to shamble through life while pretending to run. For a bat the embodiment of fear is a
synthetic sound absorbing foam that all of their howls of desperation are swallowed by. A bat's
nightmares are filled with bright rooms possessing soft walls.
What all this comes down to is a decision, another split: emancipation or a future. Free or lost,
homogenous time or heterogenous which means waiting. If emancipated, free and a lost that doesn’t
recognize itself, a constant present, an unlocked room walled with mirrors and the floor rotting out. If a
future, someday all worm, and there’ll be nothing left of the self that calls itself “self”, maybe it’s already
the worm calling whatever it isn’t “self.” When I say out I mean out of this moment. All shrapnel and
anthem, phantom and anchor, I only cry when I don’t understand. If I go will you go too.
-Dana DeGuilio
Thank you to KW, MG, AN, SD, JG, DL, RE, for helping me think, and especially to AA, AM, LW and MZ for talking it
out, for helping me.
Note
1.
Italicized response from Aliza Nisenbaum; answers of Michelle Grabner, Kaylee Rae Wyant, Lauren
Wolfe, paraphrased.
Addenda
Please see William Goyen’s “Arthur Bond,” from Had I A Hundred Mouths. It’s his worm.
From Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, 15:
Eurystheus, his cousin, tearfully recited poems, accompanying them, off-key, on the lyre, but when Linus, the
tutor, tried to inveigle Heracles into believing that the only existing freedom was the freedom of art, his pupil
yanked the man’s hat down so hard over his eyes that he broke his nose, and when the schoolmaster then
claimed that art was at all times to be enjoyed independently of the contemporary chaos, Heracles thrust him
headfirst into the cesspool, drowning him to prove that unarmed aestheticism cannot withstand the simplest
violence.
From Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 250:
In treatment of an institutionalized former ecclesiastic and madman, Pinel ordered the shackles removed and
for everyone to ignore (not address) the inmate. This prohibition produced upon the ecclesiastic (who was
To find oneself in a bright room with padded walls is the safest of all possible places because
even if you wanted to you could not come to harm. Yet it is also the most terrifying because it implies
the possibility that what you believe to exist or think that you see is absolutely uncertain. The bat
screams and begs the walls to release its cries and return them so that it might, by hearing its own
shouted question, know where it is and where the walls are that lock it in place. It is the sound of its
own voice that tells the bat what to see. You too tell yourself what to see.
Darkness does not exist, it is something that you have invented to deny your dependence upon
the light. You fear those things that thrive in darkness not because they are strong when you are weak;
most things that live in darkness are pale and feeble and slow, even the one species of bat that can
actually bite you is small enough to fit within the palm of a pre-adolescent child. You fear things that
thrive in darkness and inflate them into monsters because you must. You must believe in the greatness
of light because it is the means by which you 'see' the world and if you were to accept the limitations
and flaws of that perception then you would have to acknowledge the existence of a world outside of it.
You cannot bear the creatures of the night because they are symbolic of your ignorance, evidence that
there are realms of experience beyond the 'sight' that you are limited to. When something cannot be
known it must be reviled.
Secretly you hate the scientists in their white coats of innocence and purity because they use
insight into hidden realms to control magnets and laser beams and craft magical items upon which you
rely. Scientists are wizards with elaborate degrees to protect them from your scrutiny and if you could
you would burn all their textbooks and diagrams and machines and dance around the bonfire in ecstasy.
Think about how ready people always are to burn books when given a chance. You would return to the
world of ignorance and bloodshed if not for the elaborate fictions you have built. You use titles like
doctor to single out the people you resent, to label them and define them, and they are convinced it is
an honor. The reality is that all forms of distinction are modes of alienation that allow the distinguisher
to have a measure of control over the distinguished. Dictators are pawns to the fears of the populace,
they cannot manipulate what does not exist.
You fear bats. You think that bats are disgusting and filthy creatures that wait for you in the
darkness. They transform in the shadows, into something terrible that looks just like you, that sounds
like you, that can mesmerize you, suck your blood, taint your soul... but only if you give it permission
to enter. The best news that you can get, the only good news that you can get once the vampire has
entered your room is that simply letting it know that you have belief defeats it. Show it your cross,
brandish your absolute 'faith' in some kind of foundation and the vampire turns comical, it bares its
fangs and is revealed to be a simple beast, it hisses helplessly, enraged, and turns into ash after being
ever so lightly brushed by some isolated shaft of the light.
