No Truth Without A Fight

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[This text was originally published in C Magazine #86 in 2005.]

This question of the existence of truths (that “there be” truths) points to a co-responsibility of art, which produces truths, and philosophy, which, under the condition that there are truths, is duty-bound to make them manifest (a very difficult task indeed). Basically, to make truths manifest means the following: to distinguish truths from opinion. So that the question today is this and no other: Is there something besides opinion? In other words (one will, or will not, forgive the provocation), is there something besides our “democracies”?
– Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics

The writings of French philosopher Alain Badiou carve out their own distinct path in almost militant opposition to what he sees as philosophies’ current failure to renew itself or provide effective opposition to the ‘repulsive mixture of power and opinion’ that typifies capitalism’s vision of democracy. His works implore us to ‘keep going’, keep pushing against the mere sophistry of an academic overemphasis on the limits of language (he cites Plato: “We philosophers do not take as our point of departure words, but things.”) and towards a manner of thinking that would allow philosophy to regain its primary historical function as a search for ‘truth’. This conviction – that concepts such as truth are essential if we are to continue to effectively think about, and act upon, the world in which we live – is clearly of great relevance to any assessment of contemporary aesthetics.

Concepts such as “truth” might well sound a bit awkward (perhaps even ridiculous) to our post- post modern ears and are certainly a hard-sell when confronted with the widespread certainty that pluralism and tolerance are the most appropriate responses to the complexities of the world in which we live. But if pluralism is no longer doing the trick, if you’re looking for something a little bit more uncompromising, Badiou’s doing what he can to provide it in a manner worthy of the name philosophy, the four dimensions of which he defines as ‘revolt, logic, universality and risk.’

Badiou approaches truth from a provocative and unexpected angle. According to his central work L’Etre et l’Evénement, the only way to become a subject is by encountering an event and then persisting in your fidelity to the truth of that event. At first glance this might seem a bit harsh: if you have never experienced an event (of which there are only four kinds: artistic invention, emancipatory politics, scientific re-foundation and love) and then stood firm in your loyalty to its truth, you simply don’t qualify as a subject. However, no one said truth was going to be easy.

For example, if you were a scientist in the twenties and thirties it would be impossible to practice science in the same way after having experienced the event of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity as you did previous to it. The theory of relativity creates a truth that changes the way you think about and practice physics. It is your fidelity to this truth that defines you as a scientist and it is now possible that the rest of your life might be spent teasing out the many complications and consequences of your encounter.

Badiou goes on to define and re-define his central terms in great detail, a few of which I will attempt to summarize as follows:

Situation
A situation is simply the way things are in any given field of experience. It is the status quo, the unquestioned set of assumptions that make up our knowledge of life and thought. If nothing happens the situation remains the same, it can only be changed by an event.

Event
An event is always ‘unpredictable and incalculable’, never something that you can plan, always something that unexpectedly happens and you simply have to deal with. What differentiates an event from other significant occurrences is that the truth it generates cannot be assessed using current criteria. To decide whether or not a given event is significant, whether or not it has generated a ‘truth’, one is forced to change the way one thinks. An event creates something new, something that has the potential to alter the situation once and for all. In doing so, it also reveals the void of the situation, showing that the situation previous to the event was devoid of truth.

Truth
Stemming from the rupture of an event, truth forms ‘a hole in knowledge’, breaking open the situation, pushing at the limits of what potentially can be said. In this it contains a paradox since it is both ‘something new and exceptional’ while at the same time encompassing ‘the most stable, the closest, ontologically speaking, to the initial state of things.’ Badiou never sees truth as an unchanging verity. To the contrary, he always views it as an ‘infinite multiplicity.’ Any given truth is not the only one, contains infinite aspects, and therefore should never be rigid. If it goes too far or becomes totalizing, it betrays itself, opening the way to terror and disaster. Significantly, philosophy is not a ‘truth procedure’ and therefore can never create truths. Rather, philosophy’s role is to identify truths that have already been brought into being by one of it’s four conditions – Art, Politics, Science and Love – and to seize them, both in the sense of giving them a name and in the sense of being seized by them, of being astonished.

Fidelity
There is no truth without choice. If in your lifetime you happen to encounter an event, you must choose whether or not what you have experienced is significant enough to have generated a new truth and if so whether this truth should be brought into the fold of your situation (therefore changing everything). If so, this truth will demand of you a fidelity that then leads to an ongoing (possibly lifelong) investigation into its complications and consequences. There is nothing easy about such fidelity, you might change your mind, be killed in the struggle to establish the truth you have encountered, be ostracized from your community, etc. But something new has arisen: precarious, fragile, unable to fend for itself against the tides of convention, corruption, your own exhaustion and the inertia of prevailing wisdom. Without your fidelity to it, the truth you have encountered is unlikely to prevail.

Badiou claims that contemporary philosophy is a kind of ‘generalized, potent sophistry’; the foundational principle of all sophistry, both ancient and modern, being that there is no truth, only social convention, argument, desire, self interest, opinion, etc. It is telling that his response to this situation is not to try and ‘do away’ with the sophists but rather to enter into an ongoing dialogue with them, accepting them as philosophy’s necessary ‘enemy-brother’.

In visual art today we can also recognize something analogous to sophistry: a conception of art that – in its skilful, eccentric rejection of truth – undeniably forfeits certain possibilities for clarity and direction. This loss can then be reintegrated back into the work in the form of institutional or social critique. An institutional critique that unintentionally doubles as an acceptance of art’s socially marginal status by turning in on itself, by attacking the very institutions which, for better or worse, have been set up for art’s benefit and protection. Or a social critique that does in fact acknowledge the role of art within a larger set of social relations but does so under the cloak of a ‘defence mechanism’ irony that is really just the other face of an inability to meaningfully alter our surroundings. Such a strategies are certainly a reflection of the world in which we live, of capitalism’s ability to absorb absolutely anything, and gains further resonance by skirting the thin line between being a reflection of the problematic nature of the world and the spectator’s implicit acceptance of these same problems. However, without principles, without some consideration of questions pertaining to truth as a foundation on which to build, such strategies spin endlessly in circles.

I suppose the main thing I’m arguing for here is that we consider what contemporary art might look like if, much like David Hickey brought ‘beauty’ back into the art discourse of the mid-nineties, Alain Badiou managed to do the same for ‘truth.’ If art today often seems like a series of ‘opinions’, what might an art look like that moves past opinion and tries to encompass truth in Badiou’s sense of the term? At first glance this might appear an unlikely scenario, but fifteen years ago it certainly didn’t seem likely that beauty would become the buzzword of the mid-nineties. And much like beauty, if only as a provocation to current art world thinking, I suspect ‘truth’ has a great deal to offer.

Artists today very much need something like this. Perhaps not precisely what Badiou explores, but definitely something along these lines. For example, what would it mean to see ‘Duchamp’ as a central event (in Badiou’s sense of the term) in the formation of contemporary art? Of course, a great deal of work has been done along these lines already, but for the most part such work has been done while studiously avoiding (or rejecting) words such as ‘truth’. To see Duchamp as an event certainly doesn’t mean that Marcel Duchamp, as an individual artist, should be further lionized. Rather, we would have to search for the truth of what Duchamp and his legacy brought into the situation of art and what it might mean to continue to work in fidelity to this truth. Not just to continue working conceptually because it remains, in one way or another, the dominant paradigm. But rather to intensify one’s relationship with what is essential within the foundation of this paradigm. Of course, it is equally possible that we might realize that the event we are referring to here as ‘Duchamp’ is devoid of truth and therefore the contemporary art situation must simply change.

More to the point, I suspect an engagement with truth (or something like it) is essentially what most artists do anyway, almost as a dirty little secret or unspoken impulse. They feel that within their work there is something true and they bear this truth, remaining loyal to early breakthroughs and realizations, continually teasing out the many complications and consequences of their ongoing endeavour. Dealing with the language of ‘truth-procedures’ more directly has the potential to challenge the unspoken nature of this struggle, asking us to think about what art means on a more fundamental level, intensifying our engagement with our fundamental artistic concerns, allowing the multiplicity of our practice to swarm around a central point, giving us back a clear, yet still hazardous, sense of direction.

In what could also serve as a critique of contemporary art, Badiou condemns the framework of current philosophy as being ‘too strongly committed to the polyvalence of meaning and the plurality of languages’. He feels there is something in it that goes ‘too far in reflecting the physiognomy of the world itself’, that it is ‘too compatible with the status quo to be able to sustain the rupture or distance that philosophy requires.’ In many ways philosophy’s unacknowledged compliance with the status quo is what lies behind Badiou’s preoccupation with truth. If philosophy does not have the tools to sustain ‘revolt, logic, universality and risk’, there is probably something lacking. An ‘end of philosophy’ thinking now dominates which leads towards an unbreakable sense of paralysis.

This sense of cultural paralysis is certainly not an unusual modern sensation. What is unusual, and reveals Badiou’s activist roots, is his ongoing attempt to break it. He characterizes this attempted break as a kind of gamble, a roll of the dice. Perhaps it will succeed, perhaps not. When one is seized by a truth it is imperative to try, to roll the dice, see what might be possible if one chooses not to accept the current situation and instead work towards something that, while seemingly impossible under the current conditions, might suddenly become possible if things were to change.

In the end what Badiou tells us is that there is no truth without a fight, that to be a subject requires a certain degree of militancy (he quotes Mallarmé in saying that we must become ‘militants of restraint’), that ‘respect for the Other’ means nothing without some deeper conception of truth to guide one’s thoughts and actions.

