Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Nine, Oh'Nine, Oh' Nine, Oh'Nine, Oh'Nine

 

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Plato

Plato's Bed

Ground
The Bog of Mankind
I see the human shell
Sinking into the humus of historical context
Absorbing even the Classical Greek edicts about how 'drapery should reveal the form'
The drapery index lost
Sinking into the matrix
Into which also the body,
Decomposed but still somehow sensate
Is also in the process
Of being organically digested
And it is Plato's Forms:
No Space
No Time
Laying hard
Beneath the covers

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Collective Thoughts

Thoughts on collective thoughts:

Void
the momentary experience
not void
but simultaneous
expansion and contraction
timelessness
everywhere
nowhere
utter dislocation
merging
without borders
cosmic embrace
nighttime
IMMENSE
distance
sucked back in
for the first
nay millionth time
an immediate sense
of deep memory
a finial wakening
the gaze
so stunning
the voice
so beautiful
the ground
liquid traces
of me
and you


Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Covenant

Covenant
Bruise colored flowers
stain the darkening wood
where once
the edible house stood
and shadowed children
upon the wife
while the maid servant
watched roses
on the edge of rancid
kiss the fattening goose
and promised closure
to the witches plight
that waits in the oven
of a fatherless night.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Spare Is, as, Spare Does.


You let it drop to me.

You spoke of my confessions...

what about yours?

Is it the case that

you and I share the same tendency

to cover our tracks?

One born of preterit hope...

that what cannot be seen,

may not exist...

An ultimate presence and absence

co-mingled in matrixial night,

of the darkest matter?


You mentioned the horrors of war,

seductive cover-ups...

the fashion to obscure the lies

and the drapery

of existence failed.


Your grief,

Nuremberg,

your fathers standards...

splinters in your soul...

a trail of sorrows,

the lagrima mundi...

of your entire life.


Now the splinters emerge

and come to term,

not the first time,

but again as specter

in the form of paintings

as elegant and minimal

as any judgmental

and discriminating Papa

might expect

from his exquisitely

talented and beautiful

daughter,

the daughter

whom

awakens

amongst the ravage

of horror

and human misery

bound in ecstasy.


And under the cover of cosmic night

you do your Papa proud,

your Papa is undone.

Meanwhile the sheets are set

and the forms

remain clean,

aquiline fine,

with all the glimmer

and spareness

one should want

of a woman desired

yet chaste.


Look Papa!

All of it is there!

Your daughter has

suggested everything,

while revealing nothing!

She has done it

beautifully,

tastefully,

delicately,

amid your past

and presence

which lay

concealed

by her growing power,

her frightful bower,

of intimacy and secrecy.


Papa is there a groom

whom shall marry this bride?

Or a seed

that shall be spilled upon her?


My Lady,

To you

I will reveal

only what is comfortable

for you to bare.

I will spare all

or spare nothing.


Spare is

as spare does,

So shall I be spare

for the sake of thee.


You are my ground,

the point of my discharge

vessel of electric overload,

virgin ground,

And to you it is charged

to remain pure

and to remain active

even after the light passes through,

and the carnal blood is spilled.


My lady

I implore you

The sky is alive

for the ground to receive.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

The New World Order Is As Old As The Illuminati' Myth

I wrote this over a year ago when I realized that we were all staring down the barrel of a shotgun we were forced to purchase so that it could be trained upon us. The time to reprint this has come. Today the criminals have engineered the take-down of GE, not because it is failing, but because the cyber-cash-hosts have sent their hedge-men to tear it up and leave it in scraps so that it can be repurchased cheap and reconstituted into the wealth of the new order. And not a soul is squeaking, not a soul.


Each one of us will need to swim or sink...
And Those whom are sucking,
must cease their gloat.
Stop eating the boat...
'cause the bloat wont float.

And the dead don't vote
And the dead don't vote

When excess is rote
better climb like a goat
For the Dow Jone's quote
is gonna sink in the moat.



And the dead don't vote
And the dead don't vote

What we're seeing
is the result of what we've been wondering about for
....YEARS...
How can these schmucks drive a new car?
when they don't make enuf,
far less save enuf,
to drive
a donkey cart?

Well the answer is,
they do it with money
on loan
from the schmucks of
Cyber-Cash...
the greedy idiots at the banks,
who engineer this stuff,
and whom have made such a web of stupidity,
that it could take down everything...
especially now that the little weiners
are just quivering in the corners
like the rats they are,
trying not to lose big,
while simultaneously
trying not to fix things,
because they can't pay the bill,
and creative finance can be stretched only so far.


And the dead don't vote
And the dead don't vote

Everybody's gonna pay...
and pay and pay.
And those who will pay the most,
will not be the holy-ghosts
nor the cyber-cash-hosts,
but the responsible few
who didn't over-eat at the banquet,
and who have resourcefully saved their assets,
only to have them robbed
by the pawn-shop
who will pay the pawnee
to go out and
rob some more,
so that they can continue
on their spree of
over-consumption,
until we are all consumed.


