The characters are on set… We’ve got some rinky dink stack of cardboard dressed up as a Chalet and we’re shooting day for night. The problem with cinema is the problem of painting is the problem of fiction in genaral: IT’S ALL PHONY.
It’s a lie; a big non truth … albeit with the proviso that it tries to illuminate the truth… it is lying to get at the truth. Much of the avante garde practice I am interested in, is an attempt to tell the truth from start to finish… to avoid illusions and subterfuge (but often you end up avoiding the audience too which seems to like a good lie now and again), but we are more or less at the finish… the end of the line; the zed to the A; the omega to the alpaha; and so we start where the blog began two years ago:
“Silence,” Yells the assistant to the director. “Quiet Everyone… this is a Take”
The Characters are behind us: Alexandre and Sylvie (or was it Pat and Katherine, or just he and she?) and M. Tristan waiting in the wings.
“Speed!”
The Ghost walks before the lens like Disney on the “Wonderful World of…” and speaks:
“Ladies and Gentlemen I give you: OMegg!”
Not much of an introduction, to be sure, but tonight is all hollow’s eve and hollow things have a way of bobbing to the surface, like the ghost-white whale rising up from the lower depths to breach and blow and sing and sink again in the dark.
The naked footfalls of the young prince patter down the long echo hall of the asylum. The king is dead. Long live the king. What’s that in his hand? A skull, or an old book? He takes the throne in the cemetary or The Library where A brings us inevitably in a line to Z: Akesegawa to Zaj like a royal line drawn in chalk on green grass with shadows in late light. I mean to say: I’m coming to the end of the Netherlands Fluxus Codex. There’s still a couple of dozen pages of notes on which to draw any and all conclusions…. meanwhile: The “illuminata eye” always seemed to me connected to perspective drafting and I suppose plum lines in Masonry (and thus it’s adoption by the Free Masons). I base this only on images and not words… Which is to say That I see it that way, but I’ve never read about it, or heard it described that way… so it was odd to find this Library Project start by blairdashpb, posted while I was drawing on an image from L’Avventura. I think the scene was shot in VanGogh’s asylum or at least alludes to it. Read the rest of this entry »
They went over the bridges - all three or was it four and the once back over by the cable ferry, which used the Current of the Rhine like a sail uses the wind to cross that Alpine grey/blue water. They walked in the old town untill they found a beer hall that served sausages and a local made Uli beer.
She said, sipping the beer, “I didn’t know you were such a druggy?”
“Not really. I just read a book about it last night… on line,” he said. “I finally got the internet working.”
“Oh, it figures,” she said. “I was beginning to think you held a long dark secret, but …Still interesting. You’d never think this dark little gothic town would be at the center if all that colorful sixties craziness… They brewed all that flower power right here?”
“Sure. In a little pharmacology plant by the Rhine… actaully, after 66, or so…. after Leary and the Beatles, and the controversy, they moved production to Prague… another midevil town…. maybe even more gothic, certainly better preserved.”
“But wasn’t that behind the Iron curtain?”
“Sure, but the Swiss were neutral… money is always bigger than ideology.”
“So in the end, the C.I.A. would buy acid from communists and it somehow found it’s way onto the streets of San Francisco?”
“Well they bought it from the Swiss who had communists manufactor it under license… That’s how I understand it anyway … It’s like LSD is the Greatest Story Never Told… a chemical weapon turns into a chemical relgion, or revolution… Must be what the KGB hoped for, but it backfired on them too… Ever heard of the Prague Spring? It’s weirdly coincidental with the beginning of LSD production in Prague… probably not an accident given the track record of that little bit of rotten bread.”
“I always loved Kundera,” She said. “You hardly ever hear about him now that communism is dead…”
“Dead, unless you’re Chinese.”
“Right….Unless you are Chinese, or Korean, or Cuban, or Vietnamese, it’s dead….”
“Death of Irony my ass.”
“Still rotten for business as far as Kundera is concerned.”
“But great for Vaclav Havel.”
“Yeah, but not for the playwriting and didn’t he end up withh cancer?”
One half of one collaboration from Paper and Me, from The Library Project and smashing together of three cards from Robert Watts.