It is only by declaring that we want what conservatism decrees to be impossible, and by affirming truths against the desire for nothingness, that we tear ourselves away from nihilism. The possibility of the impossible, which is exposed by every loving encounter, every scientific re-foundation, every artistic invention and every sequence of emancipatory politics, is the sole principle – against the ethics of living well whose real content is the deciding of death – of an ethic of truths.
– Alain Badiou, Ethics

As artists today, what events can we call upon and generate to destabilize the current situation, to undo unexamined certainties and replace them with something more flexible, more useful, more courageous? Are we willing to leave behind the stifling comfort of relativity in order to once again start thinking about truth? It’s certainly unlikely, but hopefully intriguing to consider. If, without for a moment loosing sight of moderation and critical distance, we allow ourselves to believe that artistic invention has the potential to generate truths – with all the complexity, rigour and multiplicity such a word implies – what might this change? Would anyone care to find out?



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Fact

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The novelty act of fact.






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Gustaw Herling on Bukharin and Nikolaevsky

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Bukharin went to Paris in February 1936 at the head of a delegation that was to negotiate the purchase of the Marx and Engels archives, which Nikolaevsky had taken from Berlin at the request of the German social democrats. Negotiations went on for two months and got nowhere despite a handsome offer from Moscow. But the “legal” – nay, “official” – cover offered by the proposed transaction made it possible for Bukharin and Nikolaevsky often to meet privately. It is likely that Nikolaevsky took notes after every meeting.

Bukharin was tired, exhausted; he longed for a rest. It was suggested that be become an émigré and found an opposition paper. “I couldn’t live outside Russia. All of us have become used to the strain of life in Russia,” he answered. One day, half serious and half facetious, he suggested they both go to see Trotsky in Oslo: “We have had our clashes, but I will never cease to admire and respect him.” Bukharin avoided direct comment about the situation in the USSR, either because he did not trust his interlocutor one hundred per cent or because (and this is Nikolaevsky’s hypothesis) he feared the conclusions he would inevitably have been forced to reach by too open an exchange of ideas.

Did he know, or even suspect, what was in store for him? There would seem to be evidence that he did, since he described his relations with Stalin as “exceptionally bad.” There would seem to be evidence that he did not, since he spoke of the new Soviet constitution with unfeigned euphoria: “I wrote the whole thing with this very pen. Yes, the whole thing, only Radek helped out a bit. I came to Paris because I had finished the job. They are printing the text now. From now on there will be more room for the people, they can no longer be ignored.” In any case, euphoric or not, he kept coming back obsessively to two points: the need to found a second party and the extreme urgency of purifying the work of the revolution through “proletarian humanism.”

Without a second party, how can the Soviet regime distinguish itself from Naziism? It does not have to be a party contrary to the new order: suffice that it advocate “change and reform.” It might be drawn from the intelligentsia so as not to disrupt the unity of the working class. As to “proletarian humanism,” Bukharin himself had seen sufficient horrors during forced collectivization – horrors that could not even be compared to the pitiless but ineluctable cruelty of civil war – to look to the future with the utmost concern. The very psyche of the communists had been contaminated and mutilated: instead of going mad, after the experience of collectivization, they became professional bureaucrats, partisans of terror as the natural method of government, slaves of obedience to any order from above, of obedience considered as the supreme virtue. “They are no longer humans, they are gears in a terrible machine.” That is where the most serious danger is hidden, that is why the coming of “proletarian humanism” is so important and imperative to prevent the Soviet Union from turning into “a regime with an iron boot.”

He was so fervent, and constantly repeated the same things with such desperate obstinacy, that Nikolaevsky interrupted him at one point: “Nikolai Ivanovich, what you are suggesting is a return to the Ten Commandments. That’s not new.” Bukharin thought about it: “Do you believe that Moses’ commandments are outdated and anachronistic?” Nikolaevsky: “I am not saying they are outdated and anachronistic. All I am saying is that they have existed for five thousand years. Are we going to discover that the Ten Commandments are a new truth? Is that the point we have reached?” Bukharin made no answer. It was only in a Moscow prison cell that Aichenvald finally heard the answer, between the lines of Bukharin’s confession of the threshold of his last agony.

- Gustaw Herling


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Gustaw Herling on Andrzej Ciolkosz

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Andrzej Ciolkosz once argued at length that the replacement of candles and oil lamps by electricity inflicted a mortal blow on the novel. As usual, this charming and brilliant young man’s reasoning was seemingly facetious, with that contrary grin of his, but actually terribly serious. The light of a candle or an oil lamp cast a different, enigmatic dimension on the way in which a novelist looked at people; it sited the understanding of human destiny on the fragile border between the seen and the unseen, between the graspable and the ungraspable. The incandescent bulb dispelled the dark and created a flat and shallow illusion of clarity.

- Gustaw Herling



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New Emotions

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Have human emotions been the same since the beginning of time or, in different ages, are there new emotions that arise alongside new structures of social organization and technological innovation?



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Gustaw Herling on Konstanty Jelenski

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Not very long ago I was present when a well-known Paris publisher proposed publishing a volume of his essays in French. He shrugged his shoulders and received the offer with a conventional expression of thanks but was not interested in the slightest. Later the two of us went to a café and I tried to persuade him to reconsider the offer. He laughed: “Too much is written and published now, we could drown in a sea of printed paper.” And yet… in the “symposium of polygots” organized by Stempowski in 1961 in Kultura, this is what Kot said: “Why doesn’t the polygot-writer in exile always decide to do his writing in one language? It happens occasionally – and the results are often excellent: Pietrkieiwicz in English and Cioran and Ionesco in French. In my case, that of the ‘critic’ or ‘journalist,’ it is rather a different matter. My greatest satisfaction comes from writing in Polish for Kultura, for the simple reason that my articles evoke some response from a circle of friends, however small... I may have more French or English readers, but for them I am just one of a thousand anonymous hacks.” He had a cult of friendship, he was lavish with it, sometimes even extravagant.

I also remember the day I brought him the author’s copies of his Zbiegowie okolicznosci [Coincidences]. He barely gave them a glance, but when he accompanied me to the bus stop after tea, I watched from the window of the bus and saw him draw out a copy from under his raincoat; he avidly leafed through the pages as he walked, closed the book, opened it again, weighted it in his hands and smoothed it out. If he had looked up for a moment, I am sure I would have seen totally unbridled joy.

If I had to tell what the world is for me
I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole
and place him in a theater seat one evening
and, bringing my ear close to his humid snout
would listen to what he says about the spotlights
sounds of the music, and movements of the dance

These were probably his favorite lines of Milosz. And this is what he had to say about the verse: “No one has expressed more beautifully the sole philosophical revolutions of our times (compared with which neo-Marxism, existentialsim, and structuralism are the equivalent of shorter or longer skirts in women’s fashions) – arising from the conviction that man is neither the ‘lord of all he surveys’ nor the centre of the universe, so that any ‘humanism’ is now impossible."

- Gustaw Herling on Konstanty Jelenski



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PDF Format manifesto

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PDF manifesto

- Just be awesome
- Don't think
- If you think something is awesome, be that, and stop thinking about it.
- fear no villain
- DaMaGe nothing


http://www.myspace.com/pdfmusic



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Assignment

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Assignment:


Andy Kaufman is a better artist than Anna De Keersmaeker. Discuss?



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Gustaw Herling on Nicola Chiaromonte

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Every new conversation, every new essay, every incidental note on politics and drama review showed me a writer who was unusual for Italy, a land of traditional literati, masters of the clever and fatuous scrawl at the service of the latest intellectual fashion. The kind of writing in which a sentence is not just the vehicle of free and lucid thinking but also of ceaseless moral tension, writing in which the words are alive with the whole being of the person who utters them as his long-mediated and suffered truth: that is the kind of writing that has always captivated me. And that was how Nicola wrote. He never let himself be caught in the trammels of “great systems” and “general interpretations,” he mistrusted “dialectical games,” which mutilated life, and “ideological shadows,” which obscured reality. He scorned psychologism and historicism, for what interested him was man in the concrete faced with concrete events, man capable of ethical judgment à la Tolstoy and at the same time aware of something impenetrable beyond him. How could this measured “humanism” have evoked a wide response in a world enchanted with the rhetoric of false “universal” ideologies, in a climate of hypocrisy half-mixed with fanaticism, in a “consumer civilization” of arid hearts and sterile minds? Nicola became even more acutely aware of his isolation. The title he gave his book was Credere e non credere (What should one believe in, and what not?) “Ours is not an age of faith, nor is it an age of disbelief. It is an age of bad faith, of beliefs which are clung to… in the absence of genuine convictions.” What is the cure for bad faith, this terrible ailment of our time? He desperately sought a remedy. And atheist or at least agnostic, he once admitted: “It is just as hard not to believe in God as it is to believe in him.”

- Gustaw Herling on Nicola Chiaromonte



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Spartacus Chetwynd's Hermito's Children

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The best works here take you down a route where radically crazy dreams and hands on pragmatism converge. Spartacus Chetwynd's Hermito's Children (2008) is a case in point: presented on a wall of monitors, it is a bonkers ride into a zone where trash television meets raunchy underground culture; where transgender detectives investigate the case of a girl who died of too many orgasms on a dildo see-saw, to a soundtrack swinging between death metal and lisped monologues about opening a Jewish restaurant (Chetwynd ran an improvised Jewish restaurant during the making of her film, channeling the experience into her recorded scenario.)

