April 16, 2013

and maybe you came here from somewhere else. me, i spent the better part of yesterday cleaning out my desk and files and creating elaborate systems of links. binders. labels. from 1999-2002, current, pending, that sort of thing. and it was satisfying, i cannot deny. its satisfying in the way that having all my mustard packets and napkins and oatmeal packages in the same drawer is. outrageously satisfying to say this goes here.

more satisfying are the emotions of watching it dissemble over the course of the next two, four, six months. the frustration and being unable to find things, the sadness at your inability to really stick with it, the thing you will get really into for a moment, the fond remembrances of the time devoted to classifying these things. the context of it all. 

i talked to a friend recently about the problem of systemic thinking, of solving all things. of purging the endless chain of how things are fucked up and we’re going to solve them all with one grand action. guru-shit. its impenetrable. i think we’re going for a small sequence of complicit actions, taken by you and me. not always easy, but not overwhelming. no more of that, please.

March 15, 2012

i’ve been meaning to have thoughts, the kinds found in a cortazar novel. those are mostly the thoughts i used have, bears dropping from pipes, watches chiseling my impending death deeper into stone. but i’ve been busy trying to be remarkable, to do remarkable things in a city of people whose reference for remarkable lay decidedly to the west of my own. west a state of mind, not a political continuum. recently, i implanted an idea for freedom. for the non-costing of opulence, which has of course its own dollar figure, but lets live in the gilded for a moment. 

if we live in the gilded, if we bring people to our gilded shores, do we invite embarrassment? yes! and how. but nothing could be better for an organization, for an art maker, than the experience of embarrassment. to do so is to build in a consciousness. the things which move around you that you are doing for, but not near or with - oh we must invite them to lash us up and down! they see us, we’ve built a palace, a wonderful palace where people want only the mildest consideration of other. if you invite people to look at your artistic wealth, you say ‘here i am, making my haven for wealth’ and you say ‘here is the other side. the side of financial wealth’ and ‘look at how i have married these things so artfully, my desire to make and the desire for commerce to spring up around it’.

caring about things outside of money is why people make art and work in soup kitchens. to ask the making of  soup and art to be fiscally sponsored is a part of the intractable economics of late capitalism. to have it be shared without cost to the public is the only truly meaningful thing we should be working for as makers. everything else, truly everything else has been said. artists know that the financial success of a work does not speak about its value to the artform, so why do they enter into contracts with people who rarefy its access?  

there are bears in the pipes, and objects continue to signify our slow burning contract with death. they aren’t going away but the more i trouble these things the more i believe in the absolute experience of sharing. of being inside and through a moment instead of participating in its destruction. high art isn’t made for everyone but we labor to make it so or all is lost. 

December 15, 2011

we’re only being asked to persevere under the brutal conditions of genius, of genius culture, which unfortunately i don’t even believe in. in the greek sense. how many square feet of ego can live art actually contain, amirite?   

you aren’t pol pot, but this is not the three bedroom apartment listed. no, no, there is room for you, you say. and two of your friends! (pre-performance YellowTail reception!) and while the location isn’t ever very desirable, it is close to the subway. stabilized. it is adjacent to the on-ramp that connects all things. 

sitters are far more nimble than given credit. when the man coughing distracts them, they wonder if that man is bored am i bored? why he would bother coming to participate at all why does this asshole with the cough continue to go to live performances? does he know something i don’t? what is this impossibly wide frame and who’s fucking gaze is this, anyway? in the shift of a room, the ongoing critique of what presents itself. 

