Highlights from Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon edited by Barbara Cassin

Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon

Preface by Emily Apter

Philosophy in Translation

The book was the brainchild of its French editor, Barbara Cassin, herself a specialist of classical philoso- phy. In 1998, in the introduction to her translation of Parmenides’s poem On Nature, Cassin had already as- cribed the “untranslatable” to the interminability of translating: the idea that one can never have done with translation. In her writings on the pre-Socratics and the Sophists, she tethered the untranslatable to the instability of meaning and sense-making, the perfor- mative dimension of sophistic effects, and the condition of temporality in translation. Translation’s “time,” in Cassin’s usage, was associated with the principle of infinite regress and the vertiginous apprehension of infinitude. (vii)

What made it unique was its attempt to rewrite the history of philosophy through the lens of the “untranslatable,” defined loosely as a term that is left untranslated as it is transferred from language to language (as in the examples of polis, Be- griff, praxis, Aufheben, mimesis, “feeling,” lieu commun, logos, “matter of fact”), or that is typically subject to mistranslation and retranslation.(vii)

The work’s international reception was then enlarged by its translations (some still under way) (vii)

to translate is an act of rewriting, and, in this particular instance, of assisting words in their be- coming philosophical. (viii)

“Theory” is an imprecise catchall for a welter of postwar movements in the human sciences—existentialism, structural anthropology, sociolinguistics, semiotics, history of mentalités, post-Freudian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, post- structuralism, critical theory, identity politics, post- colonialism, biopolitics, nonphilosophy, speculative materialism—that has no equivalent in European languages. What is often referred to as “theory” in an Anglophone context would simply be called“philosophy” in Europe. The Dictionary of Untranslatables acknowledges this divergence between “theory” and “philosophy” not at the expense of how the editors of the French edition defined philosophy (which, it must be said, was already noncanonical in the choice of terms deemed philosophical), but as a condition of the work’s reception by Anglophone readers accustomed to an eclectic “theory” bibliography that not infrequently places G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Walter Ben- jamin, Theodore Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, Hélène Cixous, Kojin Karatani, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Slavoj Žižek in the same rubric with Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Donna Har- away, Henry Louis Gates, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Friedrich Kittler, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, and Paul Gilroy.(viii)

“dictionary,” designating an aspiration to impossible completeness, was meant to stand alongside “vocabulary” as an ironic complement. (viii)

Philosophical importance, in this case, is accorded to how a term “is” in its native tongue, and how it “is” or “is not” when relocated or translated in another language. Idiomatic and demotic nuance are fully recognized as constitutive of philosophy, prompting a shift from concept-driven philosophical analysis to a new kind of process philosophy, what Cassin calls “philosophizing in languages.” (ix)

Though it is not set up as a concept-history, the Dictionary lends itself to pedagogical approaches that explicate how concepts come into existence in, through, and across languages. (ix)

What is needed, to get a comparative sense of things, is not a firmer or clearer translation of difficult words, but a feeling for how relatively simple words chase each other around in context. (x)

In this picture, what is lost in translation is often the best that can be found, as readers find their way to a Denkraum—a space of thinking, inventing, and translating, in which words no longer have a distinct definition proper to any one language.

This said, it is by no means self-evident what “untranslatability” means. This is how Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other approaches the term (in Patrick Mensah’s translation):

Not that I am cultivating the untranslatable. Nothing is untranslatable, however little time is given to the expenditure or expansion of a com- petent discourse that measures itself against the power of the original. But the “untranslatable” remains—should remain, as my law tells me the poetic economy of the idiom, the one that is important to me, for I would die even more quickly without it, and which is important to me, myself to myself, where a given formal “quantity” always fails to restore the singular event of the original, that is to let it be forgotten once recorded, to carry away its number, the prosodic shadow of its quantum. . . . In a sense, nothing is untranslatable; but in another sense, everything is untranslatable; translation is another name for the impossible. In another sense of the word “translation,” of course, and from one sense to the other—it is easy for me always to hold firm between these two hyperboles which are fundamentally the same, and always translate each other.2 (x-xi)

2 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 56–67.

Each language, she maintained, “contains within itself the rules of its own invention and transgression.”4 The book emphasizes the singular philosophical nuances of discrete languages not because Cassin was committed to resurrecting fixtures of “ontological nationalism” (whereby languages are erected as stand-ins for national subjects), but rather because she wanted to emphasize the mobile outlines of languages assuming a national silhouette or subsiding into diffuse, polyglot worlds.(xiii)

Obscurity itself results (or may result) from the need of French philosophers to be French writers. Unlike German, whose truth is attained through verbal and syntactic unraveling, French syntax is notionally transparent to truth. Close to being an Adamic language in Badiou’s ascription, it lends itself to logical formalism, axioms, maxims, and universal principles. Above all, for Badiou, the French language is conducive to the politicization of expression, unseating predicates through the play of substitutions and the art of the imperious question (what Lacan called the “denunciatory enunciation”)(xiii)

Even the term “translation,” which signifies lan- guage in a state of non-belonging, turns out to be nationally marked. The entry TO TRANSLATE notes that dolmetschen, an anachronistic verb whose origins go back to Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into German, renders “to translate” as, literally, “to render as German” or “to Germanize.” Schleiermacher was instrumental in replacing dolmetschen with übersetzung on the grounds that dolmetschen referred to the functional work of the interpreter, whereas übersetzung referred to the loftier challenge of rendering thought. From this perspective, übersetzung is the name of a dis- avowed Germanocentrism that clings to the history of the word “translation.”(xiii-xiv)

We became increasingly drawn to the paradoxical premise of the book, namely, that of the untranslatable as the interminably (not) translated. One of the risks of the casual use of “untranslatable” is the suggestion of an always absent perfect equivalence. Nothing is exactly the same in one language as in another, so the failure of translation is always necessary and absolute. Apart from its neglect of the fact that some pretty good equivalencies are available, this proposition rests on a mystification, on a dream of perfection we cannot even want, let alone have. If there were a perfect equivalence from language to language, the result would not be translation; it would be a replica. And if such replicas were possible on a regular basis, there would not be any languages, just one vast, blurred international jargon, a sort of late cancellation of the story of Babel. The untranslatable as a construct makes a place for the private anguish that we as translators experience when confronted with material that we don’t want to translate or see translated. A certain density or richness or color or tone in the source language seems so completely to defy rendering into another language that we would just as soon not try: the poverty of the result is too distressing, makes us miss the first language as we miss a friend or a child. This may be true at times, but we can make a virtue out of seeing differences, and the constant recourse to the metaphor of loss in translation is finally too easy. We can, in any case, be helped to see what we are missing, and that is what much of this book is about. (xiv)

The places where languages touch reveal the limits of discrete national languages and traditions. We obtain glimpses of languages in paradoxically shared zones of non-national belonging, at the edge of mutual unintelligibility. Such zones encompass opacities at the edges of the spoken and written, a bilingualism that owns up to the condition of unownable, unclaimable language property, and perverse grammatology. Untranslatables signify not because they are essentialist predicates of nation or ethnos with no ready equivalent in another language, but because they mark singularities of expression that contour a worldscape according to mistranslation, neologism, and semantic dissonance. (xv)

Introduction

Émile Benveniste’s pluralist and comparatist Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions has been our model. In order to find the meaning of a word in one language, this book explores the networks to which the word belongs and seeks to understand how a network functions in one language by relating it to the networks of other languages. (xvii)

To speak of untranslatables in no way implies that the terms in question, or the expressions, the syntactical or grammatical turns, are not and cannot be translated: the untranslatable is rather what one keeps on (not) translating. But this indicates that their translation, into one language or another, creates a problem, to the extent of sometimes generating a neologism or imposing a new meaning on an old word. It is a sign of the way in which, from one language to another, neither the words nor the conceptual networks can simply be superimposed. (xvii)

Notes to writing an intro and a conclusion

Intro - Beginnings Conclusion - (Never)Endings

Beginnings- conception per Fuchs (see post on Fuchs’ essay on Polke TBP), Identity, first and second versus third person, what we know at conception versus what we know at death, the pathway of development- human, the artist, the artwork, this writing. What can and cannot be said (Wittgenstein)

(Never)Endings- death and conception both limits of knowledge, there is little that can be said beyond what we can observe, much lies beyond what we can see (Fuchs), what I have said here, what Mel has said, what others have said. What remains - and why this Ending is not ‘the End’ - is that which remains for others to say, along with all that cannot be said (Wittgenstein).

Highlights from Camera Lucida

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Hill and Wang, 2010.

Foreword by Geoff Dyer

Barthes likes “to write beginnings” and multiplied this pleasure by writing books of fragments, of repeated beginnings; he also liked prebeginnings: “introductions, sketches,” ideas for projected books, books he planned one day to write.(x)

Camera Lucida is … a more elaborately formulated series of hypotheses - not a definitive account - … Barthes’s preferred way of presenting his hypotheses was in the form of linked aphorisms, and, as Susan Sontag noted, “it is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding.” The paradox, then, is that this man who liked first words (and adored paradoxes) offered his provisional findings as if they were the last word. Needless to say, this last word was always susceptible to further elaboration and refinement, to further beginnings. This is how Barthes’s prose acquires its signature style of compression and flow, a summing-up that is also a perpetual setting-forth.(x)

He was one of those writers whose life’s work was destined, by increments, to remain unfinished.(x)

Subsumed in a general mass of cultural theory, the works in which Barthes most clearly revealed himself as a writer were the least valued. … on his semiotics, on works such as Image-Music-Text and Mythologies, while dismissing the later, more personal works as “marginal, lacking the satisfying stamp of authority.”