- from Frieze review of the Tate Triennial 2009



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Books bought in Krakow:

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The Celebration – Ivan Ângelo
The Island: Three Tales – Gustaw Herling
Volcano and Miracle – Gustaw Herling
The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa – Jan Potocki
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things – Gilbert Sorrentino
Selected Poems – Adam Zagajewski



(If you’re ever in Krakow definitely check out Massolit Books.)

(And also: Wódka Żołądkowa Gorzka.)



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What I am proudest of is having a life where work and love are impossible to tell apart.

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On Facebook I just learnt that J.G. Ballard died. (A writer who was very important to me when I was young.) Then a few moments later I learned that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick had also died, about a week ago:

http://tinyurl.com/cyky5u

(Perhaps Facebook is a good place to think about one's morality after all.) (Or at least as good as any.)

I heard Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick speak once a very long time ago, I think it might be about fifteen years ago now. I remember one thing she said quite clearly about academia. Something like: 'some academics say that The Simpsons is subversive, and then other academics say: no, actually The Simpsons subverts subversivity and therefore is not subversive at all, and you can just keep going on like that forever and get absolutely nowhere.' I don't remember much else about her talk that afternoon but I do remember I found it striking and in many ways something about her approach and attitude has really stayed with me. Afterwards I read her books and, at the time, was very much impressed by them.

At the end of the above link, knowing that she is going to die, she tells her therapist: "What I am proudest of is having a life where work and love are impossible to tell apart."

I wonder very much if, at the end, I'll be able to say the same thing, or anything even vaguely similar. I'm nervous that I won't but nonetheless hope that I will.

(And of course such a sentence makes me think very much of you, who knows very well the enormous joys and difficulties of such an attempt.)



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The longest state banquet

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The 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great, celebrated at Persepolis in 1971: this is the occasion around which this book and exhibition have been prepared.

Persepolis '71 was a party, held over three days by the last Shah of Iran, for invited monarchy and heads of state. It has been described as the most lavish party of the twentieth century. At five and a half hours, this event holds the endurance record in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest state banquet. It was certainly an extraordinary occasion, and one that retrospectively has had many consequences. To some extent at least, the party survives. Today at Persepolis, the luxurious city built by a French interior design company to accommodate the dignitaries remains standing. The site is now dilapidated, overgrown, and vandalised. The tents themselves exist as ruined, skeletal structures; their tattered cloth coverings have been all but destroyed by the elements.

- from the inside flap of Michael Stevenson's Celebration at Persepolis catalog



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Pierre Hadot quote

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I do not think that the fundamental desires of humans can change. The ruling or rich class seeks wealth, power, and honors, in antiquity just as in our day. All the misfortune of our actual civilization is in effect the exasperation of the desire for profit, in all the classes of society, for that matter, but especially the ruling class. Common mortals can have simpler desires: work, happiness at home, health. The invocations of the gods in antiquity were the same ones that are now made to the Virgin Mary. One asked the same things to soothsayers as we ask of our horoscopes. It is not a question of the epoch. But when Epicurus distinguished natural and necessary desires, natural desires that are not necessary, and desires that are neither natural nor necessary, he did not want to enumerate all legitimate desires and explain how they could be satisfied; he wanted to define a style of life, taking conclusions from his intuition, according to which the pleasure corresponds to the suppression of a suffering caused by the desire. There is an analogy with Buddhism, very much in fashion these days. To be happy one must thus maximally diminish the causes of suffering, that is, the desires. In this manner he wanted to heal the suffering of humans. He thus recommended renouncing desires that are very difficult to satisfy in order to attempt to be content with desires that can more easily be satisfied - that is, finally and simply, the desire to eat, to drink, and to clothe oneself. Under an apparently down-to-earth aspect, there is something extraordinary in Epicureanism: the recognition of the fact that there is only one true pleasure, the pleasure of existing, and that to experience it one merely has to satisfy the desires that are natural and necessary for the existence of the body. The Epicurean experience is extremely instructive; it invites us, like Stoicism, to a total reversal of values.

- Pierre Hadot, from The Present Alone is Our Happiness



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Something Might Still Change (Rough Early Proposal)

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I intend to do so by exploring a fairly specific thesis. This thesis is less like a scientific observation and more like a hunch. It is the idea that we, artists and viewers alike, know that art is in many ways fundamentally reactionary and conservative, yet we still want to believe that art is radical and revolutionary, and within the space of this paradox there is room for a great deal to happen. That in forging an emotional or theoretical connection to a work of art, even though it’s status as art solidifies it as part of the status quo, the fact that it has affected us simultaneously keeps open the possibility that something might still change.

My intention is to develop this idea into a book entitled: Something Might Still Change. In my mind this book would – in a clear, pleasurable style – work to convince the reader that paradox can be an extremely useful lens through which to view the relationship between art and politics (and perhaps also the relationship between art, politics and contemporary life.) I would like the book to focus specifically on five or six works from different fields, moving gradually towards a conclusion in which I contrast various disciplinary approaches to specific questions surrounding the nature of participation in performance.

Some works I am currently thinking of examining:

Gentlemen & Arseholes by Lene Berg
Artificial Respiration by Ricardo Piglia
etc.



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Loneliness

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Loneliness must be recruited in the fight against capitalism.










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Artists

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Not all artists are artists.










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the art market is an extreme example of what Marx termed commodity fetishism...

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Every exhibition tells a story, by directing the viewer through the exhibition in a particular order: the exhibition space is always a narrative space. The traditional art museum told the story of art’s emergence and subsequent victory. Individual artworks chronicled this story – and in doing so they lost their old religious or representative significance and gained new meaning. Once the museum emerged as the new place of worship, artists began to work specifically for the museum: Historically significant objects no longer needed to be devalued in order to serve as art. Instead, brand new, profane objects signed up to be recognized as artworks because they allegedly embodied artistic value. These objects didn’t have a prehistory; they had never been legitimized by religion or power. At most they could be regarded as signs of a “simple, everyday life” with indeterminate value. Thus their inscription into art history meant valorization for these objects, not devaluation. And so museums were transformed from places of enlightenment-inspired iconoclasm into places of a romantic iconophilia. Exhibiting an object as art no longer signified its profanation, but its consecration. Duchamp simply took this turn to its final conclusion when he laid bare the iconophilic mechanism of glorification of mere things by labeling them works of art.

Over the years modern artists began to assert the total autonomy of art – and not just from its sacred prehistory, but from art history as well – because every integration of an image into a story, every appropriation of it as illustration for a particular narrative, is iconoclastic, even if the story is that of a triumph of this image, its transfiguration, or its glorification. According to the tradition of modern art, an image must speak for itself; it must immediately convince the spectator, standing in silent contemplation, of its own value. The conditions in which the work is exhibited should be reduced to white walls and good lighting. Theoretical and narrative discourse is a distraction, and must stop. Even affirmative discourse and favorable display were regarded as distorting the message of the artwork itself. As a result: Even after Duchamp the act of exhibiting an object as an artwork remained ambivalent, that is, partially iconophile, partially iconoclastic.

The curator can’t but place, contextualize, and narrativize works of art – which necessarily leads to their relativization. Thus modern artists began to condemn curators, because the figure of the curator was perceived as the embodiment of the dark, dangerous side of the exhibiting practice, as the destructive doppelganger of the artist who creates art by exhibiting it: the museums were regularly compared to graveyards, and curators to undertakers. With these insults (disguised as institutional critique) artists won the general public over to their side, because the general public didn’t know all the art history; it didn’t even want to hear it. The public wishes to be confronted directly with individual artworks and exposed to their unmediated impact. The general public steadfastly believes in the autonomous meaning of the individual artwork, which is supposedly being manifested in front of its eyes. The curator’s every mediation is suspect; he is seen as someone standing between the artwork and its viewer, insidiously manipulating the viewer’s perception with the intent of disempowering the public. This is why, for the general public, the art market is more enjoyable than any museum. Artworks circulating on the market are singled out, decontextualized, uncurated – so that they have the apparently unadulterated chance to demonstrate their inherent value. Consequently the art market is an extreme example of what Marx termed commodity fetishism, meaning a belief in the inherent value of an object, in value being one of its intrinsic qualities. Thus began a time of degradation and distress for curators – the time of modern art. Curators have managed their degradation surprisingly well, though, by successfully internalizing it.

– Boris Groys



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Writing in Spanish

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Roberto Arlt (Argentina) - The Seven Madmen


Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay) - Let the Wind Speak


Ricardo Piglia (Argentina) - Artificial Respiration


César Aira (Argentina) - An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter


Horacio Castellanos Moya (Honduras) - Senselessness


Alvaro Mutis (Columbia / Mexico) - The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll



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graceful and ridiculous, lecherous and angelic, happily lost

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I remember my walk from the Solar to the movie theatre where Land in Anguish was playing. It must be said that I found the film even more uneven than Black God, White Devil. [Both films by Glauber Rocha.] The lamentations of the main character – a left-wing poet torn apart by conflicting ambitions to achieve the “absolute” and social justice – were at times frankly sub-literary. In addition, certain intolerable conventional shortcomings of Brazilian cinema – high society parties staged unconvincingly, female extras encouraged by directors to enact deplorable provincial caricatures of sexy glamour, an overall lack of narrative clarity – these were all in painful evidence (though less intensely.) Yet as in Glauber’s previous films and a great many other Cinema Novo productions, suggestions of a different vision of life, of Brazil, of cinema, seemed to explode on the screen, overwhelming my reservations. The poet-protagonist offered a bitter, realistic vision of politics – in flagrant contrast to the naïveté of his companions – as he resisted the recently imposed military dictatorship. The film stages the moment of the coup d’état as a nightmare he has at the moment of his death: a confusing spectacle evoking at once Buñuel’s La fièvre monte à El Pao (Republic of Sin), mixed with some of the bad habits of the New Wave and strokes of Fellini’s 8 ½. But that chaos contributed to the parodic force of the film. And the effect was not entirely a disservice to the character, even though his desperate attempts at maintaining a critical perspective on his political objectives while sustaining the will to carry them out – the kind of dilemma that would lead so many to madness, mysticism, or the trenches of the opposition – lead, rather gratuitously, to his death. It is touching to think, today, how such a series of events might provide, with slight variations, a succinct biography of Glauber himself.

