“There is no return to a harmonious state of nature.  If we turn back, then we must go the whole way-we must return to the beasts.

It is an issue which we must face squarely, hard though it may be for us to do so.  If we dream of a return to our childhood, if we are tempted to rely on others and so be happy, if we shrink from the task of carrying our cross, the cross of humaneness, of reason, of responsibility, if we lose courage and flinch from the strain, then we must try to fortify ourselves with a clear understanding of the simple decision before us.  We can return to the beasts.  But if we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society.  We must go into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure, using what reason we may have to plan as well as we can for both security and freedom.”

both incapable of remembering

just after they’ve released their contents

a tear, and a ball,

what game?

“how I wish I could just be an eye”

a gentle implacable roving sphere

an agent without hand or an eye

seeing above the game,

floating in an Eden that grows and dies and

devours itself, only to regenerate.

I want to be devoured without dying,

I want to be dipped in salty baths without a memory

I want to be cleansed without knowing it

Over and over again

paintings by Chris Martin

“Crumbling is not an instant’s Act”

Emily Dickinson

Crumbling is not an instant’s Act,
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation’s processes
Are organized Decays.

‘Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul,
A Cuticle of Dust,
A Borer in the Axis,
An Elemental Rust-

Ruin is formal-Devil’s work,
Consecutive and slow-
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping-is Crash’s law.

“I can see now I never really committed to Laura. I always had one foot out the door, and that prevented me from doing a lot of things, like thinking about my future and… I guess it made more sense to commit to nothing, keep my options open. And that’s suicide. By tiny, tiny increments.”

-Rob Gordon, High Fidelity

Lots of times, I wonder if I am destructing myself by not living enough, or doing it by living too hard. My internal drama unfolds with opposing tensions tween not being in the world enough and being in the world too much. Within these categories are subcategories of opposites like not being aggressive enough in my approach to the world, and being too aggressively personable, and in effect, ‘not real’ to the world, …the edifice of desire is a confusing crisscrossing of interweaving structural elements that give one procedural cues to dealing with the fragmentary, the bigger picture remaining always convoluted. Many times, syntheses is impossible. In writing, no life is too hard. One can strip and tap oneself out. Killing, Redeeming, Condemning, Praising, Dehumanizing, Humanizing, Anthropomorphosizing, Empty Moralizing, Full Moralizing, Preaching, Indirect preaching, Bitching, Whining, being great,…it all goes down without an emotional hitch in the literary realm. One can be and do and dick around as much as possible without feeling bad about it, and as evidenced by Dickinson’s cathartic words and their resonation within us, it doesn’t work like that in the real world. In the real world, most are immediately and constantly strickened by the weight of their actions and the pivotal temporal fulcrum that such moments are tethered too, and the inherent string that attaches decisions to catastrophe, the only true incentive causing people not to do things…unfortunately, it also happens to be a strong catalyst for reverse psychological provocation, thus leading me to my current problem with abstract art (by problem, I mean extreme affinity..; Are we starting to understand how this works?) How destructive or stupid or irresponsible can one be when making an abstract painting? I recently returned to abstraction because I never have to feel those emotions when I deal in abstraction; however, am I just being non-committal. As modernist critics point out and Rob Gordon astutely observes, aren’t I just committing suicide in tiny increments, annihilating recognizable moments that allow me to say and evaluate the important things in my world. In fact, paradoxically, the Great Wars at the beginning of the twentieth century which spurred increased awareness of atrocity and an increased sense of social responsibility among Americans made the Abstract Expressionists who already had that bent to be essentially more abstract. Why is non-abstract painting just like life?…i always feel like I’m either over polluting or over lauding when I make paintings that aren’t abstract. Furthermore, I actually enjoy lying, which should make the process of communication easier. As the title of this website suggests, I find lying or joking to be liberating(maybe a statement exposing true intentions instead of eternally deferring them violates the premise of this website, but for the sake of the point, we will break some rules). Not telling the entire truth is less an act, or an ruse than a binder that allows me to take situations, story-lines, plots, and narrative textures that I am still processing and transform them into language. Recently in a study of abstract painting and procedural memory, I made an analogy to the painting of Lari Pittman and the workings of the procedural memory. Painting is a act or process that establishes working methods that allow it to compress contradictory information into a somewhat comprehensive packet, i.e. the finished painting. Thus painting, or abstract painting is a process that makes untenable statements based on pictorial language which functions as binder. Why does representational painting not feel as satisfying as representational writing, especially given a propensity for lying which should neutralize any bad conscience? As a subject, I am still maintaining my subjectivity and fictionalizing the rest, unlike systems which fictionalize everything in an effort to overcome inconsistency or eliminate moral tone. In painting, subjectivity is fixed. I paint. In writing, subjectivity can be manipulated. The narrator can either be anyone at anytime. I suspect that the disjuncture exists here. Here, I’d like to insert an analogy. I have several friends who instead of creating little life dress rehearsals in the form of art, do what I’d like to call ‘real performance art’. For these people, every moment is filled with inherent possibility-fiction is imported into real life. As a result, they can make it through the contradictions of the day. Inconsistency is suppressed by understanding that ‘it’s just life’, and life should be full of possibility and full of me glazing over friends’ and my own emotions. Life becomes an elaborate act-an elaborate and complicated story where triumph is expected for a narrator who writes his or her life into fiction, and why shouldn’t the protagonist win, or at least self preserve. I love these friends, but that approach to life is alien to me. Instead, I feel deeply alienated and tragicomically castigate myself for cutting someone off on the sidewalk or butting in line at a convenience store. This tragicomic mechanism both stimulates me to recreate moments that didn’t go so well, and influences the way that this rehashing is communicated. The best description of my approach to writing and painting is a thick layer of lying or miscommunication overlying an intact sense of subjectivity, a bright internal kernal that retains a sense of black and white, right and wrong. The contradictions, the moral dilemmas, fragmention, despotism, overdetermination, and gravity are never internalized. Life and subjectivity maintain their primacy, while the art, the language is always perverted.