All of which was in sharp contrast to Sontag’s approving observation of the way that “his voice became more and more personal,” that he derived pleasure from the “dismantling of his own authority,” and that the marginal would come to seem absolutely central to Barthes’s achievement. … Writing in the immediate aftermath of Barthes’s death, Italo Calvino offered a similarly nuanced view of two Bartheses: “the one who subordinated everything to the rigor of a method, and the one whose only sure criterion was pleasure (the pleasure of the intelligence and the intelligence of pleasure). The truth is that these two Barthes are really one.”(xii-xiii)

By the time of Camera Lucida, Barthes’s ornate sentences, with all their colons and semicolons, italics, hyphens, ellipses, and parentheses, came quite naturally to him. Where one might remember particular scenes or sentences in a novel, with Barthes the focus narrows to favorite deployments or permutations of punctuation.(xiv)

In Roland Barthes, Barthes had warned readers that “it must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel,” and in his last years he talked about the possibility of writing a novel.(xv)

It is ironic, then, that one of the most memorable tributes to Barthes comes in the form of an image that would have been inconceivable without the benefits of digital technology. In 2004 Idris Khan made a photograph entitled “Every Page . . . from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida,” in which he combined the pages in a single image so that Barthes’s text and the pictures reproduced in the book peer at the viewer through a dense fog of their own making. (The return of the read!) It is as if decaying and enduring memories of the book’s successive pleasures - first words and last - have been compacted into a ghostly blur of almost impenetrable purity.(xvii)

Part One

… (life consists of these little touches of solitude), … (3)

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.(4)

Show your photographs to someone - he will immediately show you his: …(5)

By nature, the Photograph (for convenience’s sake, let us accept this universal, which for the moment refers only to the tireless repetition of contingency) has something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe. It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, … (5)

In short, the referent adheres. And this singular adherence makes it very difficult to focus on Photography.(6)

… my desire to write on Photography, corresponded to a discomfort I had always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical; and at the heart of this critical language, between several discourses, … but that, by ultimate dissatisfaction with all of them, I was bearing witness to the only sure thing that was in me (however naive it might be): a desperate resistance to any reductive system.(8)

The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glances through collections of photographs, … And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.(9)

For The Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double.(12)

The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares). In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.(13-14)

(The “private life” is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object. It is my political right to be a subject which I must protect.)(15)

...Death is the eidos of that Photograph.(15)

...cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, … in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.(15)

The disorder which from the very first I had observed in Photography … I was to rediscover in the photographs of the Spectator whom I was and whom I now wanted to investigate.(16)

...the best word to designate (temporarily) the attraction certain photographs exerted upon me was the advenience or even adventure. This picture advenes, that one doesn’t.

The principle of adventure allows me to make Photography exist.(19)

In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it. So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation. … this is what creates every adventure.(20)

Next, my phenomenology agreed to compromise with a power, affect; affect was what I didn’t want to reduce; being irreducible, it was thereby what I wanted, what I ought to reduce the Photograph to; but could I retain an affective intentionality, a view of the object which was immediately steeped in desire, repulsion, nostalgia, euphoria? … As Spectator I was interested in Photography only for “sentimental” reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think.(20-21)

Did this photograph please me? Interest me? Intrigue me? Not even. Simply, it existed (for me). I understood at once that its existence (its “adventure”) derived from the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in that they did not belong in the same world … a structural rule (conforming to my own observation) … this kind of duality which I had just become aware of. (23)

The first, obviously, … the extension of a field, … a consequence of my knowledge, my culture … it always refers to a classical body of information …(25-26)

...it is studium … application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity. It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, …(26)

The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pieces me.(26)

This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice.(27)

To recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions, to enter into harmony with them, to approve or disapprove of them, but always to understand them, to argue them within myself, for culture (from which the studium derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and consumers. The studium is a kind of education (knowledge and civility, “politeness”) which allows me to discover the Operator, to experience the intentions which establish and animate his practices, but to experience them “in reverse”, according to my will as a Spectator. … And I, the Spectator, I recognize them with more or less pleasure: I invest them with my studium (which is never my delight or my pain).(27-28)

Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater. … it is by way of a singular intermediary (and perhaps I am the only one who sees it): by way of Death.(31)

I imagine … the essential gesture of the Operator is to surprise something or someone (through the little hole of the camera), and that this gesture is therefore perfect when it is performed unbeknownst to the subject being photographed. … for the photographic “shock” (quite different from the punctum) consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it. Hence a whole gamut of “surprises” (as they are for me, the Spectator; but for the Photographer, these are many “performances”).(32)

Very often the Punctum is a “detail,” i.e., a partial object.(43)

However lightening-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic.(45)

Certain details may “prick” me.(47)

Nothing surprising, then, if sometimes, despite its clarity, the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it. I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum.(53)

Ultimately -or at the limit- in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.(53)

The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah: … to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.(55)

Last thing about the punctum: whether or not it is triggered, itis an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.(55)

Part Two

… (but do we see, in dreams, or do we know?) …(66)

Photography, moreover, began, historically, as an art of the Person: of identity, of civil status, of what we might call, in all senses of the term, the body’s formality.(79)

No writing can give me this certainty. It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself. … language is, by nature, fictional; the attempt to render language unfictional requires an enormous apparatus of measurements: we convoke logic, or, lacking that, sworn oath; but the Photograph is indifferent to all intermediaries: it does not invent; it is authentication itself; the (rare) artifices it permits are not probative; they are, on the contrary, trick pictures: the photograph is laborious only when it fakes. It is a prophecy in reverse: … Photography never lies: or rather, it can lie as to the meaning of the thing, being by nature tendentious, never as to its existence. Impotent with regard to general ideas (to fiction), its force is nonetheless superior to everything the human mind can r can have conceived to assure us of reality - but also this reality is never anything but a contingency (“so much, no more”).(85-87)

Photography’s noeme is precisely that-has-been, and because I live in the illusion that it suffices to clean the surface of the image in order to accede to what is behind: to scrutinize means to turn the photograph over, to enter into the paper’s depth, to reach its other side (what is hidden is for us Westerners more “true” than what is visible). Alas, however hard I look, I discover nothing: if I enlarge, I see nothing but the grain of the paper: I undo the image for the sake of its substance; and if I do not enlarge, if I content myself with scrutinizing, I obtain this sole knowledge, long since possessed at first glance: that this indeed has been: the turn of the screw had produced nothing.(99-100)

A proof a contrario: finding myself an uncertain, amythic subject, how could I find myself “like”? All I look like is other photographs of myself, and this to infinity: no one is ever anything but the copy of a copy, real or mental (at most, I can say that in certain photographs I endure myself, or not, depending on whether or not I find myself in accord with the image of myself I want to give).(102)

Since Photography (this is its noeme) authenticates the existence of a certain being, I want to discover that being in the photograph completely, … beyond simple resemblance, … This something is what I call the air (the expression, the look).(107)

All the photographs of my mother which I was looking through were a little like so many masks; at the last, suddenly the mask vanished: there remained a soul, ageless but not timeless, since this air was the person I used to see, … (109-110)

Thus the air is the luminous shadow which accompanies the body, … (110)

… I then had the certainty that he was looking at me without however being sure that he was seeing me: an inconceivable distortion: how can we look without seeing? One might say that the Photograph separates attention from perception, and yields up only the former, even if it is impossible without the latter; this is that aberrant thing, noesis without noeme, an action of though without thought, an aim without a target. And yet it is this scandalous movement which produces the rarest quality of an air. That is the paradox: how can one have an intelligent air without thinking about anything intelligent, just by looking into this piece of black plastic?(111-113)

… - the Look is always potentially crazy: it is at once the effect of truth and the effect of madness. … by leading me to believe (it is true, one time out of how many) that I have found what Calvino calls “the true total photograph,” it accomplishes the unheard-of identification of reality (“that-has-been”) with truth (“there-she-is!”); it becomes at once evidential and exclamative; it bears the effigy to that crazy point where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being. It then approaches, to all intents, madness; it joins what Kristeva calls “la vérité folle.”(113)

Fragment: Duty of Care

As a parent the legal term ‘duty of care’ seems to be not just logical but obviously so. Similar to the oath of medical professionals to ‘first, due no harm’ the obligation of ‘duty of care’ is a reminder to check our own egos and the need for power and control attached to them at the door when entering a relationship.

For a loving and caring parent the concept that one is obligated to protect another - one’s own child, in this case - with whom one has a relationship from any forseeable harm is generally not taught but considerd to naturally come with the territory of parenthood. Unfortunately, not every parent is loving and caring, not every parent inately comprehends the expansivness of the territory covered by the term ‘duty of care’. It turns out parenthood is no guarantee that one will remember to check one’s ego at the door anymore than not being a parent means that one will strut through life cloaked in one’s fabulous, powerful, controlling ego, deflecting all others as one passes them by.

Duty of care is just the legal term to define a naturally occuring emotion - empathy. With healthy function, empathy, our ability to understand and share the feelings of another enables each and everyone of us to adhere to a standard of resaonable care while performing any acts that could cause foreseeable harm to others; to avoid abusing others even if we’ve forgotten to check our ego at the door because we can imagine what it would feel like if someone suddenly ripped the cloak from our shoulders and we were left standing naked, powerless, and subjecated to forces beyond our control.

Empathy allows us to place ourselves in the position of the abused; duty of care incites us to act ways to prevent abuse. As a society we know by a quick observation of the impact of all forms of abuse on our world and the various institutions we are continually in the process of establishing in order to combat these abuses, all of which are a direct result of a shirking of ‘duty of care’ by parents and all members of society in witness to such (in)actions. However, each new organization, policy, law, or committee formed to address instances of abuse appears to not lessen the instances of abuse continually revealed and reported by the world media. Maybe it is time to begin asking ourselves why is this so?