The film was naturally not a box-office success, but it scandalized the intellectuals and artists of the Carioca Left. Some in the audience – leaders of politically engaged theatre – jeered as the lights came up. One scene in particular shocked them: During a mass demonstration the poet, who is among those making speeches, calls forward a unionized worker and, to show how unprepared the worker is to fight for his rights, violently covers his mouth, shouting at the others (and at the audience), “This is the people! Idiots, illiterate, no politics!” Then a poor wretch, representing unorganized poverty, appears from among the crowd trying to speak, only to be silenced by the point of a gun stuck in his mouth by one of the candidate’s bodyguards. This indelible image is reiterated in long close-ups.

I experienced that scene – and the indignant, heated discussions that it provoked in bars – as the nucleus of a great event whose brief name I now possess but did not know then (I would try to name it a thousand ways for myself and for other people): the death of populism. There is no doubt that populist demagogues are sumptuously ridiculed in the film: they are seen holding crucifixes and flags in open cars against the sky above the Aterro do Flamengo, a wide modern road by the sea, lined with landscaped gardens. There they are in their gaudy mansions, celebrating the solemn rites of the church and Carnival that touch the heart of the masses, and so forth. But it was their essential faith in the popular forces – and the very respect that the best souls invested in the poor man – that here was discarded as a political weapon and an ethical value in itself. It was a hecatomb that I was facing. And I was excited by the prospect of examining what drove it and anticipating its consequences. Tropicalismo would have never have come into being but for that traumatic moment.

This assault on traditional left-wing populism liberated one to see Brazil squarely from a broader perspective, enabling new and undreamt-of critiques of an anthropological, mythic, mystical, formalist, and moral nature. If the scene of the poet and the worker that incensed the communists charmed me with its courage, it is because the images that came before and after it were trying to reveal something about our condition and ask questions about our destiny. A great cross on the beach overshadows a gathering of politicos, transvestites dressed to the nines for a ball, and Carnival Indians; one feels the presence of the grotesque and with it the revelation of an island always newly discovered and always hidden – Brazil. Among the multitude at the rally, a little old man is dancing samba, graceful and ridiculous, lecherous and angelic, happily lost – the Brazilian people captured in a paradox. One does not know whether they are meant to seem despairing or suggestive; political decisions are discussed on cement patios with black lines dividing the floor, asserting a denial of the comings and goings of the characters. The camera weaves among groups of four, five, six restless agitators, who express disagreement over tactics through their body language, all shot in black and white with enormous areas of light threatened by ominous, looming shadows. It was a political dramaturgy different from the usual reduction of everything to a stereotype of class struggle. Above all, here was the rhetoric and the poetics of post-1964 Brazilian life: a deep scream of pain and impotent rebellion, but also an updated vision, nearly prophetic, of our real possibilities to be and to feel.

– Caetano Veloso, from Tropical Truth: A Story of Music & Revolution In Brazil



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Sometimes in an art gallery or museum...

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Sometimes in an art gallery or museum, I have these really sad moments. 'Contemporary art,' I think 'is like a commercial for the artists career. It's lost the desire to speak about the world.'



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The Agenda of Curator Ditte Maria Bjerg

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I don’t really care about Theatre or Art! But I am passionately occupied with such questions as:

- How did shopping become the most aggressively promoted religion of all time?
- What does the exhausted word; Globalisation actually mean - besides providing me with more money to spend on underpaid Polish builders or Indonesian nannies?
- Are we truly on the verge of post-democracy?
- Why is feminism still the ultimate dirty word? We still don’t have equal pay, equal leave for both parents and the 20 largest businesses in Denmark are all run by men.
- Is shipping tycoon Mr. A. P. Møller a hero or a villain, when he can avoid tax laws by applying diplomacy and charisma?
- Wherein lies free democratic choice, when the only choice I’m presented with is tax-limitations or tax-limitations?
- How do I burst this claustrophobic hetero-bubble of invest-‘n’-consume families that thrive in a super-sized IKEA world? Is there an alternative to fumbling blindly for the exit, as we contemplate which sofa cushions will complete our lives?
- How do I find empathy, imagination and desire - so I can contribute in creating a new Global Citizen?
- How do I become a citizen again and not remain a consumer?
- Is theatre able to approach such subjects? Of course! Where else can you address them? It’s worth a shot! Theatre must be a free public space of dialogue and generosity welcoming genuine encounters between people – a place liberated from the chains of work and private life!

I impose that Camp X in the period 01.07.07 – 30.06.09 must:

• be a spy, a police officer and an archaeologist and NOT a performance factory
• steal from the wicked and give power to the audience
• breakdown the imprisoning heterogeneous girl-meets-boy concepts
• sail the seven seas with Mærsk to discover its secrets
• create theatre that double espresso businessmen will note up in their BlackBerries
• lie to discover truth
• cultivate the hunger for knowledge and collaborate with experts
• interfere in the rapidly diminishing public space
• sing as much as possible



Original link: http://www.campx.dk/Dagsorden.aspx



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PME-ART in Japan

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PME-ART, Unrehearsed Beauty/Le Genie des autres (Canada)

Except some reports of performers' personal experiences such as labor at Dunkin' Donuts or conversation with an American soldier, some yes-or-no questions, fragments of performances and several rock tunes, the whole space is given to audience "without rehearsal." There is a microphone in the center of "audience seats" that they can use to fill the void, but it is all up to them. An experiment that transforms theatre into a kind of open forum and explores what the notion of "public space" can be today.

Dates: March 13-15, 2003
Venue: Super Deluxe, Roppongi



PME-ART, Families are Formed through Copulation (Canada)

Humiliation and death of the best friend, an allegorical story in which a father, mother, and daughter rape each other, a man who suddenly "becomes" a "Jew" during his travel in Germany, a family therapy in the nuclear age, a computer's voice preaching that we must not have children with tons of reasons. Following the experiment in Unrehearsed Beauty as a plain answer to the question "what theatre can do" in terms of content, this "theatrical" performance straightly depicts unjustifiedness.

Dates: March 9-10, 2006
Venue: Tokyo Kinema Club, Uguisudani




chelfitsch, Three Days in March (Japan)

"March 15, 2003, when the USA was about to start bombing on Iraq, I saw at Super Deluxe in Roppongi, with a fair amount of beer, a theatrical show from Montreal that looked like a political forum called Unrehearsed Beauty. Some said the performance was not worth serious consideration, but for me it was one of the very few performances that were really striking.

To tell the truth, what made me write Three Days in March that was premiered in the next year's February was the performance experience of that day. So I am very glad being able to show the piece at the Super Deluxe in the festival that the group of Unrehearsed Beauty is in. Besides, a Japanese post-rock band Sangatsu [March], which was the source of the title, is going to play at the same venue in our performance period.

I hope that audience will enjoy the piece and the band's live concert relaxing, eating and drinking as I did with Unrehearsed Beauty. It has been three years since then, but the war on Iraq is still ongoing."

(Toshiki Okada, from the brochure of PPAF 2006, translated by Tomoyuki Arai)

Dates: March 11-21, 2006
Venue: Super Deluxe, Roppongi



Original link: http://www.parc-jc.org/projects/ppaf/?lang=en



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Thomas Hirschhorn on Collage

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To do collages is essential to me. I do two-dimensional Collages and three-dimensional Collages. Doing Collages means creating a New World with elements of the Existing World. Doing Collages is expressing the Agreement with the Existing World without approving it. This is Resistance.

Doing Collages is based on this Agreement and this Non-Approval. That is the reason why often Collages are not taken seriously. That is the Reason why making Collages is suspicious and why doing Collages is considered unprofessional. But those are precisely the arguments which demonstrate the Resistance of the medium Collages. Collages resist Facts, Collages resist information and Collages resist Documents. Collages create a Truth of their own.

Doing Collages still means working with explosive matter, doing Collages still has the ability to reach a Public – a Public which I call – the Non-Exclusive Audience and doing Collages still escapes control – escapes my own control first. Everybody has, once in his life, done a Collage. Everybody has, once in his life, the sensation that the world can be re-invented, that is so easy, that it really is possible – through a Collage. But then was told – immediately – it is too easy to do this, it is too simple and it is too evident.

