And now, just in case you haven’t noticed, here’s the studio’s new official profile picture…
Do I look fat?
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Unlovable by The Smiths
I don’t have much in my life
But take it, it’s yours
Not only are the aural and visual dins almost deafening and blinding, and not only is the speed at which they’re conveyed approaching simultaneity, but the analysis, punditry and attendant bloviating are delivered just as fast… As a result, it’s extremely difficult for an artist today to take any sort of stand, except a stand against taking a stand, or a stand that mocks all stands, or a stand that blankets all stands.
Then…
What you want — OK, what I want — from serious art is distillation, an actualized sense of the tenor of the times being presented not in merely smaller replication or aleatory lists, but in concentrated form, in visual synecdoche. While I may not know that quality the minute I see it, I know it later, trudging home from the galleries, when a work of art I’ve viewed an hour or two before sneaks back into my consciousness, with a piercing summary of the zeitgeist that silences the accumulated cacophony of what I’ve seen.
I remember, back in college, reading the line, “I look for the form/ things want to come as”… and thinking to myself, yes, that’s exactly how it is for me. The irony is that philosophically, or metaphysically, or spiritually even, I don’t think I really agree with this approach at all. I mean, things are what they are. But if an invented thing doesn’t properly exist prior to one’s inventing it — well, maybe then you do have to look for the forms things want to come as.
“If it had been possible to build the tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.”
Kafka, fragment from the Blue Octavo Notebooks
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Suicide As A Sort Of Present by David Foster Wallace
“A state of consciousness other than pain — such as hunger or desire — will, if deprived of its object, begin to approach the neighborhood of pain, as in acute, unsatisfied hunger or prolonged, objectless longing; conversely, when such a state is given an object, it is itself experienced as a pleasurable and self-eliminating (or more precisely, a pleasurable because self-eliminating) physical occurrence. The interior states of physical hunger and psychological desire have nothing aversive, fearful, or unpleasant about them if the person experiencing them inhabits a world where food is bountiful and a companion is near.”
Elaine Scarry from The Body in Pain
Polyfarm #18, 2008
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A Minor Place by Bonnie “Prince” Billy
Singing from my little point
And aching in my every joint
I thank the world it will anoint me
If I show it how I hold it.
“The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.”
Donald Barthelme
I’m deep in a kind of hole right now, chasing something. Can’t sleep, can’t see people. This happens from time to time. I think it’s a good sign something cool is about to happen. These days, I can tell I’m in a hole when I check out my iTunes play counts and this guy starts to dominate:
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Our interest in the nature of the fast-changing web remains strong. If the internet is the human brain writ large, there is great potential for a vast and sweeping work of art — a life’s work — whose aim is to embody the shimmering network that tethers us to one another in such random and unknowable ways. How might we turn the internet in on itself? How might we direct consciousness toward consciousness? Could we make this all look really freaky, like nothing we’ve ever seen?
This could be bad, very bad.
You won’t find it by yourself
You’re gonna need some help
And you won’t fail with me around
Come on let’s go
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