Imagine an author that writes about a time in a bar where he noticed that a guy with a notepad is infatuated with the things that he says.
The writer that is our protagonist is a writer. The writer that is our protagonist is writing about the experience of being observed by someone who appears to be writing about him in a public scenario, in this case, at the bar. Now the reasonable metanarrator, me, parenthesis, who, close parenthesis, would, with his background or at least functional understanding of psychoanalysis or at the very least, confidence in his intuitive grasp of the inner working of man would be able to see through the paranoid line of thinking, the through line of paranoia that he's engaged in, that he's wagered on, bedeviled equally by the insight that he must participate in this dubious mode with no way of externally distinguishing himself distinguishing himself, parenthesis, ideally, with no need to do so. Alas, from the subject that pursues such lines in earnest, with no way of externally distinguishing himself from the subject that pursues such lines in earnest as if they were predetermined, unbeknownst to he, but still acts as if In fact, it's the only as if that the facts resist. The fact persists that the fact is that he's the only one who cannot distinguish himself from the predetermined earnestly that delineates itself from the pine lines by the parked cars on the main roads or the thoroughfare or the side roads that dictate the place in which he might be able to park his vehicle unless it's a figment of his mind, the place he might be able to situate himself with blinkers, blind shades, blindfolded with no rays penetrating the opaque substance that binds him and his vision to the face that wears the signs that sign their signature on the face of the devil that wears on him.
His signature. It weighs. Askewed. In balance portrayed. The few.
The proud. The brave The home The stage Patron My liege We're slaves To clone My knave My rogue. Behave. My throne. We take. us three.
N Plus n. was me, my friend. 'Twas he, the end, that showed me the sen
timent. That showed me no. Unend, unend. unending agony is to friend an unfriggening and unfriending.
To friend an unfriending. Defriend an unfriendly wagon. Dragon. To friend, defend an unfriendly dragonry. The drag race in the caves is too loud tonight.
But there have been nights in which the drag race in the cave has exhilarated me and thrilled me with this loudness. There are times I appreciate the drag race, the dragons and their racers, not wishing to erase them or mute them, but listen. It hurts. It's loud. But change reverberates and breaks stones, manipulates, changes hammers from chisels to blammers for chisels.
Not funny for rizzles. I'm not sizzling. I'm not sizzled. I'm not in the pan. I'm not seared.
But I'm serious. We can't get a deal with Sears. We can't mass produce this unless everyone wants it. Bring them near. Bring them to tears.
Bring me back. Stop. Listen. No. Destruction.
Fear. Is all that I hear. Imagine someone would much rather pretend they knew the answer out of fear and self preservation then ask a simple question. The answer to which may feed them or guide them, confuse them, contribute to wisdom, illusions, the prism, effusions, what's given, Delusions. The deluge that fissures that fills up the fissures in the city rocks, the city streets.
The impossibility of elaborating or short circuiting or returning. Because knowing a certain inconsistency undergirds each and every word, letter, morpheme, sentence, phrase, paragraph, interjection, emotion, paradigm, fluid, development, disgust, reverberation, committal to the refusal of revelation, the paradigm, the no name hovering just beyond. It's palpable. The light switch. The ruse of sight Always a false threat.
The interminable, relentless commitment to exhaustion and beyond it. The hand. The pale hand. The dark hand that extends between two vertical slats, cylindrical iron bars that run between a concrete opening. At the very least, confidence in his intuitive grasp for the inner workings of the machinations of the enigma of the mind of a starfish, A sublime.
Fish tank. Neapolitan fish tank. Amoeba. Would be able to see through the paranoid paranoid line of thinking. Bedeviled by the insight that he must participate in this dubious mode with no way of externally distinguishing myself, ideally with no need to do so from the subject that pursues such lines in earnest as if they were predetermined.
It may often be the case that our metanarrator may take this eternal mirrored vacillation, this eternal mirrored vacillation at face value, thereby recapitulating the figural nature, reinstantiating, reinstituting, Inaugurating. Affirming. The figural. Non nature of false choice. That is presented to it, it, the subject, and the work, the material, the surface.
A complex web of intensities that resonate. At face value. The value of a face is that of orientation. We know this. The pareidolia that plagues materialists.
The compulsion to configure the confounded, to coagulate the disaggregated into the familiar, to ground the stage for resonate resignation, perhaps by way of resignation or or abscontion or or mitigation or or Surrender. The other word for surrender. Thinking on now. You know it. The recognizable.