And the dead don't vote
And the dead don't vote

LA LA LA

The Illuminati Welcome You
To The New World Orde
r

And the dead don't vote
And the dead don't vote










Tuesday, February 24, 2009

PATTERNS OF MATTER

PATTERNS OF MATTER


Every moment, every day, we are, in fact, replaced. Cell by cell our constitution is renewed as part of a normal biological process. The atom and molecules that compose our brains right now, are completely different than those that comprised them just a short time ago. The neurons in our brains which persist for a relatively long period of time, are not the neurons we had a mere month before.

So I am a completely different set of stuff than I was one month ago. But I still appear and feel remarkably, the same. My matter has changed, yet my pattern persists. Just as the water rushing past the rocks in a stream consists of completely new molecules each nano-second, it’s pattern persists for hours or years. And all we can ask is who are we? Are we matter? Or are we pattern?

You, I, we, us, neigh life itself and all the universe is in constant flux, shifting every moment, matter forever renewed, yet forever aging. We are patterns of matter and energy persisting through time. And if we could upload our patterns, and replicate our matter; Could we copy ourselves? And if we could copy ourselves, Would our copies be indistinguishable from our originals? Perhaps; but our copies would not be our originals. They would be replicas living a separate life, as a separate system, that was remarkably like our system. Our originals and replicas would be different bodies in different spaces encountering different events, engendering new chance. They would be us, yet we would not be not be them. Something is always the same, yet something is always different. Flux.

Heraclitus, 2500 years past, knew that the fundamental fact of nature is change. It is not being, but becoming that is the sole actuality and eternal destiny for all energy and things. Everything is, and is not simultaneously. All phenomenon are in a state of continuous transition from existence to nonexistence and back. As things are, nothing remains. He stated: 'you cannot step into the same river twice for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you '.

So what is life if reality is merely a succession of transitory states? No matter is permanent, and all things come into being and pass away through strife. This is the universal principal, according to Heraclitus: ...'it is the Thunderbolt that steers all things'. The power of transmutation is the logos of God, the cosmic double. And the world which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made, but is now and ever shall be eternal change. Energy, not matter, is permanent. And energy is not a thing, but a process. It transforms one substance into another without ever becoming that substance itself.

What persists is pattern, which rests, by changing. Even though nature loves to hide, we remain patterns of matter, patterns of substance, and patterns of energy itself. The senses are poor witness as only wisdom can judge. Just as thought is common to all; mind is matter too. And as the one is made up of all things, all things issue from the one.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Goddess Universe-City

Summon
the starchitect
to erect the temple
in the foremost
"goddess" universe-city.

Materialization
of the
matrixial border-space
wherein
vibrations of the voice
guide the
traces of the translucent,

The one is made up of
all things
and all things
issue from the one.

Divinity need not be
sought
when stopping and looking
is enough.

If we do not
expect
the unexpected
it shall never be
found.

Ti's wisdom
knows the thought
by which
all things are steered
thru all things.

That
the world is the same
for all
no one of gods
or man
has made.



ode to Heraclitus
and the

Hin Jew Goddess
xo

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Paradise Paradox

Paradise Lost, Paradox Found:
Fran Bull Riddles with Dark Matter
.


Paradise Lost

“What you know you cannot see,
… but you can feel it.
You’ve felt it your entire life,
… like a splinter in your brain
Do you know what it is? … “
It is the Matrix.
It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
(Wachowski Bro Film The Matrix, 1992) .

The Matrix …is Dark Matter

In the Al-Kemi of Khemet (The magic art of Ancient-Egypt) Dark Matter was the Black Materia-Prima of the Nile from which all life came and went. Later forms of Alchemy, including Jungian, say it is the first-matter in the Magnum-Opus, the experiential creation of the philosopher’s stone wherein full consciousness is co-opted into absolute knowing. Throughout history it has been the physical basis of all mysticism and the occult. Out of its darkened void The God of Christians and Jews created the Genesis; and a myriad of other Gods and Goddesses did as well. Modern theories of psyche and mind pay homage to its’ fertile depths. Post Modern Movements from Pop-Goth to Punk, Retro-Sage to New-Age, extol its creative virtues. Finally Science itself whether high-tech or low-brow dares not ignore its’ dark principles.


Paradox Found

Presently cosmic-physics theorizes at least 80% of the known universe consists of Dark Matter. Invisible and undetectable in and of itself, scientists postulate its existence using measurable and observable phenomena such as the rotational speed and distribution of galaxies, speed and trajectory of light, cosmic radiation background and affects of gravitational lensing, all of which are completely contrary to predictions of dominant Big Bang and Gravitation based theories that fail by their own methods to posit sufficient energy to explain them. Dark Matter, the unseen yet powerfully eminent force is thus believed responsible. As it is now, so it ever was... Dark Matter is the...ultimate paradox to explain paradox, matrix supreme to cosmos extreme, universal womb-tomb for all existence and consciousness. It is a grave riddle Fran Bull knows and explores in her recent 'hybrid' paintings: “Dark Matter”, of which she wrote: its’ "...intriguing presence / absence, with all of its fertile implications and metaphorical possibilities, inspired the title of this series of works on canvas"