“Death is not an Hallucination,” She said.
“I didn’t say it was,” He said. “I said death is psychodelic.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something about the brain chemistry of dying seems similar to the strange brain chemistry of the psychodelic experience, or maybe even psychotic episodes… the change of reality… Change of perceptions of time and space… The dramatic shift from Being to Nothingness.”
“Well you could just say that death is Philosophical.”
“No, we’re philiosophical about death, but death is not philosophical… it’s more experiential than that I think, because you don’t think it, you do it… you be it.”
“Oh the philosophy of Frank Sinatra,” She said. “Do Be Do Be Do.”
I was thinking more the Grateful Dead.”
“So you took acid once at a Dead show and now the word dead seems psychodelic…”
“It’s a good guess, but it’s not what I’m talking about.”
“I never took acid,” she said. “It scared me.”
“Death scares everyone.”
“Not, death,” she said. “Hippies.”
He laughed and it was nice to laugh standing in front of the stone.
“I sound pretentious.”
“No, you sound pretentious and sophomoric.”
“Now you sound pretentious.”
“Let’s go eat Saussages,” She said. Read the rest of this entry »
She fell asleep with moby dick spread across her face like the fins of white whale, but somehow, he had finally figured out how to get on the Internet and started searching Basel, the city of his father. She called it “the Fatherland” as a joke and because all Germans sounded like Nazis to her and it pissed him off to no end, which was fun to watch. You could predict his response:
“The Swiss were the only neutral country… you want to blame someone, blame the fucking French, they capitulated like drunk whores…. The Swiss actually saved some Jews….They couldn’t save all of them.”
“Stole their money.”
“What is money compared to life? These survivors don’t get it….This is numbered accounts….. the birth of it.. is.. what? thirty six?… They don’t know the number, they don’t get the money… No Tickey, no shirty. You’re Korean….That’s just business. They set up the numbered accounts to keep the fucking Nazis from freezing the assets… don’t you get it? The Nazis were the law. They legally stole the money… it was legal… the Swiss did the Jews a favor with the numbered accounts….then now they get blamed for it….Typical…”
And she would begin to goose step around the kitchen and Make a fake mustache with her finger and say like John Cleese in FawltyTowers, “Vhatever you do, don’t Mention ze Var! I zink I mentioned it vonce, but I got away wis it.”
And then he would realize that she was playing him for a laugh and so he would laugh, but that night he followed a link and somehow stumbled onto an online version of My Problem Child. He started reading after the cheese rich wine washed kirsh ending dinner and read it the whole way through the cold night as she quietly snored and the room glowed from the LCD screen. The text was like a door opening in a stone wall. She got up to piss the Gewurtzterminer at five in the morning as he was hitting the end and he said, “Let’s go to Basel. We’ve been planning to stop there.”
“No,” She said. “We were planning to go to Paris and the train….ALL trains stop in Basel.”
“Listen,” he said. ” The first train is at five. If we go now, we can see the sun rise on the rhine. My grandfather was a baker. I want to show you where he had the bakery…”
“What time is it?”
“Late for a baker I can tell you… they’re up at three. We can go to the cemetary.”
“How romantic,” she said.
” We’ll find my father’s stone in the cemetary.. the one he carved for my grandmother…. and I want to find the bridge.”
“What bridge?”
“The LSD bridge… where Hoffman rode the bicycle in 1938 before the war… the worlds first acid trip.”
“What?”
“He accidently turned a bread fungus into LSD… or isolated LSD… same thing that made the Salem Witches go crazy… Ergot.”
“My God,’ she said.
“No Ergot…. sounds more like OUR GOD… Ergot EEEEERRRRGHOOOOT!,” he started to spell it for her. “E…R…G…”
You’re tellng me some Swiss guy invented acid?”
“Well he was working for Sandoz… they owned the patent.”
“Somebody patented LSD…”
“Not somebody. Sandoz. Major Pharmeceutical…”
“I know who they are… They were one of my clients at the add agency… You’re telling me they invented acid?”