It is simple to say that ‘duty of care’ only exists between certain individuals (or individual and institution) in a relationship and that others slightly removed or outside of the relationship yet in someway a witness to it, or perhaps party to a related relationship, have no obligation to adhere to standards of reasonable care despite witnessing acts that could cause forseeable harm. But then such behavior would be analogous to turning ones head to the sky while crossing to the other side of the street to avoid the older person who has fallen and is moaning for help.

Why should I get involved? It’s not my (grand)parent or friend; besides I have someplace important I need to be!

Or, to paraphrase a story currently circulating about the current US President’s response to economic advisors upon being shown financial figures and market trends showing that by the early 2020s not just the US but the whole world will potentially be in a major economic crisis - alongside the environmental/climate crisis reported just days earlier - as a result of his administrations (in)actions.

Yet the policies and laws we are finding enacted often do not limit the obligation of ‘duty of care’ to those in direct relationship or impacted by the harm. In the schools of my state all employees are required by law to report any signs of abuse to the Department of Children, Youth and Families; failure to do so is punishable by law. One would think this, if not the natural empathy one might feel for the abused, might be incentive to report; however, cases frequently appear where a teacher, a counselor, a principal, an upper-level district administrator chose to not report to the state but look the other way. Why?

Not my circus. Not my monkey.

Fragment: Duchamp’s Last Day by Donald Shambroom

Can the lifetime collaboration of two artists be extended a few hours after one of them has died? - Donald Shambroom

Only if the collaboration was truly a collaborative process.

When I think of artistic collaborations, true collaborations in which the entire creative process is based in a collaborative relationship then I believe it is possible to extend the collaboration beyond the death of a party and not just for a few hours but as long as one party remains above ground.

For example, take the collaborative partnership of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, altered by Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009.

Considering the depth of the couple’s collaboration during the time both of them were on Earth, listening and taking closely to heart how they described their collaboration when they were both alive, it is inconceivable that Christo would be able to continue the work. The actual, physical form of their collaboration differs, nonetheless a collaborative form remains. This new form is derived from the same collaborative basis for the process of the work realized during their lifetimes. The eventuality that one day one would no longer be able to actively contribute was taken into account in their methodology. During their lifetime the artists spoke frequently of this aspect of the work, acted in recognition that there would come a time when one or the other would no longer be physically present to contribute to the work’s realization but there will remain work that could or needed to be completed in some way.[1]

The question Donald Shambroom is asking in this book, Duchamp’s Last Day, concerns another collaborative relationship between two artists, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. Although many writers, artists, historians and critics have described numerous works in which both artists had a hand as resulting from a collaboration between the two it is my opinion that doing so is not only a false assumption but a misleading premise for understanding or defining the work of either, particularly Duchamp.

This question appears at the very top of the back cover, in line with the title appearing on the front cover, of this recently published book in the Ekphrasis imprint of David Zwirner Books from the artist Donald Shambroom. A short explanation from the publisher in the back pages states ekphrasis, a word’s whose origins date to ancient Greece and is one of the oldest forms of writing ...

… photo taken by Man Ray of Marcel Duchamp as he lay dead on his bed within hours of his passing

TBC

[1] I had the luck to hear Christo and Jeanne-Claude speak of this at a lecture they gave in late October 1994 at the University of Karlsruhe [KIT] in honor of the 70th birthday of Fritz Haller. The couple had just received the approval to complete the wrapping of the Reichstag/Bundestag building in Berlin from the German government. The artist’s cited the public involvement and scale of their projects as the primary reason the work would need to continue to some extent beyond the death of one of them. The drawings and prints with which finance the larger works’ realization could no longer be produced if Christo was no longer to make them but they had accounted for this and the large scale works in progress would be able to be completed. Hearing them discuss collaboration in this way was formative to my own understanding of what differentiates collaboration from assisting the realization of an artwork in other ways and has led to my own narrow definition of what is a collaboration between artists.

Controlled Burn by MvdW

Controlled burning is overseen

by fire control authorities for

regulations and permits.

There is only one

(and always has been)

controlling, regulating, permitting authority.

Fires, both naturally caused and

prescribed, were once part of

natural landscapes.

Here I have no authority

(and never have)

despite what the ads might have said.

Fire is a natural part of forest ecology

and controlled fire can be

a tool for foresters.

To stoke a fire already lit

(and burning out of control)

is unnecessary, causing the burn in directions damaging

(and definitely deadly)

beyond the intended area.

****

There are two basic causes of wildfires;

one is natural and the

other people.

It’s the people you meet that matter the most

(and make the idea succeed and survive.)

Pre-agricultural societies used fire

to regulate both plant

and animal life.

Perhaps it’s a stretch to call them innocent

(and separate like grain from the chaff.)

Tossing a few onto a pile

(and leave the rest alongside the intended.)

The goal should be to keep the lot

(and burn back the brush to save the idea.)

Back burning, starting small fires along

a man-made or natural firebreak

in front of a main fire front.

Draw a black line around all innocence

(and don’t cut off your nose again.)

Contain the fire

(and in due course it’ll burn itself out.)

Said with anxious nonchalance, your driptorch in hand

(and both eyes on the houses you’d built yourself).

Many scientists disagree to such

a simplistic approach, each

has its own merit.

Assessing each one

(and all three of your houses)

I sat aside my match

(and questioned my own merit.)

****

It was you who told me

(and I’ll never forget)

think before making a grand gesture

(and make it count!)

Suppressing fires leads to ground fuel

build-up, dense under-growth the

risk of catastrophic wildfires.

I hold my fire

(and smolder)

with my eyes on my houses

(and yours.)

Stimulating germination of desirable

trees, revealing mineral layers

increasing seedling vitality.

Am I the serotinous sort

(and require this heat for eventual growth?)

Seeing burning as one component

shifting cultivation, preparing

the field for planting.

Is this part of a unique process

(and not just a reactionary slash and burn?)

Clearing the land of any

existing residue, killing

weeds and seeds.

Am I a weed or seed

(and is it your duty to care for the land?)

****

Depending on the context and goals of a

prescribed fire additional planning may

be necessary to prevent excess loss.

I draw another line

(and wait.)

Inkjet on 8 1/2 inches x 11 inches/21.6 cm x 27.9 cm vellum (25 % rag) with handwriting in blue ink.

A quote on identity

“Our identity is what grounds us and gives our lives meaning,” said David Brodzinsky, emeritus professor of developmental and clinical psychology at Rutgers University, whose work focuses on identity and adoption. “That identity can be a motivating force or a debilitating one, depending on how we define ourselves and internalize the feedback we get from others. We spend our lives searching for self, though we each do that in different ways and at different times. It’s all about the desire to fill in empty spaces, to find connection, to know more about yourself.”

article saved in my NYTimes account

Fragment from: ‘WHITEOUT: THE NOT-INFLUENCE NEWMAN EFFECT’ by Richard Shiff. (Temkin et al. 2002, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Press, pp. 76-111) and a conversation thereabouts

From: ‘WHITEOUT: THE NOT-INFLUENCE NEWMAN EFFECT’ by Richard Shiff. (Temkin et al. 2002, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Press, pp. 76-111)

The younger generation preferred to interpret Newman by phenomenological means. Rather than asking how the artist may have felt when he made the work, they asked how a visual and bodily encounter with the work made them feel. As Richard Serra (fig. 54) put it, “When you reflect upon a Newman, you recall your experience, you don’t recall the picture.”[95] Newman believed that the one feeling should entail the other. If the artist had arrived at a genuine emotion, so should a viewer; and one’s experience of a painting should involve oneself, the painting-object, and some sense of the artist as well. But communication from one sensitive soul to another was not necessarily the concern of those Newman “influenced” (that is, not-influenced), nor were the younger artists expressing an existential “self” as he was. With the advent of Pop art and other forms of “New Realism” during the early 1960s, Rosenberg observed that “the self of the artist [is no longer] engaged by the process of creation.”[96] in an interview in 1967 - refusing, as usual, to name names - Newman remarked that “a young painter” had advised him to stop talking about the self, presumably because the art world took no interest in it; to Newman’s detriment, the idea was dating him. Younger artists, Newman complained, wanted their works to be “anonymous” in character: “without the self … outside of man … an object, a thing. People talk about painting as if it didn’t belong to a person.”[97] In this respect, Newman’s prominent signatures made the act of his “self” and the participation of his “person” obvious (fig. 55) They also frustrated depersonalized formalist readings, appearing as a set of incongruous graphic marks, an element of horizontality in a pictorial order that seemed to proclaim verticality.[98] There was at least one consistency, however: if the scale of Newman’s work was “heroic,” his analogously all-to-evident signatures only added to that connotation. “Newman considered himself a kind of hero, in a way that now perhaps embarrasses a number of younger artists,” Kozloff commented shortly after the artist’s death.[99] However, it was not Newman’s existential self and signature that had spoken so convincingly to his 1960s admirers; it was the extremity of his phenomenological effect. To that, many within the new art world responded with a welcoming wonder. (Temkin et al. p.86)

___
[95] Richard Serra, interview by Nicholas Serota and David Sylvester, May 27, 1992 in Richard Serra: Weight and Measure 1992, ed. Nicholas Serota (London: Tate Gallery, 1992), p. 25. Newman himself remarked of his work that “at one instant one gets the whole painting, and the painting can be unforgettable and at the same time there’s nothing to really examine” (interview by Alan Solomon, 1966, preparatory to “Barnett Newman,” telecast July 12, 1966, unedited transcript, p. 27, Alan Solomon papers, AAA). If there’s “nothing to examine” then one’s attention turns from the object to its felt experience, as Serra suggests.