You wield your remote control like a lightsaber and pretend to understand how it works, by pressing
the buttons you are given the most feeble and inaccurate sense of control possible and you force
yourself to accept it as actual power. This prevents you from having the seemingly psychotic but
totally sane desire to smash everything around you that has the semblance of life but was not made by
your household brand of God. You pay extraordinary amounts of money to be granted access to
thousands of channels that you can pause, fast forward, and record with your magic wand, lightsaber
remote, powerstick, Excalibur, potentially alchemical and detached penis. They could have made those
things round you know. At the end of a long day being told what to do you retreat into an easy chair
with various adjustable controls – so that you have control – and force your will on a flashing box; the
pleasure lies in the surfing and not the watching, the power and not the product. Yet you know that all
of this is bullshit. You know that TV is only able to exist because of its ability to convince you to buy
things that you don't really need. They have crafted into the remote control (lightsaber) five hundred
ways for you to be lied to and your only complaint is that the lies are not convincing enough. You are
eagerly anticipating the day that you will have holograms with olfactory ion beams in your living room.
You want a solid light fiction that will have sex with you or hold you and will never tell a soul exactly
how fucked up and insecure you really are. And you are. And so are they, the ambiguous and
ambitious 'they' that apparently 'controls' the world. They build lightsabers not only as part of some
dark and malevolent scheme but also because of the simple fact that they want lightsabers too! People
that have power are by necessity people that want power, and the only reason to desire power is if you
are keenly aware of how little you actually have and how little is actually possible to attain.
When was the last time you heard of a dictator that wasn't paranoid to an irrational degree.
Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Idi Amin, Mugabe, Milosevic, Kim Sung Jung, Qaddafi, Khomeini,
Noriega, Hussein, Castro, Fujimori, and Hitler, and the list goes on. Hitler was just looking for a
lightsaber. And it does have to be a lightsaber. If light is the symbol for all knowledge that we pretend
is absolute then what could be a better sign for power and wisdom than a giant penis that does not shoot
off it the distance as its nature demands but hovers at arms length on the thrumming edge of climax.
And those things do thrum don't they? It is almost as if they have accumulated a massive load of God
gob just waiting to be ejaculated into the face of the unknown, the darkness, the Black Knight. Lucas
was not creative enough to name the enemy of the 'light'saber anything other than Darth, which is of
course Dark spoken with a swish lisp.
Life, as you have constructed it, is entirely built around the pretense of power or control. You
are unwilling to receive any form of knowledge that denies you the fictions that must be believed in
order to claim the slightest measure of control. Civilization was built on slavery. Democracy and
philosophy in ancient Greece was only possible because none of the Greeks actually had to lift a finger.
The USA was built the same way. Societies most concerned with a person's right to self-governance
and control seem the most willing to enslave others. Almost as if it is embedded within the character of
freedom that one requires evidence of that freedom. By keeping close to hand large groups of people
living in sharp contrast you can be assured of your own relative position.
We have developed innumerable devices to reinforce our perception of control. It isn't just
lightsabers people, it is everything you own. This is not some Marxist Anti-Capitalist rant; Marx wasn't
all wrong but he was desperately far from being all right. Capitalism is not the source of all our woes,
it is simply the latest manifestation of those woes made flesh. We buy things as part of a concentrated
campaign to define ourselves, to have control over ourselves. Our cellphones have individualized
ringtones to make us attached to them, to make them seem more like something that we control. We
wear fashionable clothes as a form of expression and never dwell too deeply on the fact that all we are
really trying to do is lump ourselves into some category defined by someone else. I am established as
anti-establishment, I am ahead of the curve, I am an iconoclast, I am a card carrying member of the
Sierra Club, I like sex with boys, I like sex with boys and I am a boy, I don’t wanna grow up, I am
ironic (seriously), I am a gurl, I am a hippy, a gangsta, a prep, I work with chemicals, I am not afraid of
a little sweat, I carry firearms, don't fuck with me, I work for a living, I am a slut, a God-fearing
Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, an atheist, an aesthete, I am smarter than you, I own Apple, I am part of the
Technocracy, I am an amazing pair of tits, I am a giant penis (as clearly evidenced by my motorcycle), I
can bench you, I am a Knicks fan, I love New York, I am with stupid (aren't I so fucking funny), I am
in a band, I am made of money, I am punk rock (which means I am not made of money and fuck you), I
am fun at parties, I hate black people, I am black people, I am Italian, French, Russian, Greek,
Moroccan, I drink Coke, I am Prada, I just do it! I have in my closet five hundred other uniforms to
wear just in case the scene changes and I want to be an 'individual' as part of some other predesignated
collective. You believe you are making choices and yet you actively refuse to acknowledge that you
have no control over the set of options. You are Pac-Man and you must gobble all the dots and you can
eat the ghosts in any order or avoid them altogether but the one thing you know is that if they are not
flashing then you lose if you touch them and if you lose then the game is over.
You are complicit with the very system that robs you of what little power you actually have in
exchange for the illusion of a power that cannot in reality ever be attained. You are not only at the
mercy of the system, you are the one that maintains it and presses it on others.