This is exactly what I want to insist upon: I want to insist upon doing a simple, easy and evident work. I wanted to do a basic, rough, primitive work. I wanted to do crude Collages: Bring together what has nothing to do together; bring together – what only I think – can be brought together; bring together – what only I see – as together; bring together – what only I know – as together. I juxtapose them as a Headless Act. A Constitutive Act – done in Headlessness. I want to create the condition for an Understanding of the World – the World I am living in. I understand the World – as One World, as the One and Only World, as the One and Unique World – I am living in. I love to do Collages – and in doing it – I want to do a work which reaches Universality. Doing Collages is my tool.

- Thomas Hirschhorn, 2008



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Roy Arden on Hans-Peter Feldmann

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In 1975 Hans-Peter Feldmann sent envelopes, each containing a letter and twelve snapshots, to people with whom he was personally acquainted in the local art scene. The amateur-porn style, flash photos showed the artist engaged in a ménage a trois with two women in a deep-red brothel-like setting. The letter tells that while he wasn’t ashamed to perform such acts in private, their public display was another matter. Yet, he explains, there are much more shameful, “really sickening” things, being done in public, for which the majority feels no shame.

– Roy Arden



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Two quotes from Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory

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Spirit’s “true concern is the negation of reification.” That we make our world is the time-full “truth” that "untruth" most wishes to silence. Reification is that hardening of historically produced conditions into “second nature” – a totalizing ideological and material environment experienced as timeless and unchangeable. It is an enforced forgetting of the political “truth” that structural barbarism is not necessary, not an invariable. Collectively constructed, the given world system can be collectively changed. The practical problem of how to change it, at this point, requires radically rethinking the categories of revolutionary theory. But that the world can be changed – and that both the desire for change and the negative utopian images that provisionally orient that desire can be found within the failures and contradictions of the system itself – remains the core of “truth.” To keep this negative dialectic moving, to resist its arrest and regression, is the work and play of critical thought.

- Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory




As Heraclitus long ago showed, however, there is no pure or simple repetition. Repeating old gestures in new contexts always produces a semantic yield that exceeds that of the original model.

- Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory



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Happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life

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What I’m interest in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life.

- Wolfgang Tillmans



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A conversation between Lenin and Valeriu Marcu

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A conversation between Lenin and the young Romanian poet Valeriu Marcu (in a cafe in Zurich, some time around 1917) in which Lenin attempts to convince the poet to 'accept his critique of pacifist opposition to the First World War':


-------------------------------------------------------


Then Lenin said to me, 'Do you know the real meaning of this war?'

'What is it?' I asked.

'It is obvious,' he replied. 'One slaveholder, Germany, who own one hundred slaves, is fighting another slaveholder, England, who owns two hundred slaves, for a "fairer" distribution of the slaves.'

'How can you expect to foster hatred of this war,' I asked at this point, 'if you are not in principle against all wars? I thought that as a Bolshevik you were really a radical thinker and refused to make any compromise with the idea of war. But by recognizing the validity of some wars, you open the doors for every opportunity. Each group can find some justification of the particular war of which it approves. I see that we young people can only count on ourselves [...]'

Lenin listened attentively, his head bent towards me. He moved his chair closer to mine. He must have wondered whether to continue to talk to this boy or not. I, somewhat awkwardly, remained silent.

'Your determination to rely on yourselves,' Lenin finally replied, is very important. Every man must rely on himself. Yet he should also listen to what informed people have to say. I don't know how radical you are, or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough. One can never be radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself".



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Howard Becker Quote

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Even when you don't want to do what is conventional, what you do want to do can best be described in the language that comes from "conventions".

- Howard Becker



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Optimist Joke

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Two optimists walk into a bar. One optimist says “what a nice bar.” “Yes,” the other optimist says, “I think we will have a very nice time here.” Proving that optimists are actually not all that funny.



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Six Points Towards A Critical Optimism

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1. Optimism has less to do with your concrete situation and more to do with your attitude towards that situation.

There is no point in being an optimist only when things are easy or going well.

Therefore there must be possibilities for optimism in any kind of situation, no matter how negative or catastrophic. These possibilities might have something to do with one’s outlook.

The cliché version of this idea is that in rich Western countries, where life is comfortable and we have everything, people are often miserable: on anti-depressants, in psychoanalysis, etc. While in very poor countries, where they have very little, there is often much joy and a great zest for life.

This cliché may or may not be true. Nonetheless, it does illustrate how sometimes optimism has more to do with one’s attitude than with one’s material situation.



2. Focusing on the next small, experimental step instead of the big utopian dream.

Jacob confesses that he is really not an optimist. He of course has an interest in optimism but in reality can’t quite find the way.

This confession is followed by a statement. If he were to say that “the world is not going well’ many people in the audience might disagree but everyone would know what he was talking about.

Reasons Jacob feels ‘the world is not going well:

- Increasing discrepancy between the rich and the poor. More and more millionaires and multi-millionaire and billionaires and multi-billion dollar corporations. And at the same time more and more people who are desperately poor, living off a dollar a day or less, in conditions that few of us would consider humane.

- The appearance of right wings governments popping up in so many different countries. Governments that care more about protecting the wealth than they do about the lives of their own citizens. And that get elected using the techniques of advertising and emotional manipulation.

- Environmental degradation. A fear that in our lifetime clear air and clean water will become increasingly scarce. One statistic that is particularly alarming is that some time in the next twenty years there will no longer be enough clear water to grow all of the rice we currently consume. Rice of course being the major food staple of much of the planet.

Jacob could go on like this all night.

However, a deeper reason for pessimism is that so many of these crisis’s are not ‘problems that can be solved’ but are instead thoroughly integrated into the fundamental structures of our society, inseparable from the very DNA of Western thinking and culture.

The kinds of changes required for substantial improvement, real fundamental shifts in the way we live and think, seem unlikely to say the least. And in comparison, the ethical decisions we are actually capable of enacting feel out of scale with the global breadth and complexity of the situation.

So thinking about all of this Jacob feels astonishingly pessimistic.

However, if we instead concentrate on the ‘next, small experimental step’ it is true that in any given situation there is always something that can be done. It is also interesting to think of it as an experimental step. You try something today. Tomorrow you look back and decide if you want to continue down the same path or instead try something different. There is always some room for possibility.



3. A respect for the facts and for reality.

Much of 20th century art and thought was about tearing away the veil of culture and illusion and seeing what lies underneath. Of course, if ones rips away a veil of cultured, civilized illusion, what lies underneath might well seem ugly in comparison. This 20th century desire to unmask, to reveal the way things really are, is one of the main reasons that ‘facts’ and ‘reality’ have become associated with pessimism.

However, we can’t let the pessimists claim control of the facts. Optimists also need to deal in the hard currency of facts and reality.

Saying something is ‘a fact’ or ‘a reality’ is always connected to power. Stating that something is a fact is also a way of making it into a fact.

If a father tells his son, “You can’t be an artist, instead you have to work a real job, that’s just the way life is, those are the facts,” at the same time the father is promoting a specific way of looking at the world.

To say that life is hard or cruel also serves normalize hardship and cruelty. To say that hardship and cruelty must always be denounced and fought against is clearly a different position. There is really no reason not to state that things do sometimes change and that life is often beautiful.

We are interested in an optimism that looks at the world with open eyes. There is of course constant cruelty in the world, the question is: what is our attitude towards it?



4. What would it take to turn a pessimist into an optimist?

An essential point: because if some people are simply born optimists and others are born pessimists then there’s nothing to be done and no point in talking about it.

Perhaps the first step in turning a pessimist into an optimist is for the pessimist to see their own pessimism not as ‘the way things actually are’, but as a bias, a lens or screen through which he or she views the world. Seeing one’s own position as a bias might create a small opening through which other possibilities might begin to flow.

If one’s pessimism if not a fundamental reflection of the world, but is (at least partly) a bias, perhaps in some situations a more optimistic view would be more useful.



5. There is no optimism without imagination.

This point speaks for itself.



6. Resistance.

The most essential point. We have no interest in an optimism that simply says everything is going well and life is full of small, beautiful things and we should enjoy them and be grateful. (Though this is of course true.)

Because when we say ‘critical optimism’ we also mean an optimism of resistance, an optimism that allows us to fight against injustice and to fight against the abuses of power.

In developing this project we have realized that capitalism and the right wing are often extremely optimistic. We therefore need a critical optimism, an optimism of resistance, that has the strength and force to match injustice blow for optimistic blow.

In an interview with Cinemascope magazine, the American experimental filmmaker John Gianvito says:

“As far as one’s thoughts about our present predicaments or about the future, I have no difficulty understanding from whence the pessimism and cynicism springs. However, what’s critical for me is that regardless of one’s thoughts, one’s actions must be those of an optimist. Otherwise one is only further assuring that the status quo remains unchanged.”



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A strange combination of being happy and unsatisfied.

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“[...] I’ve wanted to be flexible, to disengage from marginality and, at the same time, from the mainstream, because they’re both worn-out today and don’t respond to a more complex situation. I don’t identify with any space or time I inhabit because they’re all too narrow, limiting, and all of this is a strange combination of being happy and unsatisfied, because there’s still so much to do, so much is needed. All of us need more radicalism, something that isn’t a monologue or being offended by what the other says, loving difference and having fewer, much fewer, micro-political friendships, and less respect for the surviving chieftans of the Paz eras. [...]”

- Heriberto Yépez



(As cited on Venepoetics, I believe from the website of Heriberto Yépez.)
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Friction and Vulnerability

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Just noticed this comment a few posts back from "i mate." Thought it was very much to the point:


"It's fine to initiate an event for people to 'come together'. but if there is no exploration of the ethics of an 'encounter', then it's like never starting a fire. for people to really share and touch each other there needs to be friction, and friction comes with one being vulnerable.