[96] Harold Rosenberg, “The Game of Illusion,” The New Yorker, vol. 38 (November 24, 1962), p. 167.

[97] Interview by Allene Talmey, 1967, audiotape, BNFA. An example might have been Robert Smithson, who, naming his opposition to Newman and certain others, insisted that “abstract art is no a self-projection, it is indifferent to the self”; see “The Pathetic Fallacy in Esthetics” (1966-67; unpublished during Smithson’s lifetime) in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 338.

[98] Newman may have provided a rationale for this effect when he referred to Ingres and Whistler as artists who could “stamp on a a symbol as if it were outside the picture. I try to do it when I sign my paintings” (“‘Through the Louvre with Barnett Newman,’ by Pierre Schneider” [1969; remarks recorded in 1968], SWI, p.298).

[99] Max Kozloff, interview by Claire Loeb for “Sour Apple Tree,” KPFK, Los Angeles, 1970, audiotape, BNFA, transcribed by Melissa Ho.

___

And fragment of related conversation ….

ME: This paragraph stood out for me when I was reading it not so much because I have a problem with his signature screaming out awkwardly from the otherwise sereneness but because of the relationship of the artist-object-spectator which Newman said less than 20 years before Wollheim but reversed the relationship to one where the viewer should be seeing the painting as the painter in order to make the object ‘painting as art’. The signature makes the viewer aware that what he is seeing does not originate with him but with that guy hanging around down there at the bottom of the painting. It’s that continued sense of ownership that drives Jim Dine to ‘correct’ paintings he supposedly finished and sold off years prior when he sees them hanging in an exhibition, maybe? And finally, if he’d signed it on the back … like we’ve been encouraged to do by those who told him he shouldn’t be signing his paintings on the front … then is the signature akin to one of those stamps/labels on the reverse sides of paintings which detail and document the authenticity of the work?

See, that roadway is an endless tangle, curving in and around itself!

RESPONSE: I understand the argument but for me it is entirely an aesthetic issue...the paintings are elegant and the signature is clumsy and awkward... …Newman's idea that he saw himself as some kind of hero...and that just because he 'felt' something as he made the work so a sensitive viewer should likewise feel something... … ...and guessing he would've been prescriptive too about what sensitivity meant?...

all that said, his paintings certainly stand as 'objects' and seem as radical now as then...

ME: I see your point and am in agreement but then I don’t sign the front of my work and for a time I only signed along the edge of the canvas where I’d stapled it neatly to the stretcher bars not wanting to mess up the pristine back!

Newman’s presumptions regards to his own sensitivity (self importance) and the viewers seem to go with the territory then as well as now. In a way it is what makes Wollheim’s thesis interesting (and counter to the previous generation) … and ironic given the painters he cited (Picasso … really?!); Wollheim gave too much credit to those guys, and, in my opinion, it doesn’t hold water based on the examples he gave but it is an interesting proposition to consider when creating/painting nonetheless. A matter of not just “how am I seeing/experiencing this?” but “how might someone else see/experience this?” and this leads to the “how does this experience relate to authenticity?” Maybe it is simply a matter of bringing a bit of empathy into the work? Does empathy make something more authentic? Is lack of empathy (or ability to be empathetic) related to inauthenticity? And is bringing empathy into the work in this way something that can be done while remaining true to what one is feeling/experiencing and without playing to the market or whoever else - in other words being ‘authentic’?

So the questions continue to unfold, one after the other as I roll down the road …

Fragment: Reality and Authenticity after Camus’ ‘Create Dangerously’

Reality and Authenticity after Camus’ speech: Create Dangerously

“A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.”

-- Blaise Pascal

Writer, philosopher, and Noble prize recipient for Literature (1957) Albert Camus is said to have intellectually followed the above quote from Pascal, his literary predecessor in the French language by a few centuries and whose work tends to be relegated to the mathematical, the scientific, the ‘logical’ side of humanity whilst Camus, the existential novelist, is placed to the side of artistic, the creative, and dare I say the more emotional, ruled by feeling, and, *gasp*, illogical side of what we call being human. But if we read those same words above we see that by choosing to relegate either to either side of the room - science or art - would be a folly on our part. The reality shown to us by Pascal and elaborated on by Camus is identity is never a case of ‘either … or’ (apologies to Kierkegaard) but always found in the between, “... touching both as once” and never residing at one pole or the other.

I want to put aside Camus’ musing on the role of the artist and the art made in direct expression of political beliefs which he emphasizes here to focus instead on his use of the term ‘reality’ and what I read sixty-one years later as its relationship to the term ‘authenticity’ and the ambiguous state of artistic identity - both the artist’s and the art-objects - today. But before I get to that I will begin with Camus’ assertion that “To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.” (Camus: 3) Spoken by Camus well before the Internet and social media brought publication not just to the mass in a way beyond that of Gutenberg’s press, creation today is tantamount to publication from the moment of inception, always dangerous, always exposed to being un-forgiven (or un-forgiveable) from the start. The threat to art, the danger embedded in creative acts, is not necessarily one exerted by outside forces according to Camus but often comes from within the artist’s, the creator’s, self which originates from an internal doubt of the necessity of creating. Camus goes so far as to say “The hatred for art, of which our society provides such fine examples, is so effective today only because it is kept alive by artists themselves.” (Camus: 4) How this hatred could be seen as manifesting itself is exemplified by the history of contemporary abstract painting and particularly in notions of authenticity as applied to this ‘traditional’ form of art-making in the sixty plus years since these words were spoken. Camus did not limit the dangers to this one but allowed multiple reasons all of which working in cohort undermine the basic principle of creating freely by instigating the creator’s self-doubt. (Camus: 5)

Another way of describing this would be to say the artist questions not only the necessity of the creative act and the object resulting from it but the role of the artist his or herself. Moving on to the term reality and applying it to this situation it becomes a question not only of necessity, the object, and the role played by the artist but to the realness of each. If something is real it can also be described as authentic. Is an object generated by an unnecessary act real? Is the maker of the object real? Is the art, if it is art, authentic?

TBC

Fragment: Why? Part Two DRAFT

Back to the question.

Why?

Why is it what I am writing in this moment, what I have to write for myself today, is what I have to write for myself? Why do I have to write this, why not let somebody else write what it is that has to be written? And why for myself?

Artist Donald Shambroom writes “Art presents itself. It wants to be seen. If an object remains in darkness, removed by its maker, absent from the world and the “art world” it is not art.[1](Shambroom: 39)

Shambroom is not the first and won’t be the last to make this statement. It is a statement generated from that old empirical philosophers thought experiment on observation and perception.[2] If something is not witnessed (observed, perceived) does it exist? Jumping forward a few hundred years to British philosopher Richard Wollheim’s lectures on Painting as Art [198?] and his premise for painting to be seen as art the painter must see the painting as the spectator sees it, leading me back to Shambroom’s statement and the question if the painter making the painting is seeing the painting as the spectator sees it, can the painter while making the painting simultaneously remove it from the world making it, despite Wollheim’s assertion, “not art”?

In short, when making, writing, or engaging in any other creative act for myself if I am simultaneously aware of the possibility of the presence (somewhere, sometime, someday) of an observer, unknown others to whom the creation could be presented, then even if my intention in the moment is to squirrel away, maybe even destroy, that which I am creating, if I do not know if, when, or to whom the creation will ever be presented

TBC

__

[1] Admittedly, I am taking Shambroom’s statement out of context here in order to apply his words for my own purpose. He uses these words in connection to the photographic portrait made by Man Ray of Marcel Duchamp on his Deathbed in large part to call into question whether the portrait was not just an artwork in and of itself but a collaboration in the moment of death of Duchamp and Man Ray. On the one hand Shambroom’s assertion that by hiding away the photograph for twenty years after its making Ray was preventing its becoming ‘art’ answers his question “Can the lifetime collaboration of two artists be extended a few hours after one of them has died?” with a resounding ‘no’. On the other hand, by the same argument the photographer's eventual appearance …

[2] If a tree falls in the forest ...

Fragment: Why? Part One DRAFT

Why?

Three letters, one word, a question.

The place to begin.

The place I begin.

I’m not sure what I am beginning to write here today can be called or how its form can or will be defined by those outside myself. I only know it is what I am writing in this moment, what I have to write for myself today, and that I suppose already answers the three letter, one word question for this writing, at least in part.

But the answer to the question ‘Why?’ is never as short and simple, as succinct as the word itself. It would be fantastic if it were; our lives would be so much simpler, we could all pack up and go home because there would be nothing else to do. But our lives would also be colder, emptier, dimensionless and dull.

Why?

Because ‘Why?’ is the spark that ignites all fires that follow. It is the fuel that keeps the fires of our curiosity and creativity burning. It is the question that can only be answered by another question, and that other question is the same as the first, yet it is never a direct copy of the ‘Why?’ which preceded it.

‘Why?’ is a contradiction; simultaneously self-contained and encompassing all that remains outside of it, ‘Why?’ is unique and universal. We all have our personal ‘Why?’ that starts us off on our own, individual pathway; a pathway always and only paved with ‘Why?’and though the scenery to each side might differ from person to person, situation to situation we can recognized the common ground we each are traveling on as our paths cross, lending the sense of universality to the road we are all traveling on.