Control is limited to the parameters within which it is defined. Control is a fiction. You can
only have control in one sense when you are constrained in another. Power, true power, is the ability to
generate your own parameters, not being able to shift between two thousand channels at will but to
determine whether channels are worth shifting between at all. Power comes in the form of a question.
It is not to see a thing that has been determined but to determine what can be seen.
Complicitance (Passive complicity)
You know that the world is a lie and you choose to believe it anyways. At the very heart of your
life, the core of your belief, nestled somewhere near that little thing you may or may not call your soul,
you participate in and encourage the fiction of the world. Everything that you pretend to be certain of
is a lie, and you know it, and you go anyways. If you faced the facts, if you looked the world in its
metaphorical eye, you would freeze up, turn into metaphorical stone just as if the world was a basilisk,
a medusa, or any of the other 'fictional' creatures that we have invented to tell us that looking too
closely at certain things will kill you. We know that the world is a cockatrice, but it is our cockatrice,
and we dance with it anyways.
We fear the dark, the unknown, the places where mold grows and fills the air with fetid scents
that we convince ourselves must be poison. We forge differences between the dark and the light. We
speak of darkness as a thing that can be counted, we imbue it with degrees of being and claim that there
can be more darkness here, less there, and ask it to have a substance so that we can place it in a box.
We pretend that darkness grows, that it exists in the positive, when night 'falls' we claim that darkness
'gathers'. Yet darkness does not exist. If there is anything, in the proper sense, there is only light.
Darkness is not a thing, it is an absence, a lack, that can be felt more or less keenly but all those
differences in value are made of 'feeling'. We speak of sensibilities as though they were senses.
It is fear that grows, it is mystery, uncertainty, it is a pronounced awareness of our fundamental
and absolute lack of perception that 'falls' at night and 'gathers' in the gloom. Darkness is simply the
fiction we use to pretend that it is some force or object outside of ourselves that makes us blind.
We only speak of darkness as though it were evil because the slight slice of perception that we
have comes from the fraction of the light spectrum that we can actually see. We describe darkness as
the unknowable and yet it is only unknown in a highly specific way. Sharpshooters have goggles to
compensate for such things. If you did not demand so much of light then you would not fear the dark.
Bats 'see' with sound. They scorn the light. To a bat it is of no consequence except that they become
more visible to their prey, light is an inconvenience not a phobia. It is the embodiment of the
unknowable that generates fear, the thing that forces you to acknowledge the crutch you have so long
relied upon to shamble through life while pretending to run. For a bat the embodiment of fear is a
synthetic sound absorbing foam that all of their howls of desperation are swallowed by. A bat's
nightmares are filled with bright rooms possessing soft walls.
To find oneself in a bright room with padded walls is the safest of all possible places because
even if you wanted to you could not come to harm. Yet it is also the most terrifying because it implies
the possibility that what you believe to exist or think that you see is absolutely uncertain. The bat
screams and begs the walls to release its cries and return them so that it might, by hearing its own
shouted question, know where it is and where the walls are that lock it in place. It is the sound of its
own voice that tells the bat what to see. You too tell yourself what to see.
You fear bats. You think that bats are disgusting and filthy creatures that wait for you in the
darkness. They transform in the shadows, into something terrible that looks just like you, that sounds
like you, that can mesmerize you, suck your blood, taint your soul... but only if you give it permission
to enter. The best news that you can get, the only good news that you can get once the vampire has
entered your room is that simply letting it know that you have belief defeats it. Show it your cross,
brandish your absolute 'faith' in some kind of foundation and the vampire turns comical, it bares its
fangs and is revealed to be a simple beast, it hisses helplessly, enraged, and turns into ash after being
ever so lightly brushed by some isolated shaft of the light.
Darkness does not exist, it is something that you have invented to deny your dependence upon
the light. You fear those things that thrive in darkness not because they are strong when you are weak;
most things that live in darkness are pale and feeble and slow, even the one species of bat that can
actually bite you is small enough to fit within the palm of a pre-adolescent child. You fear things that
thrive in darkness and inflate them into monsters because you must. You must believe in the greatness
of light because it is the means by which you 'see' the world and if you were to accept the limitations
and flaws of that perception then you would have to acknowledge the existence of a world outside of it.
You cannot bear the creatures of the night because they are symbolic of your ignorance, evidence that
there are realms of experience beyond the 'sight' that you are limited to. When something cannot be
known it must be reviled.
Secretly you hate the scientists in their white coats of innocence and purity because they use
insight into hidden realms to control magnets and laser beams and craft magical items upon which you
rely. Scientists are wizards with elaborate degrees to protect them from your scrutiny and if you could
you would burn all their textbooks and diagrams and machines and dance around the bonfire in ecstasy.
