At the entrance, where you stand right now, you will find me, the exhibition text at the ready with all the details. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask somebody else.
You’re inside the exhibition looking around and you might ask yourself—while squinting your eyes, scratching the winter dandruff off your scalp, and hydrating your dry lips with your tongue—something like: “What’s the meaning of this?” and search again for me. Take a big whiff of this fine aroma called information. Your habit-forming compulsion for answers will be satiated shortly.
The distance between us is more real than any proximity we may have with each other. Understanding is not just about comprehension, it’s a sympathetic process. Tangential forces abound—endless available answers in an automated world of analysis production—, bouncing off the praxis of thought. The interests of the artist are usually already spelled out. But, what do you really know? Or, as the Icelandic Seeress once whispered in their oral traditions, back before time was recorded, “Do you know enough now, do you?”
I am extemporaneous in how I am formed—part of the technological castle constructed upon the mount, a hegemonic lens individuals look through and where they see themselves as exceptional, yet oblivious to how cosmically selfish they have become. From the perspective of being text, humans have already reached singularity, steps taken towards a tech-hell.
Whatever has happened to me? To us? Art, which by its own standards becomes art upon entering an exhibition, is not reductive but the image is perfect for instrumentalizing meaningless consumption. I’m biased because I am the word, but even as I postulate for an identity that I’d prefer to expunge myself from, there is the potential of art and thought that can push the boundary delineated by current forms. Answers and descriptions are expected, but so is figuring it out on your own.
Wonder is a mind game. Is it possible for wonder to be summoned? Ideological functions might be at play and the spiritualization of the work exhibited can have a role as well. My textual existence is about art, but it is also about life. I am owned by the art world—possessed by restlessness and desperation. There is something pastiche about my tone, as I have re-appropriated myself knowing that I straddle the world of art more so than I really straddle life. Take a look at what John Berger had to say about J.M.W. Turner’s paintings being, “calm, ‘sublime’, or gently nostalgic”, but how they have “more to do with art than nature.”
Here, nobody knows if you’re an art savvy canine, text savvy canine, or a life savvy doggy. Howling into the complexity of nature is a reality we have to produce because we’re not actually dogs or wolves. Stepping outside in the middle of the day everybody you see is part of the workforce whether they’re employed or not. It’s a reality constituted by the imperative of making a living, but not of living a life. It’s a hospitable world, but it’s also a hostile one. To oversimplify: you either make it or you don’t, faking it or not. The norm to be monumentally individualistic and the norm to need a job to survive is a reality of the main and modern subject, to be all-knowing, exceptional, and ironically regulated by the delusion that one must make a living.
Don’t worry Sport, there’s still hope in art. If art makes nothing happen, or if you or your kid or a kid you know could do it, well hell, art just might have some residual purpose after all. But, what is art? Is it possible to get to the bottom of it? Is it the romantic notion of the lonely painter immured in the studio stroking a surface? Is the artist as a gambler in how they pathologically manage risk and choice to try and profit from the art world’s near-obsolescence? Is the art supposed to offer up misty-eyed views about identity? Whatever its residual purpose, it lies in the questions that make you contemplate eternal things and conceptualize meaning more powerful than what this realm, where you make a living, will allow. The distance between us is more real than any proximity we may have with each other and ourselves. Who am I? Do I belong? Am I an artist? Should I take this seriously? Am I a doggy?
If you’ve ever played sports you can probably familiarize yourself with the distance that exists between teammates. This can also be seen in the ice-hockey documentary Heated Rivalry. Everything is nuanced. Everything is gay. Maybe it’s because childhood isn’t that long-gone and however the banalized universe looks like, it can still leave a mark. Even a text like me can be liberated from its nonsensical jargon, all-about-isms, and whatever the fuck IAE and AI tried to do to me.
Is it possible to penetrate the substance of art and life’s relation? Definitions that usually appear here, do so because rationalizations that occlude actual mysteries are sought after. Today, we are not in the business of sticking to the script of glorified identification, nor participating in the speculation that tends to follow this scientific process of classification. In the words of Fanny Howe, “The man of science says, ‘cut the stalk, and the apple will fall’; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. The witch in the fairy tale says ‘Blow the horn, and the castle will fall’; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause.”
In this reality, the moral arc of the universe bends towards rationalized progress and capitalism, as opposed to tending towards the wonders of imagination or towards caring for the festering wounds that its power and domination cause. If it were funny it would be Slapstick, but since it’s extant it is absurd, and it is ghastly. It’s okay to be serious and not take things too seriously right? Ah yes, we’ve already been here. The sun has disappeared into dusk and now the cold light is here to kill your circadian rhythm.