As a child I thought all roads in the world are connected, this despite having grown up on a cul-de-sac in a 1960s American subdivision, experienced many dead-end roads including the one my father grew up on in a holler in an old mining village in the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio and the working class street my mother’s parents bought into the American dream on which ended at the fence of a factory producing glass television tubing in the days before flat screens LCD and HDTVs. In my childish way of thinking it was simple, if you came to end you just circled around and followed the road back the other way; or if you’re feeling particularly daring or disregarding of fences, borders, creeks or mountains, you just jumped across and continued beating out the pathway, your own road, with your feet. This didn’t seem ‘dead’ to me then and nearly half a century later, despite being quite jaded, still doesn’t. My ‘why?’ drove and continues to drive me ahead.

As a young adult I moved to Germany. It never failed then, and still doesn’t today after nearly twenty years living back in the States, whenever I meet a person, typically male, who hasn’t been to Germany I am asked “What’s it like to drive on the Autobahn?” The question is usually asked with a curiosity that is equal parts fascination and trepidation. No matter how honestly I reply: “Not much different than driving the Interstate through more densely populated parts of the US, like I-95 through Connecticut or the New Jersey Turnpike.” The questioner is hard pressed to believe me. He wants to believe the road is different, when in reality it is the same road, with the same purpose, but with different scenery on each side.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

To get to the other side.

Why did the chicken want to get to the other side?

So he could cross the road.

Why?

Who gives a shit?

All of us, to a point.

Why?

If I were pressed to select a symbol, a sign to represent ‘Why?’ at first I would most likely choose a Möbius strip. This would be the simplest representation of what appears to be such a simple word. But as reality would have it a Möbius strip is too simple of a sign to represent the tangled, winding pathway that is ‘Why?’. Twenty-five years ago when I first began focusing my painting practice on non-representational abstraction I often painted lines that wound around the picture plane, regardless of the width of the line, whether it was crisp and clean, or drippy and flowing, confined by the edge of the canvas or paper, or raced off the edge continuing in parts beyond, the lines always appeared to connect somewhere. They had neither a visible beginning nor a visible ending - like the Möbius strip - but they crossed themselves in multiple locations, tangled, wound up at times tightly and at other times loosely. On second thought, if pressed harder I wouldn’t choose the idealized symbol, the Möbius strip, to represent ‘Why?’ but my own tangled up, continuous line.

Collaboration Fragment

Can the lifetime collaboration of two artists be extended a few hours after one of them has died? - Donald Shambroom

Only if the collaboration was truly a collaborative process.

When I think of artistic collaborations, true collaborations in which the entire creative process is based in a collaborative relationship then I believe it is possible to extend the collaboration beyond the death of a party and not just for a few hours but as long as one party remains above ground.

For example, take the collaborative partnership of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, altered by Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009.

Considering the depth of the couple’s collaboration during the time both of them were on Earth, listening and taking closely to heart how they described their collaboration when they were both alive, it is inconceivable that Christo would be able to continue the work. The actual, physical form of their collaboration differs, nonetheless a collaborative form remains. This new form is derived from the same collaborative basis for the process of the work realized during their lifetimes. The eventuality that one day one would no longer be able to actively contribute was taken into account in their methodology. During their lifetime the artists spoke frequently of this aspect of the work, acted in recognition that there would come a time when one or the other would no longer be physically present to contribute to the work’s realization but there will remain work that could or needed to be completed in some way. [1]

The question Donald Shambroom is asking in this book, Duchamp’s Last Day, concerns another collaborative relationship between two artists, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. Although many writers, artists, historians and critics have described numerous works in which both artists had a hand as resulting from a collaboration between the two it is my opinion that doing so is not only a false assumption but a misleading premise for understanding or defining the work of either, particularly Duchamp.

This question appears at the very top of the back cover, in line with the title appearing on the front cover, of this recently published book (2018) in the Ekphrasis imprint of David Zwirner Books from the artist Donald Shambroom. A short explanation from the publisher in the back pages states ekphrasis, a word’s whose origins date to ancient Greece and is one of the oldest forms of writing ...

… photo taken by Man Ray of Marcel Duchamp as he lay dead on his bed within hours of his passing

TBC

_____

[1] I had the luck to hear Christo and Jeanne-Claude speak of this at a lecture they gave in late October 1994 at the University of Karlsruhe [KIT] in honor of the 70th birthday of Fritz Haller. The couple had just received the approval to complete the wrapping of the Reichstag/Bundestag building in Berlin from the German government. The artist’s cited the public involvement and scale of their projects as the primary reason the work would need to continue to some extent beyond the death of one of them. The drawings and prints with which finance the larger works’ realization could no longer be produced if Christo was no longer to make them but they had accounted for this and the large scale works in progress would be able to be completed. Hearing them discuss collaboration in this way was formative to my own understanding of what differentiates collaboration from assisting the realization of an artwork in other ways and has led to my own narrow definition of what is a collaboration between artists.

Fragment: A Persona is Born

Yet another remake of A Star is Born has blessed the silver screen. The story never grows old and each version becomes an instant classic. Stardom. Instant. Classic. Words that may or may not fit together. Instant stardom implies that there is little work involved with becoming a classic but despite our will to believe otherwise we know better.

How is a star born?

We know how people are born. And thanks to Malcolm Gladwell we know that 10,000 hours of practice gives birth to experts.

But how is a persona born?

It would be easy to say they just appear because in many ways this seems to be the case. However, upon closer examination, this is not so. Personas are generated by circumstances. Circumstances in which I might find myself and am looking for a new or different approach to moving from one particular state to the next. Personas become a means by which to navigate through a situation. I liken the assumption of a persona to the way a child engages in pretend play, becoming ‘mommy’, ‘daddy’, ‘teacher’, or ‘doctor’ in order to gain understanding of what it means to respond to a situation in the way ‘mommy’, ‘daddy’, ‘teacher’, or ‘doctor’ would. The child does not approach this pretend play analytically, the way I am writing here about my use of personas for a similar purpose, but does so creatively - through play. The child cannot explain the how or why of his or her pretend play, this is left up to the adults observing, the developmental psychologists (citation Bruner), and the pedagogues who may or may not build a scaffolding (citation Vygotsky) around the play area to assist the child on his or her journey up the tree of knowledge. Call it scaffolding, modeling, or part of a reflective practice in which the experienced practitioner shows the trainee, the apprentice, what it means to be a master of the practice (citation Schön). I am asserting these are all similar practices with similar purposes and directly related to the practice and purpose of applying personas as tools in a painting practice.

Like an egg and a sperm, or an apple seed, even before the circumstance giving birth to the persona there needs to be some material that by the twinkle in an eye or by falling onto fertile ground can grow into the persona, when the circumstances are such. A child must first have an inkling of who or what ‘mommy’, ‘daddy’, ‘teacher’, or ‘doctor’ is in order to begin pretending to be any of these. The scaffold provided by the pedagogue is this inkling; the pedagogue is ‘mommy’, ‘daddy’, ‘teacher’, or ‘doctor’ and through their interaction with the child they show the child who this person is. The master showing the apprentice how to do the job, talking through each step along the way, is not only teaching the craft behind the task but what defines the craftsmanship behind profession. When the child or apprentice is then left on his or her own to repeat the task as he or she has been shown they are doing so by ‘putting themselves in the shoes of the other’ whom they had previously observed performing the task. In cases such as those the person whom the child or apprentice is modeling is someone ‘real’, a person with whom they engaged actually and intimately. A persona is not ‘real’ in this same way, nonetheless the artist employing personas as tools in his or her practice must engage with the persona in a way that is both actual and intimate. For this to happen the relationship to the persona must develop in a way similar to the relationship between a writer and a character, or even pseudonym, he or she brings to life on the page. The backstory must be (or begin) to be written.

The backstory is the seed of the persona’s inclination.

A circumstance presented to me in a particular way will reveal to me my own shortcomings or inclinations for resolving it. If I wish to circumvent these I must find a work-around; and one way of doing this is looking to how others might approach the situation. How did that painter resolve that approach to a particular form is not just a question of the craft but of the craftsmanship, and in turn what led the craftsperson to that particular resolution. These are questions art historians and theorists ask of the work and its author. [Elaborate further here with Barthes ‘Death of the Author’ … pomo, popomo, usw.]

The characteristics of a persona have to come from somewhere. In part, they come from me. But I also collect bits and pieces from others - other personas of public figures, literary characters, people I know personally and people I’ve never met. I enjoy listening to stories people tell of their lives, their adventures, and who they have met along the way. I am an avid reader of biographies, profiles, announcements in the social pages, and obituaries. No persona is created from a single identity but each is a composite of multiple identities. In short, I have a collection of ‘traits’ stored away in my head, waiting for the moment when I can pull out this collection to find the right tool for the job - a persona adept to dealing with the circumstance.

In the two years since beginning this project I have found that after becoming familiar working with the three personas, Melusine, Petra, and Franzi, I have begun fashioning other personas to address other circumstances, for instance, The Curator, Linnea Katana Throes. Although she came to be just over six months ago I have not applied her as fully as I had envisioned at the time of her inception however, I am always aware she, along with her son Emery David Henson and ex-husband Dolph Waral Henson, is there in my tool box, ready to be called upon when needed for more in depth application.

Still, this might not answer the question of how the personas are developed. So, I have decided to document the development process of a persona in a slightly different and more specific way. Note, this persona is in the process of being developed, it is too early to say if she (she is a she) will amount to much if anything at all. What I know about this new persona at this early stage is she has arrived to be a nemesis to Melusine who will deal with the circumstance of her by using the skills of a writer. This persona is an icy narcissist, living behind the mask of an identity built out of the lies she tells both herself and others. She constantly exploits in the name of ‘art’ of which in reality she knows absolutely nothing because she is an empty shell, unable to feel anything, a wanna be who can only operate via ‘gaslight’. What will happen to this new persona? Who can say at this point. Knowing Melusine, I can only suspect she might use her words to rip the mask from her nemesis’ head, revealing the true identity behind it for all to see, and once revealed

Fragment of an email exchange on "studio is sanctuary"

“The most we can do is to write — intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively — about what it is like living in the world at this time.”