Le Corbusier

Ontology has been a prominent discourse in art recently. Though, providing a definition for ontology is a gruesomely academic task, requiring tome-length definitions that often spiral into recondite Kripkean logic and math. In summary, Ontology is a broad gestalt that informs contemporary cultural production. David Foster Wallace studied formal logic, a branch of ontology, in college before pursuing a successful career in fiction. Most recently, in a lecture at Emory university, popular contemporary author Umberto Eco waxed on his most recent scholarly effort and forthcoming publishing venture devoted to explicating his new ontological literary theory. In short, ontology is a pressing and important concept for alot of relevant humanistic theories. Ostensibly, Ontology also subsumes current fashionable theories based on Enlightenment theory. Post-modern theories like Peter Lamborn Wilson’s ontological anarchy, Performatism, Feminist theories, and a bevy of others (we will leave the Witzelsucht out for now, see introduction to website) that make their targets out of the big phallocentric Enlightenment ideology, can be cleaned and reborn under ontological matrices(Wilson’s theories make explicit use of ontology, although not explaining it very well sometimes). All of the aforementioned discourses derive their power, however, by using civil explanations, appropriating liberal ideals in order to under-gird vulnerable theories, using a strategy of displacement to derive their credibility. Although critiquing systems which rely on western liberal ideals of rationality and static enlightenment perspectives, these systems still utilize a general approach based on ideals in action. Traditional fine artists, perennial advocates of the incubated action of producing proverbial still lives have found ways to derive power of their own; power that is especially relevant now because of the intrinsic ontological implications of pictorialism. In the fifteenth century, Brunelleschi kicked the whole thing off by initiating the most powerful and yoking system since, linear perspective. Arguably, linear perspective as a system is as important, and as argued by theorists and historians, develops in parallel with the modern invention of commerce. Artists since have found ways to authorize themselves and their products in an eddying marketplace, literally and and conceptually, having no choice but to heed Slavoj Zizek’s most recent admonition in response to the government’s big bailout, “Don’t just do something, Talk.” Additionally, fine artists, at least those who create traditional static art, have no choice but to not just do something, but talk. Artistic product, often when made has no choice but just to talk, unlike post-modern theories and artists who make their discourses as much out of action as huffy rhetoric. If your a partisan with such a kinetic bent, where does the critique end. When canonized, such perspectives become as monolithic as ideologies that they strive to displace.