Your work should explore its psychological dimension if it should claim to fulfill its mandate."


Not sure about the 'psychological dimension' but friction and vulnerability are directly at the centre of the search.



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Alexander Melamid Quote

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There's a crisis of ideas in art, which is felt by many, many people... Artists now - I cannot speak for all, but I have talked to many artists who feel this way - we have lost even our belief that we are the minority that knows. We believed ten years ago, twenty years ago, that we knew the secret. Now we have lost this belief. We are a minority with no power and no belief, no faith. I feel myself, as an artist and as a citizen, just totally obsolete... Okay, it can be done this way or that way or this way, or in splashes or smoothly, but why? What the hell is it about? That's why we wanted to ask people. For us - from our point of view - it's a sincere thing to understand something, to change course. Because the way we live we cannot live anymore. I have never seen artists so desperate as they are now, in this society.

- Alexander Melamid




(As cited by Carl Wilson in Let's Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste.)
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Paul Chan Quote

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At the time, the mid-'90s, the AFL-CIO was doing college recruitment, and big labor unions were going to colleges and universities talking about how they should organize. It was thrilling. It all culminated with the UPS strike in 1997 in Chicago with Ron Carey, the Teamster president. Here's a guy who came up from the rank and file of the Teamsters, who was forced into confronting a company that refused to negotiate with the workers on a new contract. 185,000 workers walked off the job, and UPS blinked. They broke the company and got a new contract. I lived close to a UPS processing center on the South Side of Chicago, and we'd bring them donuts. It was a great moment. Then of course Carey was booted; after the strike the Teamster hierarchy voted in the son of Jimmy Hoffa as president, even though Carey had just led this insane victory, and even though everyone knew Hoffa Jr. was shady. One of the lessons you learn is that changing things often means losing your job or getting jailed, or worse.

– Paul Chan



[You can find the rest of the interview here.]



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This little square

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1.

Everything is settled. There is a specific way to do each new thing.
There is even an agreed upon way to break the rules.



2.
Maybe there will be no end, no flash, no blast,

no final show



This is your project and you must finish it

you tell yourself, you keep telling yourself

again and again

all the while knowing that it matters little

whether you finish it or not

(no one will notice, no one will care)

nonetheless you press on

this is my project, you say

this little square of irrelevance

it means something to me

damn them all

this is mine



.

Art School

.



While still in art school, all artists should take mandatory courses in humility.



.

On Artists and Lonliness

.



I was thinking random thoughts, perhaps not really thinking anything at all, when a rather concrete question randomly formulated itself, namely: am I more or less lonely than other artists? And then: are contemporary artists, as a type, particularly lonely? And then: is there any documentation on the relative loneliness, or lack of loneliness, of contemporary artists? These didn’t seem, to me at least, to be particularly engaging or timely questions to be posing but my mind hovered around them for a few brief moments and I recalled something I had read in the book Artistic Research – theories, methods and practices by Mika Hannula, Juha Suorant and Tere Vaden:

Following Rorty (1991), the question indeed is: what communities and traditions does the person undertaking artistic research belong to? The sad thing is that sometimes we are happy with the context where we find ourselves – and yet again sometimes not. The politics of the everyday – and how we can cope with it – is how we specifically handle this conflict. But Rorty continues. The other decisive question is: What is our approach to loneliness? We cannot underestimate or despise such a question. It is useless to claim that one would enjoy one’s existence maximally only if and when one is alone. Despite the journey and need to make decisions, the question is about being in the world, about the pressures and needs stemming from this and how this relationship is carried out.

I have often said that one of the things art can still do, and perhaps the thing it still does best, is help us formulate what we believe in and therefore concurrently allow us to form alliances, and perhaps even communities, with those who have similar compulsions and beliefs. If there is a work of art I like I naturally begin to think about why exactly it is that I like it. This leads me to think what questions and positions the work of art expresses that resonate with my more general world view, allowing me to further clarify what it is that I actually think and why. When I meet others who like the same work of art we have a point of departure for a discussion about values. It might turn out that we like the same work of art for completely different reasons. And these differences once again allow us to clarify what might be meaningful to us.

In an art culture of hyper-plurality, such alliances at times seem few and far between.


[Unfinished.]



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Top Twelve (Not Necessarily Released During The Past Year But Nonetheless Listened To.)

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The Wave Pictures - Instant Coffee Baby
Reiko Kudo - Rice Field Silently Ripping In The Night
Fabulous Diamonds - 7 Songs
Dirty Projectors - Rise Above
Nigeria Special: 1970-1976
Hefner - The Fidelity Wars
Tony Allen - Afro Disco Beat
Adrian Orange & Her Band
Erykah Badu - New Amerykah: Part One
Philip Cohran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble - Singles
Icy Demons - Fight Back
Tiombe Lockhart - Queen of Doom



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Painting, Coffee, Toast

.



Painting, Toast, Coffee

Does anyone still remember the end of painting, the death of painting, etc? It all seems like such a long time ago. What was it exactly that we thought was ending? An interest in strong male (possibly drunk) figures standing in front of blank canvases as if the canvases themselves were land waiting to be conquered? The feeling that abstraction was a meaningful, resonant break with representation? Art that didn’t involve video cameras?

And then another thought, another question: does anything ever really end? Do bands actually break up, or at least ever stay broken: the Sex Pistols got back together, Young Marble Giants got back together, The Pixies got back to together. Every ending is only a dull pause before the beast comes, once again, back to life.



Toast, Painting, Coffee

The colloquialism ‘you’re toast’ of course means: you’re beaten, you’re down for the count, you’re done, it’s over. I do not know the expressions origin. Should I look it up? Should I google it? Could I simply figure it out myself through common sense or logic? Bread is put into a toaster. Before it goes into the toaster it is bread, after toast. The bread is gone, of course only transformed, but somehow something that is less fresh, more burnt, now stands in its place. Perhaps, when there is discourse about things coming to an end (the end of history, the death of the novel, etc.) such things are not gone at all: they have only been toasted (I am tempted to write: toasted by over-thinking, by over-examination.) Where once there was something fresh, something straight out of the oven, in it’s place is now something that is burnt and, at any moment, ready to crumble.

Toast is traditionally eaten in the morning. “Tomorrow is another day,” is another expression that suddenly comes to mind, along the lines of: Today painting is dead but tomorrow is another day. Another day with toast and coffee and a new sunrise that will shine through the studio window. Each work will be seen in this new light. The pain and struggle, from the day before, of trying to figure how and why and what to make is washed away by such light. All you have is the work in front of you, without explanation, saying only what it chooses to say in that exact moment. Does it still choose to say: ‘you’re toast.’



Coffee, Toast, Painting

I often wonder, in an of course completely hypothetical manner, if I were to wake up one morning and there was simply, absolutely, no art left anywhere in the world, how long it would take me to notice. If I wonder about this for a while I usually come to the conclusion that it might even take a few days. However, if I were to wake up one morning and there was absolutely no coffee left anywhere in the world I am quite sure I would notice in about fifteen seconds. From this tentative thought experiment is it possible to ascertain that coffee is considerably more important than art.

You are in the studio, it is morning, a coffee in one hand, perhaps a cigarette in the other. You’re wandering around the studio, looking out the window, wondering about various random things, wondering about the next move, absent-mindedly placing the coffee cup down, picking it up again, noticing that the bottom of the cup has left a ring, a stain. The stain is a trace of this aimless moment, repeated over and over again, as if into infinity.



.

Brian Holmes: "But it is to say that unconventional and dissenting ideas don’t often come out of established and conventional functions."

.



Well, the problem I have, and maybe others have too, is that the formalism and the professionalism of the museum-university-festival circuit sometimes keeps you from knowing either who you are, or what you’re really talking about. This is not to say we should close the museums, picket the universities, burn the libraries, or go back to the land or whatever. But it is to say that unconventional and dissenting ideas don’t often come out of established and conventional functions. And when everybody tacitly agrees that culture production can only take place under the beneficent gaze of the market and the state, and on their payrolls, what you get in my opinion is very dull and timid attitudes combined with grotesquely simulated and overblown emotions. Or, from the more ambitious and professional types, you may get hyper-specialized discourses and elaborate aesthetic affects, this sort of highly valorized cultural production which appears irrefutable when it comes out of MIT or MoMA, but still doesn’t seem to be what you’re looking for.

To put it in more theoretical terms, there is no possibility of generating a critical counter-power – or counter-public, or counter-public sphere – when there is no search for relative autonomy, or when the self (autos) no longer even asks the questions of how to make its own law (nomos). So the importance of this kind of project is to use it as a moment of experimentation, not just in the quest for the perfect theory or the perfect procedure, but cosmologically, to rearrange the stars above your head. Such events don’t happen often, the only solution is do-it-yourself. It’s also part of the search for the outside, which has existential necessity. I think I’ve learned the most about art and social theory from counter-summits with lines of teargas-belching cops, and from those kinds of anarchist summer universities where you camp out for a week and have a hard time finding a shower, but also get to cooperate directly with people whose words and gestures aren’t totally dissociated from their bodies and their actions. Well, since those moments I have felt a need to develop more complex discourses and experiments, but hopefully not more conventional and complacent ones […]

- Brian Holmes



[The rest of the interview can be found here: Articulating the Cracks in the Worlds of Power. 16 Beaver Group talking with Brian Holmes]



.

