Body Life

What do you know about being addicted to heroin? What's living in your body feel like?
Do you suppose everyone experiences physical sensation the same way? What are we doing when we look at things? How visceral is sight?

Maybe the reason a lot of people go into the subject of spirituality when they write about Jack's paintings (finally) is because he dwells in the physical experience of inhabiting his body. It is a corporeal point of view. He's a physical painter and the activity is not a cerebral activity. It might as well be grooming or sport or sex. There's an involvement of body, muscle, stamina, and making the materials of paint, wood and scrapers as a kind of rumination on the passing of time.

Film can show the movement of the process.

I'm missing a body life. The best thing that could happen would be that this computer would die.

Indirect rebound

I was thinking about peering down a microscope or a well or a sewer or into a woodpecker's hole or out from my pupils. There's only ever one thing there. Why would a person choose to make a painting as a way of grappling with the question of what is a thing?

I have some small paintings of Jack's to look at. They're like moonrocks. You know if you were holding a moonrock you'd feel as if the properties of the moon were summed up in that fragment. So what are the properties of Jack's paintings?

There are some grumpy academics in my head who want to point out that it's very "boujie" of me to choose paintings as a point of focus. They are uncomfortable with their dad's fortune. He strung them a destiny hammock and they try to stand in it. It makes them wobble uncontrollably.

I defend myself by telling them it's a love story - you can't argue with a love story. Someone's feeling's might get hurt. But it's not that kind of love story. By love I just mean simultaneous event. All at once. We enjoy being consumed in the combustion together. Someone said space and time were only invented so that everyting bad didn't happen at once.

Paintings are a kind of combustion because they're visible. Visibility is a kind of fire. Jack's paintings are the results of some kind of turmoil. Things burn more intensely and are more noticeable in this kind of turmoil. Do Jack's paintings run alongside the burning of a life, is that what makes them so self evident?

Cloud of unknowing

There's a murk that isn't an obstacle or trouble, where cloudiness is the object of the action. I'm thinking again about the way many artists discuss the preference to be in a state of not knowing. They want to facilitate the development of imagery but not from the realm of the idea - but rather from a set of conditions that will help present a state of mind or being that exists parallel with our thoughts, but would be described as irrational.

The author of the Cloud of Unknowing ( a devotional book from the late 14 th Century) talks about a cloud of forgetting where the experiences of life, reason, and religious activities - especially if they are religious activities - have to be left behind and not admitted in a devotional life, which is a state of unknowing. Loving yes, but knowing - not.

I think what artists are getting at is not devotional in the church sense but devotional in an existential sense. There's something about love that is valued higher than knowledge in art and the problem is that art is valued through the intellect.

Art criticism would be irrelevant to art practice because of this.

"The brain is the most over-rated organ, I think."
Woody Allen, Manhattan

False Economy

I live in my body. What is my proximity to a subject? That's all there is. Proximity is a decision. I can take a stance distant to lengthen the perception or realize there is no proximity. There isn't even proximity to a fiction. There is the duration of the body and it has momentum established by a wave of genes and circumstances.

Why would I build a structure with no door? I suppose to look at it and remain strange? How would I experience my structure other than from the inside?

Tonight I felt like the priest in the Exorcist - the young one who lost his faith. I need something in art to to prove its existence. I don't see what good it does for anyone except the practitioner. I don't think its purpose is to be enjoyed or even seen. Why so glum...What good does it do anyone to talk about art and concepts and principles? Is it staving off a reckoning? Art is a nice thing, like a candy bar, but it denies death.

And there's such an abundance of love at the same time. Enough to last endless lifetimes.

Prolonging

Art Spiegelman's comic books have been my favorite objects, favorite art for about 25 years. One of the reasons is perhaps because his books are in my possession. I can actually own his artwork because his format is affordable. I like to be able to see his books close by on a table or prominently standing with other favorite books. I guess the next descriptive term I could use would be to say they act as shrines. But I don't want to allude to that. Culture may reaffirm faith but I'm trying to work things in the other direction. How does faith affirm culture? I mean, I live in culture and among expectations and manners. Faith is at odds with culture because it seems like hierarchy from culture to faith makes it so that culture is a clunky, malfunctioning, pitiful imposter that copes with the matter of living and faith is an ineffable elegance beyond thought. But I need faith to support the matter of living. Imagination and humor make faith. So what I'm saying is my Art Spiegelman books, Francoise Mouly designs, go one better than shrines. I was given Breakdowns as a xmas gift last year. The image on the cover is a slapstick pratfalling character going ass over tea kettle through the air - and the air is a loop de loop swoop doodle that appears over and over in the pages of this book. It's a quintessential doodle, a symbol of winding up, a triple lutz, a kundalini coil, a minimalist tornado, a 3 continuing into a 9, a primal gesture. I love to rub my hand over the hard cover and feel the glossy ink against the flat vintage-alluding matte of the cardboard. The character reminds me of Penfield's humunculous - the prominence of the bulging eyes, the mouth and the large hands close together - the prominence of how our senses grapple with the world. Spiegelman's introduction to Breakdowns is a work in itself, and it closes with notes from Victor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique" from 1917. I'll pull one salient bubble: "The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known...because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged."

click on image to enlargec

The Musical

This is not a film - but I wonder if it moves and carries time. I wonder if we watch blogs rather than read them. Do they seem to stream across the screen and are they composed enough to seem like they are strung together in composed and uncomposed sequences as we scroll up and down and click on links.

Bodies are deteriorating. Thoughts corrode bodies. Love regenerates bodies. Paintings are reflections of bodies and read by bodies. Painters have a readership, like writers.

Do the dead compete for air time with the internet and the ipod? Or do they use it as a vehicle?

The medium of an art form is itself a kind of author. A painting cures after the painter is finished working with it. Films have their own direction aside from the will of the person cobbling it together. So do we have relationships only with the form things take? Do we only have relationships with what we make or are involved in creating? I mean how do we have relationships with people? Are there different emotional mediums that we form and dis-assemble that give us the impression of relating to one another?