The choice to the relative the artist may be The artist may find themselves on at a particular spot on the scale of feeling the tension that occurs in the process of mark making that may pull them in one direction or the other. The incomprehensible or the comprehensible, the figural or the face, the visage, the physiognomy, the human form. At least, it's trope or recognizable symbols that fluctuate between realism and symbolism that indicate a foundation or an orient a a ground upon which to orient oneself and their vision. This tension may be felt greater in some artists than others, and they may be actualized with reference to different attitudes toward identity and figuration. And it could simply be recognized as a necessity of capital?
Or is it deeper? Does it reach into the ocular as such that one needs a starting point, a ruse, a artifice from which one may depart in a singular manner, choosing traditional subject matter, the most recognizable, as a way of engaging an immediate viewership while asking for a witness to the departure from convention toward novelty within the realm of expectation. To allow the viewer to see something that makes sense. And guide them towards something that doesn't, At least not automatically or with the aid of reference. At least not a particular one.
Are you getting all of this? Are you recording this? The man, our protagonist, thinks to himself at the bar as he talks to his friend and watches out of the corner of his eye the man at the other end of the bar that may or may not be interpreting, transcribing, translating, recording the things that he says. He says, Hour men at the bar has time, even during speaking somehow, to imagine the shame and the perseverance, quite frankly, that the recording other, the vagrant writer must be experiencing. There have been moments our protagonist imagines that the writer who listens has felt great ecstasy and reverence and respect for the things our man has said.
And there are surely other times Our protagonist imagines that the other writer has felt a sense of triumph and superiority over and against the utterances of a subject. And we know without asking that the other writer feels remorse in these moments, feels shame. And refrains from exalting or identifying with the judgment inherent in these moments. And becomes aware of his choice as a writer to take an angle, a line to align himself with a certain attitude that fits the character of the speaker that he employs to record. And our ability to decide for him is of no importance.
It could be a generous ear that prevails with a positive spin in the web of what is captured. Or there could be also the blatant consumption, the vampiric seduction, the blood sucking abduction of the subject and the language he collects. The bloodline. The human. Who are they?
Does it matter? I'll take what I can get and record it, he says. Has no bearing on my own understanding of my role here as a person. I digress. The man at the bar that is listened to apparently slowly loses control of his social presentation.
He loses his train of thought so often that it begins the occurrence in the eyes of his listeners, be they his friends or the other writer, begins to discredit the value of his words. They seem to issue not from a place of disingenuousness, but from a place of automatic reactive helplessness. Ideally, this foul state of mind would not neutralize or negate the value of what is being put forward and what is being asked of the reader. It's unclear in the moment But there must be a cumulative cumulative effect If it is to be a true narration. But we've left off from commitments to revelation long ago.
There was no proper ending. And there is no way to absolve the guilt. One conjures for oneself, matching their past actions with some force. There's no way to express the complexity of the situation other than to stop.
Let's say, for the sake of this exercise, I'm defending myself as an artist, which also becomes a game of questioning against what criteria or grounded in what what social sphere or what claim to legitimacy am I appealing to and for what reason? And these are all questions that are considered in the answer to the question. I feel as though there are a few people, and just a few, who understand and who need no explanation and take an immediate positive attitude toward the things I produce, things I do, And me as the producer of those things, it's self evident, the value. It's just really, truth be told, the simplest way to put it is it's the only way I know how to be. It's the direct result of me living as I do, me being who I am.
It's like asking, who are you? It's the same question as what do you do. I found myself in a situation in which it makes the most sense by one line of thinking to do what I do has emerged quite naturally from my circumstances as a person, as a a being, an entity, a subject that is aware of their own life. It occurs to me that what I do, what you see, part of what you see me do is a necessary result of who I am with regards to where I see myself in life. And this may all seem abstract, but it's really the only way I know how to see it.
You could choose any starting point to derive, to come up with a derivation with logical consistency of which is and equal parts of product and an image of my actions. I have to whatever degree taken on. The action or task of quite frankly quite frankly, I would call it art in the most general sense. That is an exploration of materials with the aim with one of the aims being, a participation in the understanding of arrangement and formalism or the arrangement of materials in form. Or, you know, it's funny.
Just now I read in inconsistencies, the entry under the title of a definition of art is that which responds to informalism with form without neutralizing it. And I remember that off the top of my head because I read it. And I looked at it and I thought about it and I reread it and I thought about it. And seems to me you could just as easily reverse the definition, depending on your perspective, which betrays the fact that perhaps every artist, whether or not they see themselves this way, are in fact on one side or the other of the imagined spectrum between form and the formless, which is a subject that has occupied me greatly, truth be told, because of a number of reasons. And this extends across all practices, which is something I've come to embrace is the fact that I am engaged in a multidisciplinary practice with whatever degree of discipline. multi modal.