“Sold it mostly to the C.I.A… and I guess a few universities…like Harvard and some shrinks… or maybe the C.I.A. gave it to the universities…it depends who is telling the story… M.K. Ultra was the program….assholes thought it would make a good weapon and it turned into a peace movement on them… Talk about irony?”
“What a fucking weird country… I thought it was all just chocolate and cheese…”
“That and knives and guns and drugs… and watches..and money….(beat) Fucking weird country….Pretty though.”
“Sure…Pretty,” she said
And they got dressed and gathered a few books and a camera and went to catch the earliest train to Basel for the sun and the Rhein and the good Basel brot straight from some bakery not his family’s and probably corporate owned by now, but still better than anything in America.
Death is not information
Stone that I am
He came into my quiet
And I will be still for him
They spent the morning making breakfast with coffee and toasting the bread from last night with butter and jam and a yellow egg and he said, “I never get over how different the dairy tastes here…the milk is like some other drink altogether.”
“It’s like liquid cheese,” she said.
“I guess it is,” he said. “I suppose they feed the cows to make cheese for adults… not just for brats to dump over their Cocoa Puffs.”
He opened his book (Murakami short stories) and she opened hers (Moby Dick, which she’d somehow never read) and the morning melted into the afternoon with silence and the dog panting and coffee and words and then the light changed and the book changed and he couldn’t read anymore… each word would send him on a chain of thoughts about his own life and it would pull him out of the story untill he had to start the page over again and then another word would set the wheels spinning untill in frustration, he shut the book.
Two bound books from gundunasu u zeneize of Amsterdam, from The Library Project Read the rest of this entry »
In the morning he rose with a half erection and quoted prose to his sleepy wife from the bathroom: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita…” he said and finally could piss past the engourgement.
“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” the sleepy wife said from under the pillow.
“Nabakov never killed anyone,” he said. “It’s just a book.”
“It’s the next line,” she said. “Humbert is talking to the jurry….it’s a confession.”
“Mea Culpa.”
“You sure is,” she said. Read the rest of this entry »
In the first full day of The Library Project, there are 221 members of the flickr group and The first half finished book has been posted by tararossstudios. I thought the color would go well with this vlog covering the last few days in all their magic and loss. I altered it digitally to bring out the color contrast that spoke to me of Taoism. Not sure If I’ll be the one to finish this painting, but it sure will be fun to work on for whoever does. I also like that she painted the enitre surface of the cover, but in a half finished style (as that’s a different approach than most). This famous postcard from Topor was published in 1967, the year of my birth. I have always been facinated at the way a book reflects the essential structure of a human… the way it is split down the middle and held together by a spine annd how it opens up and takes you in and births a whole new reality for the reader. A sensual thing, a book: like sex and cigarettes and stylish shoes…
The dog has Le Cancer… which is whole nother story, but somehow seems related.
Habbit by Thinkmule
Sylvie said in English,”Would you look at this?”
He said in French, “Quoi?”
She said in English,”This…The fucking Hearald Tribune. I don’t care if we never go home.”
“Quoi?,” he said in French, not looking up from his book.
“They are raping the Constitution. These people are claiming to be Christians and they argue for torture…?! Jesus Fucking H. Christ! End of irony my ass. I mean it wouldn’t kill someone to make them eat shit… it’s wouldn’t cause actual death. I could make you drink piss…”
“That’s a little kinky for me, dear. Even if we are on vacation.”
“… I’m saying you can make a man drink your piss and it won’t kill him…”
“Japanese swear by it,” he said. “Softens the skin, you know.”
“…Well damn it, it sure seems like an abuse of power even if it won’t cause grievous injury… I can’t believe we’re in Geneva and back home they are raping the Geneva Convention. It’s too ugly…”
“Quoi?”
“Geneva.”
“We’re not in Geneva dear. This is Interlaken…”
“Well we’re on a lake in Switzerland, aren’t we?”
“Not Lake Geneva, though.”
“I mean you can fuck someone in the ass and it won’t kill them… is that acceptable?”
“You tell me?”
“Not even on Vacation,” she said.
“I thought not…. Greeks swore by it, you know?”
