Creating, thinking. Manifesto

How do men, objects, cultures come into contact, connect; what that results?Traces, traces, imprints.

How to think our differences when everything changes around us, everything is in perpetual motion? It is therefore necessary to think our differences by creating. Painting time is thinking of the world.

To create is a time of thinking of collective memories. It is men who create the times. They share them with other men. Everywhere, there is preservation of collective memories. It is for us to build footbridges, to work about this archeology of memory, of our knowledge. In accepting our differences.

In all this (overall), a painting, a work of art, an artefact is like an archipelago. It is also a field of experimentation, it is a detail (solitary solidarity). It is henceforth necessary to break all fixity.

Think the relationship between detail and totality, knowing there are no boundaries in the relationship.
To connect, link up, join is to think with AND WITHIN the world. Works of art must think and tell the world. They must change, share with the world, and not to confine itself.

Think, create against the closure, disclose the beauty of our differences.

Supplement

They Wore Glasses *

…the value of that erased drawing. Rauschenberg rubs out de Kooning and presents the page that isn’t empty. A fondness? The erasure is a challenge to its value.

Memoirs of the Blind, by Jacques Derrida (which I haven’t read). Drawings Selected from the Louvre collection. An apocrypha of drawing. The Trace. Thematised looking, blindness or lack of sight, touch (Berger said close your eyes and move around the room). A Picture to a Blind Man. School of Guernico – sculpture yes, painting no. (1591-1660)

Literary figures who went blind, Milton, Borges… Pepys

Writing and drawing produce a trace of things. Significance or meaning can become material in art.

The draftsman cannot see, the act is blinding. There is always a blind spot – when making you are obscuring. You can never get close enough to see the moment. You can never pin down one punctual moment. That is now. Which is impossible to grasp or even conceive.

Trace – time – phenomenology – Capturing a moment. A material relationship performed by the entire body. It has the fantasy that it is the present. (An odd status.) The trace is literalised, it provokes the desire to know or see every moment – erects/creates this kind of Quasi – transcendentalism.

Its rules. Its essence

Its definition.

Drawing. The trace is seductive, it makes one desire that it tells you, this is the condition of drawing. It doesn’t give you what it promises, not fully.

Myths of the origin of drawing. De Butade- (She traced around the shadow of her lover departing for war). The story is ambiguous and confused.  No date of origin

The Feast of Balthazar by Rembrandt. The theological value of the written sign. God’s hand is finite- infinite- immortal etc…(the text itself is sacred).

Drawing is the paradigmatic image of sight. Looking honestly- objectively. It can be the visual form of the performance or gesture of making art. Critique, stepping back- stepping out. Escape problems or dead-ends.

There might not need to be a split if I am into aesthetic engagement.

We look at Rebecca Horn. Her pencils set into cloth (tied around her face, mask-like). They mark the wall. This creates distance, a lack of control – made problematic – out of control. Embodied gesture- strange intermediary of the face that draws- the bit of the body that thinks, that does the sensing. What is the relationship with this to Blindness?  (Bona asks)

Julio Paolini – To the Extent of My Vision, charts the periphery of his visual field – lung-like shape- (Blind spots) The relationship between eye- arm- surface. (He wears glasses! – rarely mentioned).

All are doing distance. Production of the mark is production – the erasure of itself as a single moment – the point becomes a line. The visible structured by the invisible.

Expectations of drawings – distance. Roman Opalka 1 to Infinity – (detail,1965) Absurd promethean. Conceptually structured subject – takes – material form. (Dark canvas  – white paint) ‘til the brush runs out and fades – the charging of the brush. The visible system of traces creates a visual rhythm. It will stop at his death – the horizon of his own death. (He signed a pact with death) D. Human being= (Heidegger)- in essence a temporality – an unfolding of time – a certain dissection – we don’t get younger, only older then we die – A concern for our future- hurtling towards our finite end – we know and we care–Temporal passage. The task is… the thing that might provoke you into thinking how best you might live- do/be the best. Perversity=defined as being towards death- the rest of your life is a count up. Opalka counts down. One number closer but one number more alive. His death makes him want to live…

* (Based upon notes made during a Writing Art lecture, presented by Andy Fisher, 26^th November 2009)

Writing Manifesto

By XESKO

Writing is as old as Man.

When consciousness came started the need to express ourselves. Beginning with writings on the wall, with a fury and a longing for expression that even when our fingers were bleeding we didn’t stop.

From there the writing has evolved from simple prehistoric paintings to glyphs representing sounds.

Its development has led the man to voice their feelings and writing has become, report, prose, statement, theory, communication, poetry, essay, speech, critique, dissertation, law, breath and life.

The man without writing is hollow as a dead tree, so we can’t live without it.

Being human is breath, eat and sweat writing.

Writing is Man and Man is Writing.

Want to read more? Writings from my Head

Reading Anxiety

Benjamin

Baudelaire

Goethe

Hegel

Marx

Althusser

Benjamin

Adorno

Taussig

Gell

Mauss

Bataille

Foster

Breton

Benjamin

a writing and reading manifesto

From an artist’s point of view.

 

A writer’s manifesto, any manifesto it seems, is quite simply a public declaration of intent which include a list of charges to be strived for. So in a writer’s manifesto from an artists eye, what should that include? Can a writer vouch to be a better artist, comforter, educator, healer, friend, historian, story teller, or visionary? Can a writer promise  understanding, empathy, laughter, tears, pain and joy. These are huge responsibilities if we think about them.

It  seems that in life firm promises are broken despite the original resolve with which they are made. Therefore I can only speak for myself when I say that, I am unable to list a set of charges for which I would happily accept the responsibility of intentionally conveying to others.

Except that as it is possible, I will do what I do to the utmost of my individual ability, and that is all because most of the time I am reacting to the spontaneous. Therefore in this context of the ‘immediate’ the ‘now’ I cannot know fully what I am doing in relation to what has already happened, therefore how can I promise anything except discovery.

To illustrate this personal point further I discovered that  the writer Jorge Luis Borges, once wrote of an artist who, when he grew old, decided to paint a vast mural of the entire universe. He painted the stars. He painted the birds. He painted the ocean and its monsters. He painted lovers self involved and mothers doting on their children and strong men glorying in their muscularity.

He painted day after day after day after day until he no longer had the strength to continue. Facing death, for the first time he stepped back from his mural to see what he had created, to see the whole of it. And what did he discover? Only that he had painted his own face!

As in the artist’s shapes and colours, so in words. The words paint our selves.

I think life is a bit like this.

This is all I know.