We have fought and won

.



1.
We have fought and won.
You will not oppress us anymore.
We have won the right to
oppress ourselves.


2.
In every battle there is a decisive moment.
Where things could just as easily
tip one way as the other.
What if that moment were stretched out.
What if it lasted forever.


3.
Loneliness must be recruited
in the fight
against capitalism.



.

The counts on which Valerie is usually convicted of failure...

.



The counts on which Valerie [Solanas] is usually convicted of failure are the following: she was not a lesbian, she was a lesbian, she didn't comb her hair, she was a hooker, she was poor, she held extremist views, she was humorless, her humor was inappropriate, she picked on an artist who would become important, she was clueless about the workings of the art market, and she missed. She did not, fortunately, kill Warhol, or anyone else. By the time she got to him, William Burroughs had already shot his wife, and Norman Mailer stabbed his. Louis Althusser had yet to strangle his. Let us not even begin to speak of Carl Andre. The only woman to survive her man was Mailer's wife. Did the critical reputation, credibility, or perceived contribution of any of these men suffer more than a temporary glitch?

- Catherine Lord, Notes On Beatification: The Case For Valerie Solanas


[From the book Failure!: Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices]



.

And just write anything.

.



And just write anything. Because you left the book you were reading (and enjoying immensely) at home, because you are sitting in the café alone and perhaps want others to think you industrious. You have no thoughts so you write anything, not worrying that it’s pathetic or uninspired, no one will read it anyway, even if by some miracle it is published hardly anyone will read it. But you sip the last dregs of your coffee and write. This is the perfect, public loneliness. You look around the café and continue to smile.



.

New PME-ART Mandate

.



Through performances, installation, public process and theoretical and practical research, interdisciplinary group PME-ART confronts its contemporary practice via local, national and international artistic collaborations. Combining creation, exploration, critical reflection, dissemination and casual yet significant interactions with various publics, the work is an ongoing process of questioning the world, of finding the courage to say things about the current predicament that are direct and complex, of interrogating the performance situation.

Performing as ourselves, we create actions, conditions and speech executed with a singular intimacy and familiarity. This intimacy reduces the separation between performer and spectator, opening up a space for thinking, tension, reflection and confusion. Within this space we present meticulously prepared material in a manner that is open and loose, sliding the situation towards the unexpected, towards a sense of connection with whatever the audience brings.

Full of paradoxes and contradictions, the work is often destabilizing. Such destabilization is not only about art, but also echoes the social and personal discomfort so often encountered in daily life. We believe acknowledging uncomfortable realities, instead of pretending they are not there, is of fundamental importance for the development of critical approaches that are generous and unpredictable.

We are deeply engaged with the ethical and political challenges that arise when working collaboratively, searching for a delicate balance between the essential freedom of the performers (to create the thinking, physicality and substance of the work) and the rigour necessary to structure and gradually refine the material over the course of the process.

Drawing considerably upon literature, music, dance, visual art, critical theory, philosophy and cinema, such influences are never entirely direct, always infiltrating our practice from personal, unexpected angles.

While the style of the work may seem fragmented, and is in many ways a reflection of the fragmented times in which we live, simultaneously the work generates a deeply human experience with a foundation in basic yet ephemeral realities: people working together, dealing with the audience, simply trying to figure things out.



.

Of course it’s too easy to think this way

.



Of course it’s too easy to think this way, as if every question had the same simple answer: that the world is irredeemably damaged. These people have style but that doesn’t guarantee they lack substance. Do more people read a book when it is the only one left in the shop? Do more people commit a crime when the pertinent law seems flimsy, arbitrary or ridiculous? In every matter there is choice but rarely does freedom decide everything. Does a belief in love automatically entail a belief in couples?



.

These moments of lucidity

.



These moments of lucidity within the dumb, stupid, corrupt, venal, smug, overly-satisfied-with-itself world. And the lucidity that is little more than a stand-in for the overwhelming grayness of ones own inexplicable temperament.



.

An American Plea

.



In the upcoming American election, the Republicans (with the help of rigged electronic voting machines) will simply cheat. When you cheat it is considerably easier to win. I therefore predict the Republicans will once again prove victorious. Considering the variety of questionable, even suspicious, practices during the last two American elections, how come this possibility of imminent electoral corruption isn’t front page news every single day?

God willing, if you are planning to be anywhere near the voting machines this November, anywhere near where votes are being tallied: please, bring a video camera, film covertly and often, get something on tape. Come on America, show some fight, let’s throw some of this painful evidence up onto youtube and see what happens. What the fuck else is the internet for?

Signed, a concerned Canadian.



.

A Dream

.



We were living in a house together. The house was a lot like the place where I live now but it was located in the suburbs. We were renting videos or watching videos or maybe the internet and something happened and you died in my arms. I knew that when you were dead what I had to do, what I had been instructed to do, was go to the basement and blow up the house. I gently laid you on the kitchen floor and snuck down to the basement. I knew if I cut the gas line with your knife the house would explode. I cut the gas line with your knife then crept back up to the kitchen, took you back in my arms, and held you tight, waiting for the house to explode so we would both perish along with it. Then you awoke. You looked at me, I was startled that you were alive and said we have to get out of the house as quickly as possible because it's going to explode. We ran out of the house and dove onto the grass. You asked me what had happened and I explained everything. We sat on the front lawn for a long time, watching the house (all of the windows and doors were flung completely open to air out the gas), waiting for it to explode. Then you got very, very angry at me for blowing up your house. I knew that I was in fact in the wrong because I was only supposed to blow up the house when you were dead and clearly you were not dead. Then there was a flashback to when I was in the basement, a close up on my hands: instead of cutting the gas line I had - by mistake - cut the sugar line (the sugar line was a white straw-wrapper filled with sugar.) I suddenly remembered this, my own incompetence, could still taste the sugar on my hand, told you this new detail, and we went back inside and cleaned up the house.



.

Dear ask the experts

.



Dear ask the experts,
my life is empty
please advise
yours, lost
Dear lost,
ask the experts are not mind-readers
please send more information
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
when I try to think up reasons to
begin anything new
or for that matter reasons
to continue on with things I am
already doing
I can come up with many
many good strong reasons
(some of which of course contradict one another)
and yet, if I consider them further,
all such reasons fail to convince
please advise
yours, lost
Dear lost,
why do you need reasons to do things,
why not just do things that ‘feel right’
and let the reasons take care of themselves
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
without reasons I feel unable to
make decisions
if I try to trust what I feel
I realize that mainly
I feel apathetic and ambivalent
perhaps this is not ‘normal’
but it is where I stand
and I am searching for the next step
I am open to suggestions
yours, lost
Dear lost,
your desire for ‘suggestions’ is much
like your desire for ‘reasons’
you are searching for a crutch
since you have fallen out of touch
with your true desires
simplify your life, create the space
within which what you already
know you need can
gradually rise to the surface
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
if my life was any more simple
I would be in a coma
I have simplified and found only
emptiness and loneliness
yours, lost
Dear lost,
why didn’t you mention before
that you were lonely
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
must have slipped my mind
yours, lost
Dear lost,
loneliness is much like boredom
the solution is simply to take an interest
in something
find people who you like and
surround yourself with them
intertwine your lives with theirs
write down their birthdays in
your daytimer and make sure to
do something special for them
expect them to return the favor
your community is a mirror
in which you can see yourself
and better understand your own
true desires
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
I am already surrounded by close,
very dear friends
who care for me and bring warmth
and friendship and community
into my life
it doesn’t help
yours, lost
Dear lost,
have you tried drugs
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
the drugs don’t work
yours, lost
Dear lost,
it is rare for us to suggest
such radical measures
but in such extreme cases
we occasionally propose an attempted suicide
here is our reasoning:
an attempted suicide is a cry for help
you are obviously in desperate need for assistance
therefore, perhaps an attempted suicide
might bring you the help you desire
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
I am now a ghost
yours, lost
Dear lost ghost,
please note that we had specified
an ‘attempted’ suicide
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
it seems I overshot the mark
yours, lost ghost
Dear lost ghost,
what is it like in the afterlife
ask the experts are extremely curious
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
it is warm here
I feel calm and at peace
all the troubles of a barely lived life
feel like the most distant,
pleasant memories
everything feels at peace
yours, lost ghost
Dear lost ghost,
so in some sense we have
managed to solve your problem
after all…



.

By self-selection became the first generation of psychoanalysts...

.



the unconventional ones
the doubters
those who were dissatisfied with the limitations imposed on knowledge
the odd ones
the dreamers
those who knew neurotic suffering from their own experience
the mentally endangered
the eccentrics
the self-made
those with excessive flights of imagination




[description, according to Anna Freud, of the characteristics of the personalities of those who, by self-selection, became the first generation of psychoanalysts]



.

It’s true, as I’ve told others...

.



It’s true, as I’ve told others, that knowing one knows nothing is the best way to be, since life, minute after minute, is never more than being inspired to rediscover what one thought one already knew. I did know it, but… No, not “but”: and I’m about to know it again, right now.

– Harry Mathews, 20 Lines a Day



.

And people started to arrive...

.