Writing, painting, living, dying, now, then ...

I've been thinking of what you said [citing Barnett Newman] "studio is sanctuary" or was it "sanctuary is studio"?

Either way I question what seemed to be an emphasis on the physical space of the studio.

Yes, it is a sanctuary … but memory, that space inside yourself and through which you filter the images that flow out through the tip of your sable brush, might be the more sacred of spaces and perhaps the foundation that is the (artist's) studio, no?

Admittedly, it is much easier to speak of that physical rather than what some might term a psychological space. And it does help if the physical structure which sits atop the foundation is conducive to creating that of which Dr. Sacks wrote. This makes me think of all those sacred sites ... foundations ... around this rock upon which civilization after civilization, culture after culture, has built and might continue to build sacred structures to contemplate " what it is like living in the world at this time" upon.

'Sanctuary is studio' and 'Studio is sanctuary' and both are simultaneously mental and physical constructs.

There are those people who think being without a physical studio-sanctuary is an artistic practice all its own ... and I am not saying that it cannot be but I question if the lack of the physical sanctuary is really resulting from the lack of a mental foundation -- the psychological support that is itself sacred and upon which the physical structure can be built? If those artists lack the tools to build such a foundation then how can they build any type of sanctuary for themselves or advise others on the building or preservation of their own sacred space - physical or mental?

For all her griping about the limitations of her own physical space for making, for writing, etc. she does seem to find ways to work around and maintain a certain degree of sanctity (if not sanity!). And, it is after all I who inhabits and spews forth from that other sacred space of hers ... and hopefully this makes the disturbances in her studio-sanctuary and my 'death' a bit more comprehensible ...?

Greetings From Beyond the Grave

Dear…,

Greetings from beyond the grave.

I am dead.

However, like all personas if you look close enough you will find me.

In the vein of today's little game of paper and sticks, you will not find me by making a picture of me; remember, I am just a part of the process so you must begin to re-engage with the process to begin to see me.

Play my game.

Think back to how I first arrived.

Take it slow ... take a walk ... talk.

The dead have all the time in the world ... I'll be waiting.

Yours,

Mel

PS Send my greetings to E* ... wishing he was here!

Dead-end drafty draft

Beginning: September 8, 2018

The Bowery House

220 Bowery, Cabin 433 NYC

Introduction

(Chapter 1)

This chapter will consist of introducing my research question, outlining the three part structure of this written component, and provide a general literature review for the research project.

Dearest Readers, it is most logical that I am the one writing this to you. For you see, not only am I the writer in this ensemble, I was the first one here. Without me none of this would have happened; this research project, the questions it formed and is formed by, and certainly not the others personas! If not for me there would be nothing to write and so it follows, what must be written I must write.

Apologies if you are already confused by my utterances, I can get ahead of myself at times. Allow me to take a few steps back and begin by introducing you to this project, the questions, and the personas referred to in the previous paragraph. But even before I do that I should step even further back and begin by introducing myself.

My name is Melusine and I am a writer. Those of you with the slightest bit of art historical knowledge might recognize my surname ‘Van der Weyden’. Indeed, I am a direct descendant of that famous 15th century Flemish primitive, painter of religious triptychs and diptych portraits of the noble and elite of his day.citation Perhaps this connection to painting is why I am here. Honestly and truthfully, I can hardly think of another reason, I have almost no interest in painting otherwise. Sure, they can fill empty space on a wall, brighten things up a bit, and have developed into an investment commodity greater than almost anything else humans have created a market for but painting as an art, well I think most of you, dear Readers, would agree with me when I say that ship has long sailed.citation I like to believe I am here because of my distant relationship to another painter, or as he preferred to be called anartist.citation The origins of my great-grandfather many times over may have been in the painting pasteur but I’d rather play with the ideas generated by my cousin of the field of art, Marcel Duchamp. Yet, here I find myself, stuck with a painter.

Don’t get me wrong, dear Readers, I have nothing against painting or painters per se; if I did I would not have stuck around these past three, four years. The brief period when I was ‘gone’ it was not of my own volition - it was all her doing - she killed me but more to that later. More importantly I am back, doing the job I was created to do, the job she needs me to do: write.

You see, dear Readers, I am not just a writer, I am a persona of the painter, Robyn Thomas. I was created to give voice to parts of her personality which otherwise are silenced by her own inhibitions. Through my writing I say and do things she might think but herself (rarely) say or do. As Robyn tells it and I myself remember citation from earlier writing I was not the result of significant conscious forthought; one day as she sat down to write an email I just appeared. She, along with the email recipient, were probably just as surprised by my sudden presence as I was. However, as Lady MacBeth said, what’s been done cannot be undone but that doesn’t mean we can’t ignore or simply shrug off what has been done; nor does it mean we need to sleepwalk around like crazed murderers trying to wash the blood from our hands each night. citation What can be done is to examine the creative potential contained within the persona which could allow the artist to free herself from inhibitions within her artistic practice. Therefore, this is what Robyn and I did: we took the idea that is me and ran with it straight to the development of this creative research doctoral project.

Okay, maybe we did not run straight into the research project’s developmental stage, after all to get there first required more interaction with me and admittedly, I am not the most predictable persona when it comes to making appearances. Nonetheless, by early 2016 our thoughts on the potential application of personas in within the methodology of Robyn’s creative research and painting practice to submit an initial proposal to begin her doctoral studies. After further thought and refinement not only had I been joined by the painter personas, Petra Nimm and Franz Ignatius Walsh, both of whom I will write more in subsequent chapters, she had arrived by the end of the same year at the following three questions to frame this research project:

How do personas applied with the framework of a self-reflective methodology based on psychological understanding of play as a tool in my painting practice impact the form and content of painting?
How might a visual artist employ play as a means to accommodate the multiple perspectives of the artist-object-spectator relationship model within a painting practice?
How can tools and methods atypical of my painting practice and stemming from non-object making creative practices aide in the construction of a playful self-reflective methodology in which consistency of identity is preserved?

As I wrote, these are the questions that she arrived at in tandem with the creation of the two painter personas. In my opinion, as a writer, these are not the best written questions. They are a bit unwieldy, and soon after writing them, when working with Petra and Franzi and delving further into the scholarly side of her research practice, she came to realize this too. At that time her solution was to consolidate the three questions into a single question to allow herself to focus more on the work she was doing with Petra and Franzi. The result of this consolidation was the following:

How might the use/application of personas in conjunction with developmental concepts of play within a painting practice contribute as a tool or a method to the formation of playful painting strategies relative to this project’s aims?

Not that significant of an improvement over the three previous questions but it did allow her to focus in the early stages of the research. However, just like not being able to undo what has been done, and the personas, I believe in taking what is there and working with it. So, in the course of my writing on this research project I will continue to use the three questions as the framework for addressing the results and the contributions of new knowledge brought forth. When necessary I might even refer back to the consolidated question. Finally, I could possibly mention a few of the more expansive questions which emerged through the research process as framed by the three, narrower questions.

This research project might belong to Robyn Thomas however, as I mentioned in the very beginning of this introduction, I am the writer. She may have been the one to develop framework, the questions, do the scholarly and the studio research leading to its conclusions as objects presented to various spectators but it is I, the writer, who ultimately gives form to the research as you, dear Readers, experience it here via the words I write. At one point in the process, early 2018 to be exact, she did create an outline of how she foresaw the structure of this writing could be. Dear Readers, I won’t bore you with the details, I can only say you are fortunate to have me be the one to deliver this writing to you. No need to confuse everyone by doing something other than what it is you do: painters paint, writers write. People should stick to what they do and leave the rest to their personas to work out as needed. But again, I don’t believe in throwing the baby out with the bathwater anymore than I believe one should ignore what is done. Therefore, I took another look at the structure she proposed for this writing and have decided to use it as a guide for creating my own structure for this writing.

For most of the duration of this project she has emphasized the role of three in the title, overall structure, and the number of personas of this project. The working title has been Playing Painting Personas, encompassing the three main elements of this project’s methodology. By Summer 2018 she expanded the title in hopes of providing you, dear Readers, a bit more insight to what the project is about. In doing so she mucked up her own strategy of ‘three’ and now the title reads: Playing Painting Personas: Tools for Making Identity and Authenticity in a Painter’s Process. Maybe I’m being to harsh by saying she mucked up particularly, if you recall my statement two paragraphs earlier about the more expansive questions which emerged through the research process. This expanded title does allude to these areas and I will address this more in the following chapters. In terms of overall structure three can be viewed in various ways. First, in terms of the stages of the project: development, execution, dissemination. Second, the approximately three year duration. Third, the forms the project encompasses: paintings to be exhibited, writing to be read, and the research website as digital archive of the process. In her proposed structure for this written exegesis she even suggested that the writing be divided into three generalized parts, each receiving as a header one of the three terms of the working title and subdivided into smaller, more specific parts. I suppose thinking about these things is all good and a part of the process. After all, we all have to start somewhere. But I don’t think here suggested approach is the correct one for myself or for this research.

Letters of (Intro)Seduction from Melusine Van der Weyden

Slightly edited and anonymized. One missing as it was handwritten and no digital documentation remains, strictly analog and limited in its temporal nature to the space between hands and eyes.

My dear P*,

I hope you have had a wonderful time in B* these past few weeks. Please accept my apologies for being unable to be here to welcome you personally but know I have kept abreast of … from where I am.