Think about how ready people always are to burn books when given a chance. You would return to the
world of ignorance and bloodshed if not for the elaborate fictions you have built. You use titles like
doctor to single out the people you resent, to label them and define them, and they are convinced it is
an honor. The reality is that all forms of distinction are modes of alienation that allow the distinguisher
to have a measure of control over the distinguished. Dictators are pawns to the fears of the populace,
they cannot manipulate what does not exist.
You wield your remote control like a lightsaber and pretend to understand how it works, by pressing
the buttons you are given the most feeble and inaccurate sense of control possible and you force
yourself to accept it as actual power. This prevents you from having the seemingly psychotic but
totally sane desire to smash everything around you that has the semblance of life but was not made by
your household brand of God. You pay extraordinary amounts of money to be granted access to
thousands of channels that you can pause, fast forward, and record with your magic wand, lightsaber
remote, powerstick, Excalibur, potentially alchemical and detached penis. They could have made those
things round you know. At the end of a long day being told what to do you retreat into an easy chair
with various adjustable controls – so that you have control – and force your will on a flashing box; the
pleasure lies in the surfing and not the watching, the power and not the product. Yet you know that all
of this is bullshit. You know that TV is only able to exist because of its ability to convince you to buy
things that you don't really need. They have crafted into the remote control (lightsaber) five hundred
ways for you to be lied to and your only complaint is that the lies are not convincing enough. You are
eagerly anticipating the day that you will have holograms with olfactory ion beams in your living room.
You want a solid light fiction that will have sex with you or hold you and will never tell a soul exactly
how fucked up and insecure you really are. And you are. And so are they, the ambiguous and
ambitious 'they' that apparently 'controls' the world. They build lightsabers not only as part of some
dark and malevolent scheme but also because of the simple fact that they want lightsabers too! People
that have power are by necessity people that want power, and the only reason to desire power is if you
are keenly aware of how little you actually have and how little is actually possible to attain.
When was the last time you heard of a dictator that wasn't paranoid to an irrational degree.
Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Idi Amin, Mugabe, Milosevic, Kim Sung Jung, Qaddafi, Khomeini,
Noriega, Hussein, Castro, Fujimori, and Hitler, and the list goes on. Hitler was just looking for a
lightsaber. And it does have to be a lightsaber. If light is the symbol for all knowledge that we pretend
is absolute then what could be a better sign for power and wisdom than a giant penis that does not shoot
off in the distance as its nature demands but hovers at arms length on the thrumming edge of climax.
And those things do thrum don't they? It is almost as if they have accumulated a massive load of God
gob just waiting to be ejaculated into the face of the unknown, the darkness, the Black Knight. Lucas
was not creative enough to name the enemy of the 'light'saber anything other than Darth, which is of
course Dark spoken with a swish lisp.
Life, as you have constructed it, is entirely built around the pretense of power or control. You
are unwilling to receive any form of knowledge that denies you the fictions that must be believed in
order to claim the slightest measure of control. Civilization was built on slavery. Democracy and
philosophy in ancient Greece was only possible because none of the Greeks actually had to lift a finger.
The USA was built the same way. Societies most concerned with a person's right to self-governance
and control seem the most willing to enslave others. Almost as if it is embedded within the character of
freedom that one requires evidence of that freedom. By keeping close to hand large groups of people
living in sharp contrast you can be assured of your own relative position.
We have developed innumerable devices to reinforce our perception of control. It isn't just
lightsabers people, it is everything you own. This is not some Marxist Anti-Capitalist rant; Marx wasn't
all wrong but he was desperately far from being all right. Capitalism is not the source of all our woes,
it is simply the latest manifestation of those woes made flesh. We buy things as part of a concentrated
campaign to define ourselves, to have control over ourselves. Our cellphones have individualized
ringtones to make us attached to them, to make them seem more like something that we control. We
wear fashionable clothes as a form of expression and never dwell too deeply on the fact that all we are
really trying to do is lump ourselves into some category defined by someone else. I am established as
anti-establishment, I am ahead of the curve, I am an iconoclast, I am a card carrying member of the
Sierra Club, I like sex with boys, I like sex with boys and I am a boy, I don’t wanna grow up, I am
ironic (seriously), I am a gurl, I am a hippy, a gangsta, a prep, I work with chemicals, I am not afraid of
a little sweat, I carry firearms, don't fuck with me, I work for a living, I am a slut, a God-fearing
Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, an atheist, an aesthete, I am smarter than you, I own Apple, I am part of the
Technocracy, I am an amazing pair of tits, I am a giant penis (as clearly evidenced by my motorcycle), I
can bench you, I am a Knicks fan, I love New York, I am with stupid (aren't I so fucking funny), I am
in a band, I am made of money, I am punk rock (which means I am not made of money and fuck you), I
am fun at parties, I hate black people, I am black people, I am Italian, French, Russian, Greek,
Moroccan, I drink Coke, I am Prada, I just do it! I have in my closet five hundred other uniforms to
wear just in case the scene changes and I want to be an 'individual' as part of some other predesignated
collective. You believe you are making choices and yet you actively refuse to acknowledge that you
have no control over the set of options. You are Pac-Man and you must gobble all the dots and you can
eat the ghosts in any order or avoid them altogether but the one thing you know is that if they are not
flashing then you lose if you touch them and if you lose then the game is over.