But, nonetheless, I use multiple instruments, and this is a vantage point at which I become aware of certain blockages levied against me. I can imagine people with certain attitudes towards those who are as they might describe Jacks of all trades, master of none. But perhaps it's the case that mastery It's a singular concept that can only be arrived in the context of an individual's pursuit. And mastery as it is classically understood, at least in this case, has no bearing on the practice as it's carried out has no legitimacy in the sphere of activity. The naivete that characterizes the impetus of my action, I think, ought to be situated with as much charity that's called for in a robust, far reaching expedition into the unknown, into the limits of the possible.
The practice that is a direct confrontation with personal limits, the body, and its variable, varying states of integration between faculties, namely that of eye and mind or eye and hand, or cognitive, calculating, and intuitive, acting in earnest with humility. At times, one approaches the medium with apprehension. And a disposition filled with doubt, solipsism, and rage. And if regular enough, there are times when the practice commences with a sense of Exactitude that at any moment can falter into either the previous category or one of hubris and self satisfaction. A great challenge then becomes to embody a form of confidence that is coextensive with the situation at hand or the attitude of or the commitment to a direct enactment or performance of the current state.
Of impossibility by way of the radical decision to act, to change the state of things with the materials, once again, that are at hand in the arena provided whether it be a blank page, a piece of scrap paper, the ground, a public wall, a sheet of graph paper found in the dumpster, newsprint, gifted cotton paper. The digital screen, or any surface that lends itself to or refuses, resists inscription or recording. One cannot expect there to be total presence when confronting the need. To listen to their own experience, Or manipulate materials or tools or use tools to manipulate other tools with tools and materials in their life world with continuous grace and And Humility, which often entails or necessitates The bad or the wrong or the accidental, the unassimilable, the displeasurable, the ugly, the fact of their ness that cannot be subsumed into any predetermined aesthetic category. And it's the vacillation between these extremes as an end product.
What is seen on the recording surface after time has changed the surface, that is an index of a searching that had to have been That had to have Legitimating outside of any articulated body of sovereignty. As legitimate. Legitimate internally as as a singular instance of an energetic exchange that refers to nothing beyond itself, but as an image is an image. A trace of Activity. And it's funny to end that sentence on this.
On this redundant note. Because within the experience I'm describing and within the potential, the impossibility of apprehending the apparent final result of such a process. There is infinite possibility for singularity and novelty that, in my view, legitimates the happening. On the other hand, it also betrays the futility. The futility of discourse of meaningful language to try to accompany these endeavors.
And yet, furthermore, the irony continues as it grounds its pre ironic status as an innocent game of self legitimation legitimization. That this very quasi confessional tone of admitting that there is nothing to say, that, to put it another way, the thing shows what the thing shows. There is disclosed that which is disclosed. The tautology of a pleonism, as a great friend once put it. This very pronunciation declaration of redundancy is the grounds upon which such disclosure can be apprehended.
Such activity can be registered. Not an excuse, but a paradoxical account of the state of creation or the state of the subject as they find themselves situated in the process of manipulating materials on a recording surface or as they find themselves implicated in an ongoing process that is at once natural and or the image of a natural occurrence as well as the simultaneous denaturalization of nature. And in my so to say, in my specific experience pertaining to the process and product that are a result of my, as I call it, need to make marks, very fundamentally basic need to make marks, plural, and to make a mark, historically. But that is far down the line of awareness in terms of the immediacy of the action. In abstraction, we find thought or the activity of reducing complexity into a manageable field of elements to be recombined in such a way that those who engage with it can make sense of it or feel some degree oriented within their own context, which is embedded in other overlapping contexts, be they socio, cultural, political, economic, historical, psychological, interpersonal.
In this case, we think of the will to make marks. As fundamental as it may be, imbued with a certain, dare I say, authenticity or earnestness or directness or attunement with anywhere from one's personal intuition to the spirit of the times or any connection combination that these two levels may have with one another, which inaction must be in earnest even if that earnestly is undergirded by an ironic understanding of the state of things or the impact that such a set of marks might have on the contemporary or historical understanding of what constitutes an image or what characterizes a picture plane. Clearly, it is not enough for someone who approaches the canvas or picture plane in earnest to rehearse or regurgitate preexisting forms or those that appear in any obvious sense, forms that have been analyzed by the artist or otherwise. Clearly, the following of directions will not suffice for a sense of contribution to life, art, the state of things, possibility, the wager, the promise that's been made to consciousness or to awareness or possibility or impossibility itself. That one must perform or actualize that which only they are capable of performing or actualizing, which is the singular quality that will determine the character of their work.