And people started to arrive

the one we didn’t recognize

the one not interested or interesting

a friend of a friend we had heard many terrible things about

the friend we really liked and the other friend who was steadily growing on us

the crazy one who sat in the corner who after awhile we forgot

and everyone brought alcohol

and the stereo was informed by a rapidly changing whatever of eclectic suggestions

and the one who lost the address and had to phone three times before finding the right doorbell

the one who three of our closest friends had dated and we knew many intimate and embarrassing details about

the couple, who we called ‘the power couple’, who seemed to do little else then support each others careers

and it was getting crowded so we felt pride – clearly word had got out

“What do you mean by political?...” we overheard, just a few feet away

“Political… as in making things possible.”

the one who was at all the parties and knew absolutely everyone

and the one who hardly ever went out and was rapidly making up for lost time

the drinkers and non-drinkers and dancers and ones who might dance a little bit later once they’d had a bit more to drink

this was goodbye, next party would be somewhere far away: new city, new problems, new friends we would someday soon describe with a similar distanced love

and remembering the last city, the last party, ten years ago, the ones we still often wrote too and the ones we long ago forgot

the ones who said they were sad we were leaving and would miss us terribly

and the ones who said we were lucky to get out of this mean-spirited backwater and they wished they could escape as well

the ones who would stay in touch and the ones who would try to stay in touch and the ones for whom such thoughts barely even occurred

“They’ll be back in a year,” we overheard, just a few feet away, but knew this was not the case

and we wondered: how many of these people would we ever see again? how many would we still remember in ten years? would we hear when they got ill, when they got married, when they had children, when they died?

we looked around the room. guessing such things had never been our strong suit, but still: one hundred? two hundred? packed into corners and perched on the edges of chairs

did we really know why we were leaving? could the friends we hadn’t made yet ever hope to match the drunks that surrounded us now



.

Notes Towards A Critical Optimism - Part Two

.



Ten Points Concerning Critical Optimism:

1. Optimism is an attitude towards reality that affects ones actions.

2. Without optimism nothing happens. Critical optimism is a desire expressed through action to make sure that not only bad things happen.

3. Optimism isn’t enough, we also require a tactic.

4. There is no optimism without imagination.

5. Optimism has less to do with your concrete situation and more to do with your attitude towards that situation.

6. The future isn’t fixed.

7. Focusing on the next small, experimental step instead of the big utopian dream.

8. A respect for the facts and for reality.

9. What would it take to turn a pessimist into an optimist?

10. Resistance.




And for Part One: http://radicalcut.blogspot.com/2007/02/towards-critical-optimism-preliminary.html



.

Maybe there will be no end

.



1.

Everything is settled. There is a specific way to do each new thing.
There is even an agreed upon way to break the rules.



2.
Maybe there will be no end, no flash, no blast,

no final show



This is your project and you must finish it

you tell yourself, you keep telling yourself

again and again

all the while knowing that it matters little

whether you finish it or not

(no one will notice, no one will care)

nonetheless you press on

this is my project, you say

this little square of irrelevance

it means something to me

damn them all

this is mine



.

I see now the problem...

.



I see now the problem is that I am a complete ideologue when it comes to theatre: always fighting for a certain, extremely specific, way of making and thinking about performance. I can be fair and reasonable and believe there is room for everyone but in my heart and blood I know that I am right. And when you are an ideologue you can never really be open and you can never, not for a second, rest. Towards my own ideology I feel only like Bartleby: I would prefer not too. But twenty years of fighting have turned me inside out. I am exhausted. No one particularly cares how or why performances are made. And when I was young, no one advised me to pick my fights more carefully. Is this what being an artist, a certain kind of artist (I suppose), in some sense, finally means? Then again, like Ranciere says, how to open a window and let in some air?



.

Hospitality Three - Promotional Text

.



Raised on a steady diet of television, recorded music and the internet, people today sometimes feel more comfortable mesmerized by recordings, or interacting through the interface of a computer screen, than they do dealing directly with real human beings. Hospitality Three: Individualism Was A Mistake will not shy away from this discomfort (a discomfort present at any live performance), rather it will honestly address it in order to deepen our understanding of what it might be like to share space with a group of people one doesn’t necessarily know.

Using the temporary community of people gathered in a room together to watch a performance as a metaphor for the wider community-at-large, Hospitality Three will provide as series of evocative examples of people working together – effectively (and sometimes not so effectively) – giving special focus to the fact that our cultures over-emphasis on individualism often makes such ‘working together’ difficult.




.

Laura Calderon de la Barca and the Anthology of Optimism

.



Dear Laura Calderon de la Barca,

I am posting this because I have now twice tried to email you and have yet to hear back.

If you are out there please contact us. We are very curious.

Hope you are not offended by anything I have written below.

Optimistically yours,
Jacob


.......


And here is the post:

On January 16, 2008 I sent the following email to Pieter de Buyser, my collaborator on the Anthology of Optimism:


.......


Dear Pieter,

Today, when I was going through my blog to send someone the link about the Anthology of Optimism project:

http://radicalcut.blogspot.com/2007/02/towards-critical-optimism-preliminary.html

I scrolled down to the bottom and read the following comment by Laura Calderon de la Barca:


------------------------------------------------


Hi, Jacob!

I enojoyed very much sharing your exploration of what opens up inside of what Critical Optimism may be. I googled up the term as part of a websearch I am carrying out for a research project called "Cross-cultural 'Larrikins' in a Neo-Liberal World: Ideology and Myth in postmodern Australia, Mexico and Brazil". I first heard it the day I submitted my PhD thesis, which I wrote in the form of psychotherapeutic session for my country, Mexico, and which contains many elements that match with your reflections and ideas, although applied in different ways. My supervisor, Prof. Bob Hodge from the Univertisy of Western Sydney, suggested I join his wife, Dr. Gabriela Coronado, himself and someone else to start a group of "Critical Optimism Studies". I was delighted with the idea, and when I joined the Larrikin project as a full-time research assistant, one of my duties was to look up material for furthering this inquiry. In what you wrote there are many points of convergence with our project: the clarity about the damaging effects of Neoliberalism, the need to find other alternatives that are neither naive nor disempowering, the need to bring in reflexivity to the equation, and how identities get in the way of this, to name a few.

I am curious about the stories you might have to share on this, and if we can establish a space of sharing that may synergically propel this approach further. My e-mail is l.calderon@uws.edu.au, and I would love to hear from you.

All the best,
Laura Calderon de la Barca


------------------------------------------------


For some reason I think that this is really fantastic. It's almost like something out of a Borges story. Pieter and I think that we've invented the term "critical optimism" and then suddenly there’s a "Critical Optimism Studies" group and what's more it's in Australia. It's like we made it up but of course we couldn't have made it up because actually it already existed. And of course the name Laura Calderon de la Barca does sound just a little bit like that of a fictional character. (I realize this reading is more than a little solipsistic, I think really I'm just being fanciful) And then I very much wonder where it will lead.

And yes, then there is another point: the "Critical Optimism Studies" group is a real thing. There are so many things in the world that would give us a greater sense of belonging if only we knew where to find them.

Optimistically yours,
Jacob


.

PME-ART New Mandate

.



Through performances, installation, public process and theoretical and practical research, interdisciplinary group PME-ART confronts its contemporary practice via local, national and international artistic collaborations. Combining creation, exploration, critical reflection, dissemination and casual yet significant interactions with various publics, the work is an ongoing process of questioning the world, of finding the courage to say things about the current predicament that are direct and complex, of interrogating the performance situation.

Performing as ourselves, we create actions, conditions and speech executed with a singular intimacy and familiarity. This intimacy reduces the separation between performer and spectator, opening up a space for thinking, tension, reflection and confusion. Within this space we present meticulously prepared material in a manner that is open and loose, sliding the situation towards the unexpected, towards a sense of connection with whatever the audience brings.

Full of paradoxes and contradictions, the work is often destabilizing. Such destabilization is not only about art, but also echoes the social and personal discomfort so often encountered in daily life. We believe acknowledging uncomfortable realities, instead of pretending they are not there, is of fundamental importance for the development of critical approaches that are generous and unpredictable.

We are deeply engaged with the ethical and political challenges that arise when working collaboratively, searching for a delicate balance between the essential freedom of the performers (to create the thinking, physicality and substance of the work) and the rigour necessary to structure and gradually refine the material over the course of the process.

Drawing considerably upon literature, music, dance, visual art, critical theory, philosophy and cinema, such influences are never entirely direct, always infiltrating our practice from personal, unexpected angles.

While the style of the work may seem fragmented, and is in many ways a reflection of the fragmented times in which we live, simultaneously the work generates a deeply human experience with a foundation in basic yet ephemeral realities: people working together, dealing with the audience, simply trying to figure things out.




.

This isn’t the work we had meant to do

.



This isn’t the work we had meant to do
but it’s work nonetheless. Muscle. Struggle.
you land in the place and just start digging
vaguely remembering other, previous plans
or you dig to forget. Or to turn the head
of past regrets, so they once again face some
present sense of semi-fulfillment

This isn’t the work we had meant to do
but it has its pleasures and its surprises
its drawbacks and its pains
other roads might have been just as hard
or harder
and what does any of that matter now
this is the road you’re on
you can of course turn back
back towards indecision
towards that lost in aimless thought
and constant undecided self-recrimination
or you can forge ahead
and between these two options
as you continue to forcefully dig
there is no real choice
this isn’t what we had meant to do



.

As far as one’s thoughts about our present predicaments...

.



As far as one’s thoughts about our present predicaments or about the future, I have no difficulty understanding from whence the pessimism and cynicism springs. However, what’s critical for me is that regardless of one’s thoughts, one’s actions must be those of an optimist. Otherwise one is only further assuring that the status quo remains unchanged.

- John Gianvito



.