“Go find a Greek then (beat)… You know that you’ve become a the new Romans, when you start crucifying bearded men in the desert and making them into martyrs…it’s just so pathetic. Didn’t Bush ever even read the God damn Bible?”
“I don’t think he reads much, dear,” he said. “Certainly not The King James… difficult syntax… Shall I open the wine?”
“Yes,” she said. “Better open two.”
Book (detail) by Me-Jade Read the rest of this entry »
Here is another image from The Library posted by Battaolo a Brit living in Barcelona. You know how they say that a thousand monkeys sitting at a thousand typwriters will eventually write Ulysees and so I suppose that a thousand cats running on a thousand pianos will eventually run Bach, but Szentjoby begs the question, what if you had a thousand monkeys typing on a piano… What do you get then? I imagine you get something like The Library Project.
This is working as my favorite film transition: a slow dissolve between the Fluxus Codex and The Library Project. They, like Lolita are starting to talk at the tip of the toungue to pronounce tappingly on the teeth a T sound…like a typewriter (we are up to Yasunao Tone in the codex for aliteration fans)
So this is the finished (?) book collab with Driftwould. I created The Library group on Flicker today and we already have 150 members and a fairly chatty vocal bunch they are… It should be fun to watch what happens. A lot of discussion is already starting about what and how to paint on books… what about digital collabs.. and what is a book after all? In a stroke of luck (or fluke) Remyyy, one of my favorite Vimeons posted an unbelievably beautiful, French, literary pastoral… So in the name of international art games, I give you M. Remy and still winding down the Fluxus Codex: Tmas Szentjoby showing us how the cruciform creates the codex itself, or vice versa. Gutenberg might not have been a fluke afterall… or more likely a white whale in an alpine lake.
Above you see the beginnings of a new project I’m doing with all of my favorite Flickr artists. It’s called the Library Project and the first one in the card catalogue is Driftwould from Canada… Also Thinkmule has my half, but I don’t have his yet…
Let me explain: the idea is that one artist takes a hardcover from a book, tears out the pages and draws in one half (or half draws in both halves) of the binder/diptyque. In a nod to Ray Johnson, the two books are mailed (swapped) and Each of these will be finished by the other. The results are posted in a Flicker group called (what else) The Library. From this group, hopefully a show will be currated for New York, or Paris, or Basel, or Berlin, or wherever anyone wants to show this project. It should be deliciously portable. I’ll post these again when they are finished, guess I’ve got to get to the post office… oh and the top one is our first collab… but not a book cover…I call it Falling Peace Piece. I had a leftover peace sign from the crowd drawing below… fit like a fluke. Read the rest of this entry »
I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner with Danial Spoerri…or atleast his flux pages. I used them as place mats and the food as an art medium to draw on paper.
I first encountered the work of Danial Spoerri in Allan Stone’s kitchen in Purchase. Going to the Stones as a child, was a little like going to a culture carnival: fantastically exciting with a little touch of fear and trepidation. The place made Kane’s Xanadu seem uncluttered and bourgeois. The Stone Mansion was more humble on the outside for sure, but right at the porch you were greeted by enormous naked bodies and monster-like heads and the inside was piled with thirty foot fighting statues and faces and tits and dicks and abstract craziness…. shrunken heads and skullls and bones and The kitchen was all Spoerri’s table tops as I recall… Danniel would take a whole setting after some debauched philosophical (symposium) meal with chicken bones and bits of bread and spilled wine and bottles and glasses and plates (Julian! We all know where you got the idea… but hell you did your own rif) and cigarrtte butts put out in a steak and he had some magic technique of perserving all these scraps like in a wax works and the whole thing got cut off at the legs and hung up on the wall like a painting. It didn’t seem like art to me at that age, it seemed more like archeology and fortunately I loved anything archeological. I didn’t get DeKooning untill I was painting in oil in College (you don’t know how hard it is to paint like that, untill you try it… it’s bloody worse than trying to paint like Ingres)… Spoerri I got right off the bat. I was a fat kid, I liked to eat… what’s not to get about Spoerri.