You are complicit with the very system that robs you of what little power you actually have in
exchange for the illusion of a power that cannot in reality ever be attained. You are not only at the
mercy of the system, you are the one that maintains it and presses it on others.
Control is limited to the parameters within which it is defined. Control is a fiction. You can
only have control in one sense when you are constrained in another. Power, true power, is the ability to
generate your own parameters, not being able to shift between two thousand channels at will but to
determine whether channels are worth shifting between at all. Power comes in the form of a question.
It is not to see a thing that has been determined but to determine what can be seen.
Review
COI
A conflict of interest is a situation in which someone in a position of
trust, such as a lawyer, insurance adjuster, a politician, executive or
director of a corporation or a medical research scientist or physician,
has competing professional or personal interests. Such competing
interests can make it difficult to fulfill his or her duties impartially. A
conflict of interest exists even if no unethical or improper act results
from it. A conflict of interest can create an appearance of impropriety
that can undermine confidence in the person, profession, or court
system. A conflict can be mitigated by third party verification or third
party evaluation noted below—but it still exists.
Note: This summary incorrectly implies that conflicts of interest only
apply to professionals. A conflict of interest arises when anyone has
two duties which conflict - for example an employee's duty to well
and faithfully perform their work as purchasing manager, and that
same employee's familial duty to their sibling who happens to be
tendering for the sale of widgets to the employee's employer. In that
case the employee has a conflict of interest, despite the fact that they
are not a lawyer, doctor, politician etc.
-Wikipedia entry
Wiki and common acceptation have it wrong. In
practice, COI simply cannot function as a guiding binary
principle. In reality, objectivity is often the unethical
position to espouse. Take for example the flailing discipline
of contemporary art criticism and an unfaltering corpulent
art market:
market (dealers + collectors) = subjective (opinion and taste) = prosperous
art (artists) = mostly subjective (self-important) = confused
criticism (critics + journalists) = objective (disinterested) = crisis
Small-minded COI complaints plague cities like
Chicago when it comes to art criticism. Cries of favoritism,
cronyism, discrimination, and unfairness by artists and
other players lacking art world authority are heard as
frustrated calls for objectivity in an industry fueled by
subjectivities (This strikes me as odd because
discrimination in the art-world is not closeted, nor is it
mysterious. Sure, it may be annoying but its transparency
neutralizes the inequity). Criticism’s real crisis is that it no
longer is charged with the framing of discourse: the
vendors have now taken up that vital facet of art practice.
The structural lay of the land in the contemporary art
world — with all of its dominance located in distribution and
consumption — requires criticism to be equally passionate,
frustrated, confused, and angry, in short: subjective.
Criticism’s objective analysis is unconvincing and static in
the face of an overly aroused desire to trade in cultural
capital. Plainly, the goal is not to undercut the market but
to establish a parallel platform that is fervently dialectical.
I am regularly accused of non-objective activities in
my writing or in the operation of The Suburban. And those
accusations are true. However, I highly value objectivity but
only as an abstraction. Therefore I allocate that research to
my studio. But until a canonical precept takes hold of this
global art world (a return to art movements instead of
market movements), battling it out with tribes and tastes is
my way to demonstrate deep and passionate conviction in
art, artists, and their ideas.
With that I would like to briefly address a host of
recent exhibitions that would certainly put me at risk for a
slew of COI violations. Colleagues, current SAIC graduate
students, and recently graduated students, would all be
disallowed as review considerations for Artforum or
Artforum.com, ArtUS or X-tra. Phil Hanson, Dana DeGuilio,
Gaylen Gerber, Jeni Spota, John Phillips, and Heather
Guertin are all painters who since the beginning of this year
have mounted exceptional solo exhibitions in Chicago. I am
proud that I have professional or personal relationships to
these artists but I am fierier and enthusiastic in regards to
how each contributes to the discourse of contemporary
painting.
Phil Hanson’s acrylic paintings shown at Corbett vs.