December 8, 2011

first as reverie, then as tragedy, then as farce.

i was in the bath. i thought - oh, i hate theatre. that must be why i make it. my anger extends to tv and film, but i do not make those because i don’t hate myself that much. at the lenaia, we remembered our recent past, bore it out on stage, and drank ourselves into a stupor. remembering comes first. with distance, we recreate a long-ago sad. we cannot inhabit it but we happily wish for a day pass. if theatre was sediment at the bottom of the bottle, we desperately wish it to be an unbalanced sediment that could threaten to disrupt the entire vintage. a hallucinatory brew which places us right there, again, in the middle of history’s maw. a problem of phenomenology, the problem with kant. it is impossible to create presence in a history - but we try in tragedy to do so. we see the knife and the narrative in real time, but it isn’t us with knife. it is just knife. knife and bottle. bottle and lip. lip and story. myth is the lost referential. playing at it to grasp it in full is as improbable as a motherfucker with a hat.  

December 7, 2011

addressing the critic.

these things get solipsistic quickly, so i will attempt to rein it in.

1.Even (perhaps especially?) if you are not college educated, you have no reason to be talked down to by a critic, an institution, or an artist. this is different than being asked to consider something new. if you are a breathing person, you can most certainly feel the difference.  

2. Things which move in a (lets say metaphorical) vacuum are only doing so because of gravity. NASA says they are considered to be free falling. This should be a fucking mantra for people who make anything. 

November 1, 2011

being public is much different than being live, and is different still than glasnost. 

to make something inside the world, and not above it, you accept and embrace the micro. you understand this implicitly because you continue to make live but not public. public is the metier of the internet (at least the internet of late 2011), the documentation of live. so to question the efficacy of liveness you must question the means purpose of the radicalism inside it.

those whom liveness can affect- it is silly to think it can affect all - it must do so radically, and those must feel the burden of the idea, once formless but now at least inchoate. and for this, the cloud of vapor must be very big, indeed. 

online, there are social networks blinking and beeping and alerting us to events, amusements, births, deaths, memes, storms, reunions, and cats. our capacity to cry and chuckle and feel anger and immediacy by merely browsing the interiors of others lives is legitimately overwhelming, creating a manic, awesome waves throughout our increasingly sedentary days, weeks, and months. as we sit in front of screens and curate our intake and output through these media, we wonder what liveness does for us, what is radical enough about it, where is the us inside of it. 

October 30, 2011 • 31 notes

Scientists tend to operate through a logical process in the material world. In science it seems necessary that your facts be concrete, repeatable, and predictable, which means there has to be an existing reliable form of measure. And the only reliable forms of measure, as far as science is concerned, are pure abstractions, that is, abstract systems which can be overlaid onto the world of experience. Euclidean geometry or clocks or scales are pure abstractions. You can count on them to be the same every time. And, as long as you have that kind of measure, then what you’re getting can be held to be factual, as it were, in line with the original hypotheses and proved in performance.

… Reasoning appears to be more confused, more haphazard, partly because of the scale of what it tries to deal with. The logical, in a sense, seems more successful because it cuts the scale down. In fact, that’s what makes it logical: it takes a very concise cut in the world and simply defines or refines by deduction the properties of that cut, but it never deals with the overall complexities of the situation. It only applies within the confines within which it operates, so it seems much clearer.

The artist, however, as a reasoning being, deals with the overall complexity of which all the logical subsystems are merely segments, and (s)he deals with them through the intuitive side of human potential - and here the inconsistencies are as meaningful as consistencies.”

Robert Irwin
October 29, 2011
pure function, that is the inside. interiors which do not work publicly, for the beloved. the purest work. action unpaired with economy.
some thoughts on sentimentality. 
October 26, 2011
production still from my new, future, and previous productions. 

production still from my new, future, and previous productions. 

October 26, 2011

hour fourteen thousand six hundred and thirty seven of streamlining a process. it is difficult to simplify such complex motives. get in this seat. give money on top of this. come back please and feel like you are a part of something. you are a part of me. and my database. you are a part of the world i am changing one piece of rhetoric at a time. this sentence means thirteen things. sometimes it means two thousand, sometimes twenty-five. the beauty of language here, come to pay visit to your guilt. the new show is going to be great. so is the new initiative. yeah, i’m working shit out.