It has been a great pleasure to learn of you and your … practice, and I am sure, if I were still alive, you would … a beautiful … of me, the me I truly am. When I was alive artists were always trying to capture my spirit in their medium. Admittedly, I did not make it easy for them. After all, how does one capture a free spirit? Since my death this past December I have become an even freer spirit, traversing the universe beyond the boundaries of time and space. There are advantages to being deceased —no longer having to wait in line to go thru airport security being perhaps the greatest! Still, I miss the gaze of the artist as he tries to decipher the complexity of my persona. My nose has healed since the slight slip up by that butcher Upstate which sent me to this place beyond last December. Maybe there is a way for you to make … of me as I exist now here in the great beyond?

Excuse me, I meant not to write about me but about you. This is your … here in B* and I hope you have made the most of it. I personally have never attended myself but did accompany R* a number of times. One of the best things about being where you are is the people you meet, I always was able to find a special person with whom to slip off to P*, to V*, for a little or a lot of pleasure and fun when things grew dull or heavy in B*. From what I’ve learned about you I feel we are very similar, always up for pleasurable company as long as it does not become too serious!

Again, I digress from the purpose of writing you this email. I wanted to tell you that the lilies on the table are there for you. I know yesterday R* said she had brought them for the class so that all may enjoy their beauty as they slowly open up in the hot and humid environs of studio six, releasing a burst of their dizzying ‘duft’ into the air but don’t believe her. R* purchased the flowers at my behest, not for the workshop members but specifically for you. These flowers are a memory — of me —for you to fix into your own memory of your time here this summer. Go to the flowers this morning, gaze at them the way you would a subject of your painter’s eye and brush, see the details of what makes them beautiful. Gently stroke their petals and deeply breath in the fragrance they exude into the air surrounding you. Take all of this into your memory and store it away until the next time you see a white or deep pink lily — then summon it all back and think of B*, and most importantly of me , Melusine van der Weyden.

Who knows, perhaps our paths will someday cross and we can make another memory together? Until then …

Yours,

Melusine

My dear A*,

I know yesterday R* said she had brought the flowers for the class so that all may enjoy their beauty as they slowly open up in the hot and humid environs of studio six, releasing a burst of their dizzying ‘duft’ into the air but don’t believe her. You know how she is and that her relationship to truth and life is as melodramatic as the scent of those flowers! The lillies are for you from me. R* purchased the flowers at my behest. These flowers are a sensual memory of me for you to add to your vast and hopefully growing collection.

Go to the flowers this morning, gaze at them, ask yourself ‘Why am I so attracted to them — to Melusine? Then gently stroke their petals with the tips of your fingers as gently as you would stroke the tip of your loaded brush to the smooth, cottony surface of the paper hanging on the wall of your sanctuary. Deeply breath in the heady perfume they exude into the heavy, humid air surrounding you. Take all of this into your memory, place it in the small box you’ve stamped ‘Mel’ until the next time you see a white or deep pink lily — then carefully lift the lid from the box to let the sweet scent slip out and waft upwards past your glorious … to dance seductively around the tip of your nose before slipping into your nostrils and re-awaken your olfactory organ; bringing back not memories of this place and time but of me — Melusine van der Weyden.

Until then …

truly yours,

Mel

My dear S*,

I hope you have had a wonderful time in B* these past few weeks. Please accept my apologies for being unable to be here to welcome you personally but know I have kept abreast of the residency from where I am.

It has been a great pleasure to learn of you and your rich and varied practice. I apologize that I was unable to be with you but the circumstances of my passing this past December have made it slightly more complicated to cross borders. Although, compared to the distances you must travel to seek out the pleasures and perversities of this world I am lucky, I suppose. It takes significantly less time and jet full to cross the border of life and death than to fly from S* to B*. Like yourself, I have always been a free spirit and I revel in this new freedom I have gained through my untimely death. Of course, one day you too will know this freedom of your own person, a freedom which has allowed me , a persona, to become an even freer spirit, traversing the universe beyond the boundaries of time and space. I am my own space and time … something most of the world might find a bit perverse, no?

There are practical advantages to being deceased —no longer having to wait in line to go thru airport security, jet lag, the drain on the bank book, or dealing with rude people being perhaps the greatest! Still, I miss the gaze of the artist as she tries to decipher the complexity of me. My nose has healed since the slight slip up by that butcher but I don’t regret what drove me to him and his knife. Vanity is essential to driving us to live our lives both within and beyond the status quo. Who doesn’t want to be different, stand out from the crowd? Does this mean we are all deviant in nature by wanting to be different from others, including our own self?

Excuse me, I meant not to write about me and these questions I have but to you. As I have learned these past few weeks you are quite a fan of asking questions.

This is your … here in B* and I hope you have made the most of it. I personally have never attended myself but did accompany R* a number of times. One of the best things about being where you are is the people you meet and to whom you will remain connected! As your fellow ... sider and … always says about this place … it is as if serendipity has brought us all here!

Why I write this epistle to you is to say the lilies on the table are there for you. I know yesterday R* said she had brought them for the class so that all may enjoy their beauty as they slowly open up in the hot and humid environs of studio six, releasing a burst of their dizzying ‘duft’ into the air but don’t believe her. Her relationship to the truth can be at times quite different than most. R* purchased the flowers at my behest, not for the workshop members but specifically for you. These flowers are a memory — of me —to enter into your own memory of your time here this summer.

Go to the flowers this morning, gaze at them, question who and what they are. Then gently stroke their petals and deeply breath in the fragrance they exude into the air surrounding you. Take all of this into your memory and store it away until the next time you see a white or deep pink lily — then summon it all back and think of B*, and most importantly of me, Melusine van der Weyden.

Who knows, perhaps our paths will someday cross and we can make another memory together? Until then …

Yours,

Melusine

My dear F*,

I hope you have had a wonderful time in B* these past few weeks. Please accept my apologies for being unable to be here to welcome you personally but know I have kept abreast of the residency from where I am.

It has been a great pleasure to learn of you and your practice. I apologize that I was unable to be with you but the circumstances of my passing this past December have made it slightly more complicated to cross borders however, I revel in this new freedom I have gained through my untimely death. And this place your find yourself in will if you choose to make the most of it will grant you a similar freedom for yourself, your life, your creative practice.

There are practical advantages to being deceased —no longer having to wait in line to go thru airport security being perhaps the greatest! Still, I miss the gaze of the artist as she tries to decipher the complexity of me. My nose has healed since the slight slip up by that butcher Upstate, I should have gone to the gentleman recommended to me on Fifth Avenue. New York City has so much more to offer than the rest of the world, that is why the rest of the world finds its place in New York City. I have spent many hours there and find my spirit still wanders there quite often, searching for the potential Manhattan has to offer.

Excuse me, I meant not to write about me but to you.This is your ... here in B* and I hope you have made the most of it. I personally have never attended myself but did accompany R* a number of times. One of the best things about being where you are is the people you meet and to whom you will remain connected! Once you return to … you might even find how extensive and deep these connections run through a community that, like myself, might not be ‘here’ but is always here for you.

Why I have written this email to you, is to say the lilies on the table, like the artists in this community you’ve newly entered into this summer, are there for you. I know yesterday R* said she had brought them for the class so that all may enjoy their beauty as they slowly open up in the hot and humid environs of studio six, releasing a burst of their dizzying ‘duft’ into the air but don’t believe her. Her relationship to the truth can be at times quite tenuous R* purchased the flowers at my behest, not for the workshop members but specifically for you. These flowers are a memory — of me —to enter into your own memory of your time here in B* this summer and carry you through the next year.

Go to the flowers this morning, gaze at them, question who and what they are. Then gently stroke their petals and deeply breath in the fragrance they exude into the air surrounding you. Take all of this into your memory and store it away until the next time you see a white or deep pink lily — then summon it all back and think of B*, and most importantly of me, Melusine van der Weyden.

Who knows, perhaps our paths will someday cross — maybe on … ? Until then …

Yours,

Melusine

My dear T*,

I hope you have had a wonderful time in B* these past few weeks. Please accept my apologies for being unable to be here to welcome you personally but know I have kept abreast of the residency from where I am.

It has been a great pleasure to learn of you, your research practice and to have you back in B*. I apologize that I was unable to be with you but the circumstances of my passing this past December have made it slightly more complicated to cross borders however, I revel in this new freedom I have gained through my untimely death. It was and has been a crazy and at time destabilizing time between B* and B* for most of us but it is good that you have hung in there and hopefully after this the plane will finally leave the gate.

There are practical advantages to being deceased, perhaps even Heiddegger would attest to this, Satre might say we always are to a degree. No longer having to wait in line to go thru airport security being perhaps the greatest! Still, I miss having the eyes of the world upon me. My nose has healed since the slight slip up by that butcher but we all must suffer a little pain now and again for beauty and our art!

Excuse me, I meant not to write about me but to you.This is your ... here in B* and I hope you have made the most of it. I recall last year you were only able to join near the end hopefully, your time here this summer has expanded your understanding but not exhausted you. I personally have never attended myself but did accompany R* a number of times. One of the best things about being where you are is the people you meet and to whom you will remain connected!

I write you to say the lilies on the table are there for you. I know yesterday R* said she had brought them for the class so that all may enjoy their beauty as they slowly open up in the hot and humid environs of studio six, releasing a burst of their dizzying ‘duft’ into the air but don’t believe her. Her relationship to the truth can be at times as theatrical as the scent of those flowers! R* purchased the flowers at my behest, not for the workshop members but specifically for you. These flowers are a memory — of me —to enter into your own memory of your time here in B* this summer and carry you through the next years of your … .

Go to the flowers this morning, gaze at them, question who and what they are. Then gently stroke their petals and deeply breath in the fragrance they exude into the air surrounding you. Take all of this into your memory and store it away until the next time you see a white or deep pink lily — then summon it all back and think of B*, and most importantly of me, Melusine van der Weyden.