Dempsey in January are jubilant in their emblematical
anatomy and diagrammatic oneness. Assertive color and
line motifs underscore mottos, symbols, and a desirous
sentiment in these works. Traces of psychedelia, Pop, and
concrete
poetry
reverberate
through
Hanson’s
symmetrically composed canvases. Modest to small in
scale, Hanson’s paintings never reduce themselves to
posters or design exercises. They are bold and often
graphic in their formal organization yet Hanson’s meticulous
touches of pliant acrylic medium quicken the painting’s
surfaces and quiver his contours. “Organ music has a
special kind of intensity. Multiple layers of pure tones
accumulate; themes and forms appear and dissolve into a
wall of sound,” writes Hanson, expounding on the title of
his exhibition: “Organ Music”. Elaborating, Hanson writes
that he is “interested in a painting that is closed, tightened
up, overdetermined.” Yet Hanson’s long relationship to the
physical act of painting habitually gives way to an image
that is so animated and intricate that even his
‘overdetermined’ pictures look uncannily radical.
Jeni Spota’s 12x12 show at the Museum of
Contemporary Art is also a collection of small-scale,
overdetermined paintings. But unlike Hanson, Spota’s work
is ‘overdetermined’ in a conventionally single-minded and
conceptual manner. Her thick impasto-laden canvases
loosely quote a sequence in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1971
adaptation of Boccaccio’s 14th-Century The Decameron.
Comprised of one drawing and seven paintings, Spota’s
12x12 show frames our deep-seated desire to locate our
belief systems within the individual specialness of the outré
trendy. More like contemporary art tchotchkes than
paintings, Spota’s work promotes the naïve representation
in Protorenaissance frescos and Italian film with lavish
amounts of paint. She has hit a culturally fashionable
trifecta with these representations of representations of
representations, and I bet she will hit another combination
of quirky narrative quotes and unexpected material again.
Her challenge will be to see if making a painting is part of
the equation.
Included in Spota’s 12x12 exhibition is a collaborative
piece that she made with Gaylen Gerber titled “Giotto’s
Dream for Gaylen.” Here Spota caked in the backside of a
Gerber monochrome with more amassing of iconographical
background figures. This piece sets up a welcome dialogue
between Spota’s project of conceptual reiteration and
Gerber’s on-going project of staging. Concurrent with
Spota’s exhibition at the MCA, Gerber’s show at Rowley
Kennerk in the West Loop featured objects and artifacts
from collaborations with Daniel Buren, Louise Lawler, Adrian
Schiess, Heimo Zobernig and Allan McCollum. Gerber has
always been elastic in who he platforms via his gray
supports. Spota’s overextended and overly determined
exercise with Gerber humanizes the several sober and
reductive gestures articulating the Rowley Kennerk gallery.
For example, the sheet of striped Plexiglas that Gerber
gleaned from the Daniel Buren exhibition at The Arts Club
in 2006 loops local exhibition history and recontextualizes
Buren’s conceptual minimalism. Resting on the floor like a
funerary monument, its solid gray geometry intentionally
subverts the beauty of Buren’s original translucent
paintings. What I most appreciated about this Gerber
project is that for the first time I identified the potential of
his gray backdrops acting as a shroud instead of merely a
platform. Finally, it is assuring to know that Gerber is not
without an existential pulse, showing us the thin line that
separates obscuring and presenting, consuming and
promoting.
Thinking about the immediacy of Dana DeGuilio’s
gestural paintings and the promptness of John Philip’s
hard-edge abstractions is the most efficient way to get at
the paradox inherent in both of their practices. Both
sincerity and cynicism are interwoven throughout these two
very different approaches to the language. And what is
most fascinating is that DeGuilio and Philips keep both of
these incongruent sentiments at the fore. DeGuilio’s project
at Contemporary Art Workshop features several new
paintings, ones that incorporate a new directional staccato
motif among the push and pull of her inelegant gestures
and her poised brushwork. Her palette and her marks
aspire to be polemical but DeGuilio always gives over to the
dignity of expression. Aware of this, she included a
tongue-in-cheek drawing in her show that functioned as a
key to the vocabulary of marks in her compositions. For
example, “nervous,” “pleased,” “bored,” “goofy,” are all
assigned a specific linear gesture. In a way, this drawing
represents her conceptual ambition, one that is
unobtainable when she picks up a loaded brush. Phillips’s
show comprised of eight new paintings that are urbane
arrangements based on doodles. His titles range from the
playful to the ridiculous and it is in his textual designation
that Phillips reveals his necessary skepticism of perceptual
abstraction.
Heather Guertin’s four-painting shown at 65 Grand
was perfectly situated in the domestic space constituting
this unusual little exhibition space. Bleaching, ironing and
gouache shape her Jules Olitski-cum-Sergei Jensen
abstractions. The kitchen environment in which these works
hung gave her paintings an illicit self-aware wink to viewers
who thought they were seeing lyrical Color Field work.