I’ve been banging my head against Spoerri’s radical game of reality vs. art since that childhood Christmas party revelation. Really, reality is so interesting, how can art compete? People like Rauchenberg and Christo and even Jackson Pollock have all given me answers and more questions. One interesting note is that when I had my first show of paintings in Switzerland (Zurich in 1991) Spoerri’s sister came to the opening and stayed the whole night. I hadn’t heard boo in New York about Spoerri in years and so had imagined him dead, but she assured me, he was alive and working and that he would’ve enjoyed my paintings. Anyways, he’s one of my five heavies and the first fluxus artist I ever encountered.
My DInner Mit Daniel Read the rest of this entry »
The whole thing ended in dancing and Sophy went to dip and Tom dropped her on the floor with the cat and she started sneezing like a bell chiming right at midnight and we were all laughing untill it stopped at twenty one… and we had one more Guiness and Tom sat down on the couch and closed his eyes and whispered to me, “Could you get these people out of my apartment please… I want to sleep” and Sophy blew her nose and crawled up the loft ladder and lay down, but Tom stayed on the couch where Sylvie kissed him once goodnight on his smiling bald head and then I started hearding the hangers on like cats out the “Get Smart” labyrinth of doors and stairs and more doors and more stairs, till the unruly crowd hit the sidewalks and burst like a breaking beer bottle - going off in all directions. A few of us climbed up the hill past the Gothic arches of the great bridge towards the 2 and 3 and you could hear all of New York like the white noise buzz after the bells have all rung.
The other Tom was talking about Italy and the wine and the Italians in California and how they’d brought all that Viticulture with them and I went off on the German Barbarians and their Beer and how the fithy drunken hoard had brought down the whole fucking empire with all it’s arches and aquaducts and roads. ..so we went off on the merits of wine and beer and the other Tom walked by yelling, “UP THE IRISH!”
I was thinking about George Macuinas and all his Atlases and I thought it would be interesting to see one that traced the flow of wine and beer and hempf and I thought of all those Nazis fighting in the Spanish Civil War and painting Guernica with chordite and iron. Did they bring their own beer? I’ve never tried Spanish Cervesa…only some from their colonies in Mexico and Peru, etc. Did the Spanish have hashish with all those Muslims there? Some one should draw a map.
There is an excellent article that touches on fluxus by Dan Visel at ifbook: Finishging Things. Also, I ran into my old pal Scott Boldin (aka DJ. Skizum) during the weekend and he’s off on a facinating political tangent: My America Too. His sticker designs reminded me a little of George Macuinas.
here is an installation I put up during the Dumbo Open Studios. I am now going through a ton of tape and photos, etc. from a series of parties and openings and music and performaces, etc. A Lot to look through and throw out and try to shape….probably it will be called “All Tomorrow’s Parties”… I’m in a mode where I don’t want to look at art, make conversation, drink wine, nor listen to music. I am in short exhausted and going SHHH PEACEFUL, but if you want to read something check out a little article I wrote on if book. Read the rest of this entry »
this is from Paule Sharits… Dumbo open studios again today…
her say hello, she might be in Tangiers
She left here last early spring and is living there I hear…
Dumbo open studios this weekend. I may not be able to post, but come see me at 135 Plymouth Street, second floor… we’ll talk… look at art… maybe drink a beer. Read the rest of this entry »
I Passed a ball field on a run and a sort of poem came into my head. retraced my steps the next day with a diagram and video camera to try and remember (write) the words:
I found this piece of street art painted on a stripe of grey plastic tape and I pulled it off a black steel gate housing and put it on a cardboard and brought it home and restored the chipping enamel paint and I have been wanting someting by this guy since I saw his cloud sign on the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan bridge and he paints clouds and they sort of remind me of the clouds I used to throw into drawings in College after reading all 2,000 and whatever pages of The Tale of Genji which was illustrated with cloud filled pictures from some floating world , but his metal signs are glued onto the sign poles with industrial adhesive and therefore difficult and conspicuous to remove and I thought I might get arrested for vandalizing vandalization and this tape was a more or less moveable feast and how perfect to find it after yoko’s sky hole and this thing was about the size of a book mark any way, so it read like a bookmark in the street …. the heel is mine.
Subscribe