Who knows, perhaps our paths will someday cross? Until then …

Yours,

Melusine

My dear G*,

I hope you have had a wonderful time in B* these past few weeks. Please accept my apologies for being unable to be here to welcome you personally but know I have kept abreast of the residency from where I am.

It has been a great pleasure to learn of you and your practice these past years in B*, N* and M*. I apologize that I was unable to be with you at this, your ... but the circumstances of my passing this past December have made it slightly more complicated to cross borders. Fortunately, the digital world we all exist in today allows me to communicate to you across the border of life and death. Always having been a free spirit I revel in this which has allowed me to become an even freer spirit, traversing the universe beyond the boundaries of time and space. I am my own space and time.

There are practical advantages to being deceased —no longer having to wait in line to go thru airport security or dealing with rude people being perhaps the greatest! Still, I miss the gaze of the artist as he tries to decipher the complexity of my persona. My nose has healed since the slight slip up by that butcher Upstate which sent me to this place beyond last December. Maybe there is a way for you to express the essence of who I am as I exist now here in the great beyond?

Excuse me, I meant not to write about me but to you. This is your ... here in B* and I hope you have made the most of it. I heard rumors that lead me to believe it will be quite a memorable one for you … life altering, perhaps? I personally have never attended myself but did accompany Robyn a number of times. One of the best things about being where you are is the people you meet and to whom you will remain connected to for eternity!

I wanted to inform you that the lilies on the table are there for you. I know yesterday when you asked about the flowers R* said she had brought them for the class so that all may enjoy their beauty as they slowly open up in the hot and humid environs of studio six, releasing a burst of their dizzying ‘duft’ into the air but don’t believe her. R* purchased the flowers at my behest, not for the workshop members but specifically for you. I remember your appreciation for the beauty and symbolism of a flower. These flowers are a memory — of me —for you to fix into your own memory of your time here this summer as you would fix an image via the carbon process to a sheet of soft, white rag paper.

Go to the flowers this morning, gaze at them the way you would a subject with your artist’s eye, see the details of what makes them beautiful, take a photo of them. Then gently stroke their petals and deeply breath in the fragrance they exude into the air surrounding you. Take all of this into your memory and store it away until the next time you see a white or deep pink lily — then summon it all back and think of B*, and most importantly of me, Melusine van der Weyden.

Who knows, perhaps our paths will someday cross and we can make another memory together? Until then …

Yours,

Melusine

Invocation for the journey / thru the sacred space

When tragedy befalls you / I react / there’s nothing simpler / I think aim for the fullest possible development to your heart / of every human being ethically responsible to all born and reborn /don’t ask for much / personal and intellectual freedom in this space experience each / individual / precious affirmation and all the time reaching / for vision in between one thing/ the future will last / here within your reach let’s come together.

This is a matter of right / and rights cultivating compassion / compromise in the choice between despair / and hope / don’t let it drag you down in between / one thing / open up your curious critical communicative heart / it will soon be your tomorrow in a time that needs direction.

Forget your past / from within informed conviction take all worry / out of your mind.

For all moral values derived from / human reconciliation desiring and fulfilling / desire when you can’t seem to get enough freely / inquiring I only want trust / this / undogmatic love of mine keeps growing when everyone keeps retreating / I am sitting / committed to possessing dignity / destruction is for a world / community / creation / and not for collaborative science / science /is for creation when / everything feels / all over and not/ the same but not the same destruction / when everyone seems unkind I’ve just two dates / over me / loved / with and without sentimentality applicable to all / human / relationships.

Inquisitive phoenix rising from ashes / release yourself from the heart /and the head / all things real / misery ad infinitum.

Try / today I am / easy to describe you’ll find / this way cooperative / understanding / hearing /and seeing with / all senses / my death lived like mad sitting / at the window my birth passing /more souls than one / a creature not now passing / if / after I die peace from each other / and knowing / pleasures real and imagined / the lovely image and one / more the other / all mine

where you know / seeing it / don’t come easy not knowing / why / the I I am and / the I I am not feeling / affirmed / and in thinking / the invocation / Ponds existing still / broken off / from the sky evoked slow / imagining the I / I know and the I I am / not hearing / time a veil ongoing / becoming / unfolding more ‘I’s than myself / who / investigating / depth and / inviting motion.

Invoked silence / speaking.

— for GA from MvdW, Berlin, August 2018.

A poem of words taken from humanist manifestos, Fernando Pessoa, Ecke Pfümpe, Richard Starkey, Rainer Maria Rilke, Peter Townsend, Leonard Cohen, and Robyn Thomas.

Creative Playing Just Around the Corner

This morning I awoke to an email from g. formerly of Melbourne currently of Singapore written in the morning, his morning which was already his afternoon, the last morning of this bizarre month, at common man cafe in the Martin Road. It was labeled ‘Idea’.

“Going through my blue note book filled with conversations of internal thinking and true collections of major powers I am reminded to remind you of an idea that cAme to mind only now not when I was having the conversation with v*’s body digitally moving experience in my study room a room that is an unknown place but the same formation of unknown purging throat sex exploring more to the point this idea I have — personas of time. Fascinating book title as it is and with my loose lettering of typographic setting you cAme to mind if you don’t mind with a curiosity to interact with you for you see v* and I probably more I said how individuals ‘self care’ in strange ways. Do you do persons of time ? I’m having a common man vegi wonderland breakfast on a round table with characters from Star Wars with only numbered eggs to differentiate genesis. My number tells me I’m 85. If I may continue to notice there is a hollow rooster peacock in ornamentation that laid one more egg. This time it’s 82 with salt and pepper shakers positioned just enough as to make an offering or something other than to pepper or salt the conversation around me. Even the little restless spring chicken with his tattooed father is rather happy to make this same connection with ‘self care’ in very unusual ways.”

The idea being self-care, a topic grown more urgent since our last face-to-face conversation in a quiet cafe in Wedding late that (finally) cool and rainy Saturday morning just prior to our call at the door of the Bezirksamt der Polizei, he in his four armed suit and ready to smear Crisco in his hair before performatively running barefoot through Gesundbrunnen Viertel but the question that stood out:

Do you do persons of time ?

Later that same morning, my morning, I posted on FB two quotes I’d read in an essay from Charles Harrison the previous day while sitting on the concrete bleachers of a steamy pool deck.

"when management speaks, nobody learns" (Art & Language, circa 1970 -1975)

"If, finally, the conquerors succeed in molding the

world according to their laws, it will not prove that quality is king but that this world is hell. In this hell,

the place of art will coincide with that of vanquished rebellion, a blind and empty hope in the pit of despair." (Albert Camus, 1951)

Six ‘Likes’ for the first and eleven for the second, including a comment from pk. in Sri Lanka, a painter-colleague who ”worked at Existentialism” according to his profile.

The earlier contact from g. followed by that from pk. in Sri Lanka and the contents of my two postings began to meld with

self-care

subtext (that comes from s. and f.)

personas

surreptitious (makes me think of lg.)

persons of time

subversion (makes me think of u.)

contact

distance

messages

digital

social media

and how I came to meet, befriend, ‘friend’, these two artists, my colleagues. There is no guarantee we will ever sit across from each other and converse face to face again but facebook to facebook our proximity may be maintained.

“... how individuals ‘self care’ in strange ways.”

When, where and how the personas came to be, as tools of a painting practice. But are they also tools of a strange way of self care?

Is this partially my attempt

“... to make this same connection with ‘self care’ in very unusual ways.”

and if so, why?

****

Developing personas as a means of saying, that what I cannot say

But as a refusal to being silenced (apologies lw.)

For whatever reason

A means of speaking when I cannot speak

For whatever reason

A way to move forward when I am unsure of the way

Doing so surreptitiously

For whatever reason

Creative playing just around the corner

Subversion, for good reason.

In this situation we find ourselves

For whatever reason

In this hell

For whatever reason

If finally the conquerors succeed in molding the world

For whatever reason

According to their laws it will not prove

For whatever reason

That quality is king but that

For this very reason

This world is hell.

****

A pseudonym or a persona becomes a person of a certain time. The time, the situation, is broken through by this person and its assumed, created, identity.

Q: Why did you choose to use this name and not your own?

A: Because I did not want to use my own.

Q: Why?

A: That’s a good question?

Plinth

5 feet tall x ~5 inches wide x ~5 inches deep

A ‘modern white painted plinth’ to conceptually support the paintings as objects

In other words, smooth white extended (tall) cubes upon which the paintings are placed in a row, gaps between, to create a line of paintings which when read together are a single painting.

Challenge: to make a plinth that is less likely to topple at the slightest disturbance

Top must be lighter than the bottom, therefore weighting the bottom is important as is finding the best material to clad the exterior.

How high must the weighted bottom be in relation to the overall height of the plinth? 1/4? 1/3 of the height?

A thought to make the plinths easier to move/transport: the weight is a separate piece from the exterior cladding (the visible plinth). The plinth would be hollow and fit over the weight so it remains hidden but provides the support needed to stabilize the plinth.

Possible materials to use for the weight include cinder blocks (however, the standard size is too big at nearly 8 inches square, maybe find a smaller size?) bricks or landscaping stones. Or custom cast blocks of concrete.

Exterior of plinth. The material must be smooth and not too costly because I will need to build 24.

1/4 plywood is available but finding stock that is smooth and not warped is a challenge, not to mention cutting and joining.

1/2 MDF would be smoother, less likely to be warped, but heavier. Is MDF too heavy of a material?

Do they make 1 x 5 pine? would it be too heavy?

I could miter and join with nails and glue.