I cannot. Therefore, I must.
do you ever get the sense that everything you do or say is a form of cowardice? And that your waking life is spent targeting bravery and missing the mark fatally. Well, perhaps any fatalistic outbursts can be forgiven without being excused To whine and moan is predictable and to some degree expected and accepted. As it is merely at bottom, an animal wailing against its will at the confrontation of its immediate environment. One ought one ought not to suppress these urges to grieve existence, to bemoan one's position with a body in a time and place.
The trick is, of course, to leave off from these activities. Once they begin to calcify and become an image of the subject. Because once that image materializes, there is the chance that it will be inhabited or subsumed or assumed by the host, which will make of it their grotesque. I am using the sense of grotesque as it is found in the preface or the inaugural writing of Sherwood Anderson in his short story Circuit, Waynesburg, Ohio. His notion of the grotesque is one that Encapsulates the phenomena of a character or if one is willing to extend narrative trope of character to person, personality, persona, subjectivity of either real life or the reality of life.
In any case, nonfictional existence, etcetera, that this consolidation of character traits that is possible to sum up or articulate, communicate, package, distill into a communicable entity. That this trope, defining characteristic, Akin to hamartia, the fatal flaw of Aristotelian. Origin. Mythological origin. That this set of characteristics be recognizable is the primary explanation or source of causality for that character's actions and the situations and the way they respond to situations they're found in.
A great friend of mine and I were moved by this basic insight of Sherwood Anderson because it liberate us liberated us from the at least the necessity for others to occupy rigid forms of tropes while at the same time giving us tools to conceptualize, understand, categorize characters or characterize people or humanize subjects. This train of increasing personalization that moves toward humanity can also be reversed. That one starts out with a predictable universal and moves toward the indefinable, Unrepeatable particularity of a subject or situation without being able to decide whether or not those sets of observable phenomena or consistencies adhere to or accompany or constitute those same entities Man Abstraction is necessary in this process. And that is why we talk about two different things when we talk about the drawing of a circle as a metaphor of inclusion and exclusion simultaneously in order to just that order or organize our experience or field of perceptual data. In doing so, we necessarily simplify.
And assign positions of static meaning in order to orient ourselves in relation to it, which entails a process that entails unnecessary destruction, distortion, manipulation, abandonment of the very thing we wish to engage with. And yet, by the same token, by the same stroke of activity of characterization, we also give body to transubstantiate, create, validate, inaugurate The entity or phenomena or a set of characteristics in question. So to know a thing, we have to change it. And by changing it, we both destroy what it was and also make it more of what it is. And yet this leaves futurity as the most radical image of thought, which is, once again, to rehearse and yet to instantiate the truth of what we find in writers, that this is the demand of writing, the call of the other, The impossible necessary.
The impossible possibility. And we can keep saying this, reiterating this, finding ways to say it other ways. Which is the task, really. And perhaps an interject interjection here, long dash. It has long been my intuition and commitment and suspicion that I am relegated to an impossible realm in which the only thing I must do, which also is the only thing I am interested in doing in a deep sense is that which I cannot do.
But not only in this nebulous sense of the self, I being the subject and the action being my actions. But to extend that further, this being brutally honest about a person, the personality, the contact with the person, the persona that inhabits this problem, problematic. That, of course, this extends to experience a phenomena of art and life, of environments and materials, that can be rearranged other than they are, I e, have a contingency that are Period. It is my task to fully engage with contingency both by relinquishing power and seeking it out, hoarding it, Lassoing it like an animal just to look at it, which is my own capability, which is a form of reflection, but not in a self absorbed way, ideally, hopefully. For if one truly looks whether it is at the mirror image of one's self or at what appears not to be reflected.
The quality of the looking the quality of the looking is what is important. This determines the experience of life. It may or may not be recorded in a response to and with the materials on a recording surface. It may be the case that my entire life, I spend confronting materials, situations, environments, feelings, auras, moods, tendencies, assumptions, obstructions, patterns, observations, revelations to no avail, At least on paper, on record, as a viewable receipt, as a body of reference amenable to retroactive validation, whether by my own spurious criteria or by that of any given convention or tradition. And to be perfectly honest, to confront this knowing that it may be all for naught.