Other shows I would have liked to delve into include
You-Ni Chae’s at SAIC’s LG Space , the Jim Lutes survey
show at ISU Galleries in Bloomington, Eric Lebofsky’s droll
sculptures at Western Exhibitions and Ann Wilson’s
‘drawing’ show at Rhona Hoffman. Diego Leclery’s show is
perhaps the most sinful COI I could muster given that he is
my editor for this piece and publication. So I am forbidden
to expound on his video installation at Julius Caesar, a
video that humorously brings viewers on a journey that
traverses representation to abstraction, from Pieter Bruegel
to Ellsworth Kelly with stereotypical identity constructions
along the way—a bagel and a bald eagle are our stepping
stones amidst macro and micro worlds. It is reminiscent of
Ken Fandell’s video showing concurrently at Tony Wight
where Fandell’s sovereign swings betwixt a Cheeto and the
starry Universe. Both Leclery’s and Fandell’s looping videos
evoke ontological befuddlement with a plucky sense of
humor. We can laugh at the big picture because we don’t
know what the big picture is.
MICHELLE GRABNER
watching) that these are professional actors (of no genetic
affiliation), that one should “not attempt” to reenact the
portrayed events and that, doing so, both in the case of the
son as of the mother could result in psychic trauma: the
ineluctable guilt attendant to knowing an uncrossable line
has been crossed, psychic trauma inflicted both ways for
life. And what if the boy or his mother trip and die in the
watery mess, trip and sever their spines? What if electric
shorts start a fire, destroy the house and the belongings,
precipitating the family’s fall to penury? Serious trauma!
Just before, perhaps during the previous commercial
break (Food Network, Tuesday, 3:42PM) a woman leapt
from moving vehicle to moving vehicle, sparing none:
garbage truck, horse, bicycle, etc. Her car had not been
repaired after an accident (catch: “Bad insurance. Now, try
good insurance.”). There was a warning, professional
stuntmen were involved—presumably some vehicular
choreography as well—one should not attempt to do this.
Trauma would likely result if the untrained were to mimic
the actors on the screen.
For five cents today
there isn’t a thing you can buy.
For fifteen cents, gum.
Today’s my brithday.
Happy brithday, young man.
Thank you very much.
-•From hosey
Dracula,
When I’m half awake I say yes to everything. If you
come to my window I will let you in. I just don’t want
to live forever.
Double Trouble
On TV, there was an ad for paper towels. In it, a
ginger rapscallion shakes a full 2-liter bottle of orange-ade
and unleashes the pressurized contents in a money shot
directed at his mother’s face. The mother finds it amusing
and harmless enough to join in. With a housekeeper’s
prudence, mom sprays back with water from the
detachable nozzle of the kitchen sink.
Both laugh—the
angle being that there is Bounty or Brawny or whatever
else to make this mess less of a hassle—and give
themselves over to this thinly veiled act of incestuous
jouissance. The subliminal subplot doesn’t bother me
much: as an advertiser you have to sell, and appealing to
a need for Oedipal transgression is as old as the business,
I’m sure. What alarmed me was the absence of any
disclaimer on the screen, telling me (or kids and mothers
Happy birthday!
The past and the future.
Do not ____ this text
What control do we have over the future? What
control do we have over ourselves?
These are not
inherently related questions: the first question is the one I
mean to ask and the second question I ask to throw off any
attempt to assuredly ask the first question. What control
do I have over myself? I think I’m a good writer, but I
know I’m not, I know I’m too young (at writing), too hasty,
not well enough read to have developed notions of style.
Everything I write I hate about ten minutes after I show it,
submit it, print it and that must be evidence of something.
I simply haven’t done enough of it to know it’s worth
anything. No one tells me if it’s shit, no one tells me things
are shit, so does that mean I’m not making shit? Or does
that mean that I’m deaf to criticism? Deaf to nuance? And
if I can’t pick up on it how am I expected to be able to do
it? I want nuance, I want to nuance. I have no notion of
whether something will fly: I will like it, it will fly with me,
but I laugh at every joke, my own or every one else’s; I get
every point, even if I disagree with it or fail to get it (my
own or every one else’s). I feel a pulsing excitement
pushing the boundaries of what I know, by book, by hook
or by crook. Not like I don’t tell the same story over and
over again, but I just don’t know what I’m writing until I
write it. And I don’t know if people will understand it until I
write it, and I don’t know if people will get past this
sentence, or even up to it. To somebody who drifted off, I
don’t even exist, and then, what?, I’m supposed to keep
venturing to say that I believe in x, y, and z? Well, I’m
shaky on z, but x and y, solid. And what about this lame
attempt at humor? What if it turns out to be a great line
and I mistakenly excise it because it’s so corny? It’s
unlikely, but what if? What if it makes me famous? What if
people take it for a witty pass at critical irony? What if, in
ways unknown to me at this moment, it fits perfectly where
it’s supposed to fit, like good words written by a good
writer—not me—someone who can use words like
assignation, obstreperous, atavism. And what if people
take my phrasing and choice of words—even these words I
can’t use but have chosen as examples of my
shortcomings—as precisely the cocky-clumsy ostentation I
just mentionedv, as a critical commentary on the practice of
writing?
