Infinite: Tin Cans Around Saturn

Local artists (and by local I mean no actual area but the idea of particularity) sometimes seem to believe in the piled-on scrum only and effect not to think that anything beyond that matters (that is, the universalism as defined by the critical impulse, the writing of the event of art, etc.) so to say, not to believe in the interruptive aspect of art and consequent start-up anew (this is the agility of the scrum) but only in its power to get the individual game going. A closed ‘spiritual’ realm, not a phenomena immersed in history, writing, politics, science and all the other things that impinge on everyday life ---but which are not-quite-everyday. In that sense, there is an aspect of art (perhaps especially in times of stress) that is deeply conservative, certain practioners preferring to stick close to the body and an immediacy of affect. Populist art, that is, art that tries to stay away from the historical and centrifugal rigors of serious art, often strives for that immediate pragmatic closeness (although any ‘striving’ would seem to launch it, eventually, into another category; economic if nothing else.)

At any rate, I’ve been trying to think about why art can be so boring much of the time and yet why Art can have a frisson of enlargement about it that art tries to stay away from. (Though often times that simply strikes me as a ploy on the artists’ part.) To put it another way, the local artist often times tries to steer clear of a certain, um, relationship shall we say, with the infinite, the (non) thing which would tempt them from the immediate and often smacks of religion. (Although the more astute of us realize that often times that which is not becomes that which is, and that which is becomes that which is not.)

And so I come across a passage this morning:

"Modern art has also turned towards the event, or the possibility of the event. Modern art knows that it has no objective status. It knows that it does not incarnate any prior idea in its supposed wholeness and unity. In its resistance to objectification and its practice of ‘disincarnation’, modern art becomes increasingly concerned with ‘precarites evenementielles’. The most radical examples of this are installations, happenings, and jazz. Here, again, it would not be hard to describe a many-sided modern literature of the event, including Mallarme, Kafka, Joyce and Woolf, Pound and Imagism, William Carlos Williams and various traditions in post-war American poetry." (Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency, Andrew Gibson)

Gibson makes the point that this modernist approach fiddles with the controls of history and can lead to thoughts of an ‘evacuation of history’ as exemplifies by the work of Samuel Beckett. It strikes me that ‘regional theater’ (to use the performative for all the arts) is precisely not interested in such epochal formations as a history bending event. The popular is precisely that which has already been slightly (not too much) bent.

And of course the coils of history often bend in unpredictable ways (it’s why we still have history… which is not the same as progress however, no matter how much neoliberal thought might have it be so).

But what caught my eye in the quote above was ‘disincarnation’. Specifically, its relation to Corpus, a beautiful and mystifying text by Jean-Luc Nancy; a few quotes from the section I am reading now and the stated and implied chiasmatic relations of local/universal, body/spirit etc:

"Incarnation is structured like a disembodiment."

“The signifying body – the whole corpus of philosophical, theological, psychoanalytic, and semiological bodies – incarnates one thing only: the absolute contradiction of not being able to be a body without being the body of a spirit, which disembodies it.”

Heads and tails. A flipping of a (coming) quantum coin: or rather acephale and aphallic, cut off the head, put it in a can, and shoot it into orbit around Saturn, leaving the tail to spawn .. or is the other way round? “No head or tail, then, since thing provides support or substance for this material. I say ‘acephalic and aphallic,’ not ‘anurous,’ which is fine for batrachians. An impotent, unintelligent body. Its possibilities, forces, and thoughts lie elsewhere.”

Insurrection and resurrection take place simultaneously. (As well as beheaded/headed.)

Toynbee Tiles written all over streets scattered from here to Sao Paulo:
"The dead are resurrected on Jupiter."

Meanwhile here on earth the corpses are cinematically animated: zombies and vampires, proliferating, perhaps, regarding that bend in history, we should say clinematically: "Clinamen, a fragile, fractal prose, inclining to accident. Not the body-animal of sense, but the areality of bodies: of bodies indeed, including the dead body. Not the cadaver, where the body disappears, but the body as the dead one’s apparition, in the final discreteness of its spacing: not the dead body, but the dead one as a body – and there is no other." (Corpus, 53)

Art forming the dead shells, re-animation, finite and infinite swarming along its closed track, luminosity of kelipot, now irremedially mixed with the core, becoming sphere.

First, evacuate and abandon
tin cans to Mars…
flung from head to tail
comet

Round in Circles

It is most often (inevitably one would say) that there are levels of accountability in society and levels of un-accountability. Since these apparently economic concepts arise through concepts and constructions of 'credit' or credulousness or investment in certain plans of reality (yes, not inappropriate to call all this 'theological' as Agamben and others have noted), any alternative accounts of reality seem 'bankrupt' -- and in a most literal sense. What previously were thought of as 'signs from the heavens' are always thought of, sociologically, as symptoms of cultural and social pressures, tensions and dislocations. The 'economy' as we have come to love and hate it, is always fenced round with baton wielding angels, ministerial enforcers of P.O.V. for the great Treasury To Come. Pursuit of any unacounted-for (and un-wanted) signs will surely lead to a sort of moral bankruptcy.

Is it any wonder then that the resurgence of the 'paranomal' (other than its perennial ebb and flow) seems tied to the free-floating economy of the web, where credit, either in its citational form or its monetized form, seems to be undergoing a phase shift into some other sort of creature (recent national and global events would attest to this also)?

I recently curated and wrote a catalog entry for a show called 'Crop Circles, Cosmograms, Psychogeographies'. You can find the result of that over at FORT!da? books or just off of the Public Domain site. Of course it could also be the case that I have 'symptomatized' something here also. In the distancing of this theorizing about it, it is all be inevitable.

It will be interesting to see the reactions of folks to the show itself which opens in a couple of weeks at eyedrum art and music gallery.

Unfortunately, one thing which I planned but did not have time to work into the show was tattooing and psychogeography and the 'talking object' and diagram as is now being discussed in certain art theory circles.

here was the original call for the show:

Crop Circles, Cosmograms, Psychogeographies

If nothing else, perhaps it can be said that modernity is about diagrams,
schematics, blueprints, Rorschalk cards, flow charts, maps, floorplans and
all the other graphic devices designed to simplify and link the real,
material world with the abstract world of thought and feeling. The same
thing might be said of the visual arts in general.

The infamous crop circles started mysteriously appearing in the fields of
England in the mid-Seventies. Over the past thirty plus years, they have
become the source of much speculation, wonderment, hoaxing: were they made
by artists? By aliens? By intelligent plasmas? Unknown terrestrial forces?
Covert military operations? As with everything, your answers depended on
your proclivities and stations in life. At the very least, they were
beautiful and 'artistic' and SEEMED to be some form of cosmograms, in the
same league with mandalas, Mayan city constructions, Egyptian
mega-constructions, archaic native American pictographs and other nativistic
schematics which seemed to link an astronomical world above with the
terrestrial world below . and to imbue those diagrams with a purported
spiritual power.

All these types of 'ground-based' diagrams also have in common implicit
psychological connections with the land even to the point of creating those
connections ex nihilio. The term 'psychogeography' was coined some years
ago to account for the feeling that the 'beach under the pavement' somehow makes
itself felt in ideas, feelings, and 'spirits'.

The visual arts show at eyedrum art and music gallery will explore these
connections and forms: What are these forms? Do they have effects and
affects or is 'aesthetic' sufficient? Can they be created anew? Does
technology facilitate these 'cosmic figures' and give them new voice or
does it kill them off in paving them over and leave us with a dead schematic ...
which nevertheless still tries to speak?