Not only does not discourage me, But in a sick, sadian way, serves as the very source of sovereignty for such an undertaking. So abstraction and sovereignty. There may be a number of approaches to manipulating materials for a given project to a certain end, with a certain goal, with a certain effect. But simply speaking, from the most fundamental as it is articulated by Hans Prince Horn. The need to make marks.
But not, well, not necessarily in the deontological mode of moralism, but does not necessarily need to be one characterized by abstraction even if what is seen on the picture plane appears to be what has appears to have demonstrate certain aspects that are that are that tend to be associated with what is known as abstraction in the arts. I think it is important to differentiate between the process of thought and thought as it unfolds in the subject, the sub object, and its activity, the event of subobjectivity that emerges in interface in the environment, between materials, energy, and recording surface. This is another kind of thought that takes place beyond abstraction. This is what is fascinating about the claim I find myself stumbling upon here, which is that on this model, abstraction, the act of simplifying the complexity of phenomena in its particularity does not have a total does not determine the essence of what thought is or can be. It is simply not the case that what is happening when an artist or a subject moves a material across a plane of reception.
That this change in material, physical, observable reality is one that is is necessarily an image of a reduction or minimalization or attenuation of complexity. In fact, in some cases, it would seem very clear that even though an object recorded in this intersubjective objective process is nonrepresentational. Although it does not take part in what's understood to be a mechanism of thought. In the is also akin to the violent act of the destructive understanding, dividing, categorizing the previously unified field. But is itself an activity that could, on the one hand, maintain the illusion of equilibrium of the transfer objects or, on the other, transform our notion of time and space by rearranging what is there.
Now with abstraction, we have multiple levels to register the relevance of change. With each change perceived according to a value system that is embedded within a model or a criteria of not only basic apprehension, but also of judgment categories that are predetermined to whatever degree the subject is conscious of them or not Of that consists of categories of the good, the pleasing, the beautiful. One thing that is important to consider, and this is an aside from the point I'm aiming toward, but seems worth expanding upon that. This idea that, First of all, that we apprehend things with relation to, predetermined schema. I think it's important to resist the temptation to include value judgments and the most fundamental original mode, the faculty of perception.
Because if there were no gap, then it would naturalize the categories and make it impossible to be otherwise, which would then also neutralize the force of those categories. So there must be a gap so that the subject may form a position, whether consciously or not, with regards to how that particular set of sense perception functions in their understanding of the work itself, the encounter with the work, the person, the subject viewing the work, the world in which this takes place, and the way those worlds divide into numerous states and categories. But as I wanted to say, It's important to note that there are at least two registers within perception that may inform one one another in some nonlinear fashion. But in any case, that there are two, at least two. Modes of interpretation.
And this may sound odd, but it is true that the human brain the human is a brain and all the faculties and systems that allow it to interface with an object does contain an inherent, innate, natural, biological framework for what is registered as perceptually pleasant. What is satisfying to the gaze. There is a cognitive explanation that ironically, once again, is emotional in character. That there is an innate physical physiological emotional response that takes place in the body, in the sense preceptors, in the brain that registers certain phenomena as pleasant or beautiful, and others less so or not. And so there is a science to aesthetically, to mastering what would be the average person's response to mastering the construction of an object that would elicit an average person response that is one of overall amiability or is overall amiable.
Although, this gets tricky when cultural considerations, which may be considered secondary, but really are perhaps equal or primary considerations regarding their place and function in this mode of aesthetic aperture, apperception. The compound and distort and shift this innate sense of pleasantness. For instance, taste shaped by history, by time, exposure, and the desire on part of the subject to construct their own world to make a claim against the given, to stake out a space for that which is wholly theirs or to carve out a section of life, a nook in which one might observe something wholly unique, which ultimately must be some strange combination, some unpredictable combination of the given with another kind of given. The kind is shaped in the particularities of one's life in their environment to any degree of consciousness. For instance, one may have only seen a certain type of art, and this will turn them against that.
Or depending on their attitude, it will enforce their desire for that depending on their own relationship too. Comfort and expectations. Or one may seek out the complexification of desire as a as its own reward and ritual for the sanctity of human experience and complexity. And look for how the bad becomes good, becomes bad, becomes good, becomes bad, becomes good, and is frozen in a single still. And the pain and pleasure that results from the registration of a single outcome amongst a myriad of multiplicity, a manifold, and take pleasure in this difficulty and not to be satisfied, which perpetuates the encounter or the search for the encounter or to access bird memory, Whether personal or with a sense of deep time, it may seem the same.
And it often does.
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