On self-awareness?
I guess I ruin it by
mentioning it, in trying to figure something out about it. Or
maybe I should just go with the feeling that it is all crap.
The only control I have over my output is to put it down,
put it out there and see what happens. I’m pretty
convinced this piece will flop. I’m sorry if you feel left out
by being one of the few people to get this far. I mean, it’s
not that far, it’s just this meandering thought is endless.
Well, I can go forever like this. I mean, I don’t think I
put out crap, I love what I do, and I have a feeling that
history might be long enough for me to be guaranteed a
relevant place, even as a shitty writer or limited thinker.
Not that I am or not asserting whether or not I am or am
not either of those two things, I just want to make clear
that I don’t know anything yet—not that—very little,
anyway. I would, however, gamble that culture is moving
towards an interest in the intricate and interconnected, not
uniform
and singular lineages, and if this pattern
continuessss...
as have other patternssss....
The failure of this project, or the failure of me as an
artistic entity to flap butterfly wings will be proof of my
efforts. I give it 9-to-1 odds against being around to see it,
but I’ll suffer those odds, gladly. There are thousands if not
many thousands of artists who thought themselves great
and never amounted to anything (yet.). Surely, I, in
paralyzing doubt, can get as far. But only one thing will
determine that.
Bdbdbd is completely stuck in the anal phase.
If I don’t make it, if I don’t say it, how will I know if it
has wings?
That’s the control I have over the future. My brain
and my mouth and my little typing fingers all do very
different things. My brain has no control over the future.
My mouth has more control over the future than my brain
but my gecko-jointed fingers have even more. I mean,
what if this is, like, the fucking goddamn Communist
Manifesto? I don’t even have to share any credit with
anybody.
The problem is the immediate historicizing, it’s the
skipping the present, wanting to belong immediately in
some kind of future. Amodee Eahreni Essem.
We do live in an age, I think, where we no longer feel
that disconnect with the future that was perceptible in my
youth (I’m 30), or even more pronounced in the Jetson
childhood of my forebears. I think with little talking devices
in our hands and our entire music collection to walk around
with and with beef growing from scratch in a tube (it’s
true!)... well, that wraps up all of my youthful fantasies of
the future. Except for virtual reality, but if you consider
metaphorically the ubiquity of online porn, I’m immersed
already in my erotic fantasies in ways I couldn’t imagine in
my youth. Space flight and travel I’ll probably be around to
see. It wasn’t realistic anyway for me to think I’d still be
10 and living the future, so I can accept being wrong on
more than a few counts.
No, forget much of that, this is not the issue
The issue is putting out. Shitting all over the world
rage and frustration. The issue appears three-fold—do I
shit out my frustration/do I sublimate it into form/do I do
nothing— but it is actually two. Sublimation doesn’t change
the truth that shit is at play, that something which existed
even in early childhood, the urge to master/control output,
to project some psychic state onto a physical object, is the
wellspring of the creative act. And there is of course more
than just rage and frustration to my relationship to the
world, but rage and frustration are what I’m focusing on
because they’re so primal, and anyway, I’m not really
focusing on them at all. Do I move or not move, make or
not make? For bad artists, or conflicted artists, or naturally
untalented artists, it’s a tough call. Some people are gifted
and never ask themselves these things.
Others ask
themselves these things, but swiftly move on, their minds
made up, their paths carved. Others just obsess about
what the question implies, what does it mean to do or not
to do. Those unfortunates (obsessive neurotics) never even
really get to the moment of decision: they manage to
construct a whole prior order of questions they feel the
original begs, and spend their lives answering those,
convinced they will eventually decide with sufficient wisdom
whether to do or not to do.
Of course, everybody does, most of the time, even
obsessive cases. But if the question becomes one of
confidence in creating art, of being sure that one is doing
the right and the good, then I think everyone, even healthy
artists are liable to fall victim to the neurotic’s spiraling list
of priorities and find themselves never getting anything
done.
BDBBDB
Image credits: page 1, img_1.jpg and dragon_wars_poster_5.jpg, Google
Images; page 2, collage by Jeni Spota; page 3, scan1.jpg by Jason Loebs;
page 4, scan2.jpg by Jason Loebs; page 11, images provided by Dana
DeGuilio; page 12, hoop.jpg by Heather Guertin; pages 14-20, credits
unavailale; page 22, Picture-3.gif, Picture-12.gif, and Picture-10.gif by
bdbbdb; page 23, nonchala by Elizabeth Weiss, scanned by bdbbdb; page 24,
Picture-11.gif by bdbbdb; this page, josephuffie.jpg by bdbbdb.
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