To add to the whole drama, Laziness has also been a prominent focus of critical attention recently, given credit for creating masterpieces and somewhat resuscitating the almost by now premodern idea of the slothful artist, who bucks society and destroys himself or herself or even less dramatically, the flaneur who lazes the day away by fulfilling his or her human perogative to do what ever the hell it is they want to do. Painters like Martin Kippenberger and Michael Krebber epitomize the ostensibly lazy by climbing the ladder and being recognized by respective bodies of work that don’t purport to offer anything in the way of seeing or explaining, resisting entering into dialogues of language, progressive societal ideas, or outdated futzy dialogues in general. Little by little, artists are digging out of the Post-modern pit, or the cleansed ivory tower by making pictures again, pictures that are as complex and in many ways perfectly indicative of a critical environment based on ontology that strives on understanding the nature of truth. It seems that the time is just right for exploring pictorial space again. Paradoxically, the truth isn’t being excavated out of the magical past, or the underlying geometry of the canvas, or lifted from the pages of Nostradamus, or Poor Richard’s.

Ellen Altfest paints in painstaking details, details of still lives and studio sessions that are rendered astoundingly plain. Part of Altfest’s fascination with detail is probably it’s ineluctable relationship with the ground. And strangely, this perspectival relationship with the ground ideologically supersedes the ostensible pictorial interest in depicting the present, a place where ontology starts and doesn’t look back to. This pictorial relationship with the ground is reminiscent of Japanese landscape, where the distance is foisted up on a hinge onto the picture plane, floating in full view for it’s audience. Strangely, Altfest’s pictures also conjure a scene from the movie Gladiator where Russel Crowe is being extradited by slave caravan to his new owners compound. The scene which recurs throughout the movie is meant to foretell crowes death at the end of the movie, signifying death, redemption, and the transitory existence of crowe who floats free from his ethnocultural identity until the end of the movie. It is not a stretch to equate not only the pictorial representation of floating noting the arbitrary details of the ground in transit to the contemporary shoegazing mentality of the emo. Additionally, the allusion to youth with it’s relative lack of attachment and alienation from the world of perspective proper, is content staring straight at the ground. This is exactly where Altfest’s pictures find there interest. Altfest’s revolutionary stance is not in rediscovering the world, or replicating the chopped and composed perspective of the hyperrealists, but in it’s unwavering stare to the ground. Here, ontology finds a place to speak. It is here that the suspended equations of modal logic, or the ontological algebraic equation finds it’s pictorial equivalent.Unhinged from a perspective that seeks to recreate reality perfectly, the picture is able to make a case for truth.

To my horror it was crumpled into a ball, the word love immediately visible from it’s crushed corner. “Love, Mom” echoing in the recesses of my car floorboard. How long had they been there… Isn’t love the most pitiful thing ever, a fucking pitiful little Moses that doesn’t have to lead the children into the promised land, like a stack of Chuck Paulinuk softbacks, leading to nowhere but their interminable artificial bases.

1. Man, the teaching gigs sound awesome. You can use those to springboard into jobs here in New York.
2. You should move to New York. It is lonely here with no friends (essentially).
3. You’re BUYING a studio? I guess that’s something CFOs can do, eh?
4. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve longed (somewhat) for my days in Chicago… I guess it’s that ‘grass is always greener’ cliché. However, shortly after, I remember that I am in an awesome place and shouldn’t reminisce too much. Times weren’t all that great in Chicago except for friends (which brings me back to point number two).
5. I kept meaning to call you after I got these two e-mails, but I generally only remember to do that when it’s around 2:30am. I figure that’s too late for you, but I could be wrong.
6. Jennifer has insisted I give more of my money to The Man and get my diploma. I told her it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on, but like I said, she has insisted. She is relentless (she’s mentioned it a single time).
7. I have altered my “Cave” video piece using a snippet of ambient noise from the original video footage and replaced the Radiohead music track with an open source (read: free) recording of a Claude Debussy piece that I chopped up and applied some radical reverb to.
8. (I hate ending a sentence with a preposition, but sometimes it’s necessary so as not to sound pretentious, as in the case of the structure of this parenthetical sentence.) I find placing periods in their appropriate positions relative to the closing parenthesis gives me great pleasure (and even a feeling of power over the English language).
9. Shalom is spelled shalom, fyi. I only bring this up because I had to temporarily pause to figure out what “molish” was. I thought you had lost your mind. Have I told you I enjoy speaking in Pig Latin (should those words be capitalized [as if this is a formal letter]?). (I hope that double punctuation was appropriate. Otherwise, number eight was in vain.)

I would enjoy seeing photos from your iPhone device sent to my iPhone device and vice versa on occasion. I think that would be fun. At the conclusion of this e-mail (once I have sent it off from my computer) I will then send you a second e-mail with a photo of what I am seeing at that moment. It will be boring.

Goodnight good sir. Night.