Dark Matter

Dark Matter, the series is large, some thirty plus pieces, and offers ample insight into Bull's astute and deviously elegant methods of metaphor, as well as her preoccupation with dynamics of figure and ground which she herein extends to a deeper dimension; one tacitly expressive of the dark interface between the cloak of culture and the obscurity of soul. The pieces, mostly square in format, range in size from 12” x 12” to 30” x 30” to 50” x 55” and consist of monochromatically painted muslin fabric that has been dipped in Italian Plaster and laid over none to few small simple forms set atop stretched canvas frames. While at first glance they function as spare low-relief abstractions worthy of minimalism in their reductive quality of parts and matter of fact resistance to content and detail; they are quickly perplexed by a theatrical tension duplicitously entangled in a simultaneously gauche and glamorous play of figure and ground, ground and surface. By this strategy Bull radicalizes her stated influences of Ancient Classical and Renaissance/Baroque painting and sculpture from which in her own words she sees: "the human body.. portrayed as lying hidden beneath ...swaths of fabric...sacred garments of the divine ...whose folds tell their cryptic stories of what lies beneath, and in some cases, of what has transpired as with volcanic ash ...capable of burying whole civilizations."

In Bull‘s hands, Greek edicts of how drapery should by movement and distortion reveal the form are revamped, and Romanesque preferences for divine costuming, Platonic Revival and low relief representation are redressed to a contemporary level of craftiness inclusive of consumer ready-mades, cultural commentary and postmodern inside-trading. Under the histrionic, exquisitely painted surfaces of satin white, shimmering rose, metallic bronze, glimmering gold, blood red, creosote black, paste peach and primer matt crenellations of fabric, lay odd objects, eerily inert and disturbingly recognizable as lowly craft items, whose associations with home-spun kitsch subvert presuppositions of high-born art and tasteful understatement. Bull’s collusion of mundane and urbane value systems debases signification in a lubricious currency of skepticism and pleasure that operates as darkly and perniciously above the ground as it does below. Presence begets absence and the viewer seeking solace in definitive meaning finds only a retrograde sensation of ambiguity cast upon a timeless ground of inertia as cold and blind as the contents within. The result is unsettling.

The dyadic tensions between conceptual and formal oppositions where-in material and metaphysical dissolution and resolution of figure vs. ground are affectively crucified in surface relations of ego-self, culture-soul, day-night, micro-macro, intra-extra create a tension which Carl Jung believed was prerequisite to the emergence of meaning and James Hollis claimed was the terrible embodiment of the divine. Saying one thing through two that are violently opposed is a necessary way of seeing through to reality, James Hillman noted. He conferred with Heraclitus‘s thoughts that ‘the real constitution of each thing is accustomed to hide itself and that to arrive at the basic structure of things we must go into their darkness‘. Thus by separating one thing from another and pitting them even against themselves in a process of phenomenological “bracketing”, Bull ascertains essence through transcendental reduction while her use of an extreme metaphor is a clear sign that hard answers do not exist. And it is only Plato’s forms that remain firm beneath the covers when reality shifts as readily as the greatest concepts forever elude. Stanley Kubrick once said: “No matter how vast the darkness, we must supply our own light”. Ultimately it is through Bull’s lucid eye that we see Dark Matter is not so much a riddle to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

Dark Matter, the paintings and more may be seen at Fran Bull's Site:


http://www.franbull.com/home.html

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

OBJECT CODE: BUCK_M_FULLER

#96 #% #96 #

OBJECT CODE:
BUCK_M_FULLER


I would like to to introduce an OBJECT, mine in some ways, whom was once a man named Buckminster Fuller, and whom is now a thing, a memory, an idea and a form. IT/HE crossed my mind and a'mused me after having read an exhibit review by Bruce Sterling In ArtForumOnlineMagazine 10Sept08 entitled: "Starting With The Universe". Which, in my less than humble opinion. Yes it
not only starts here,
ends
is here
everywhere here
all it is
all that is
what it is
what it is...
forever.
And BuckM was inspired by it.

I begin with Sterling’s article which was written in celebration of the exhibit: “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe” (220 models, videos, photographs, and works on paper and the only extant Dymaxion car, a fuel-efficient vehicle designed by Fuller), first installed at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and soon to be installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The article, wills Fuller a 20th century self-created genius, an:
“American beau ideal, ’60s guru: non-violent, non-ideological, non-revolutionary, drug-free, neatly dressed in a suit, with horn-rims, and close-cropped hair, ...optimistic yet thunderous, can-do yet contrarian, a firm believer in the scientific method, yet questioning received wisdom in ways that seem to offer broad, smooth paths into a radically transformed world.”
It goes on to say that Fuller should be known and idolized by the 21st century's:
“one million ranting Internet techno-enthusiasts, muddling disciplinary boundaries with their web-logs and search engines“, whom, he states “If they knew themselves better, ...would surely make a point of knowing him”.
The author exuberantly points out that this is so because Fuller was a:
“one-man world-saving machine…a miniature academy: an architect, engineer, designer, physicist, geometer, and poet, whose main occupation was explaining how to operate reality, and who has become ‘the ultimate space-age techno-utopian” who through his “intellectual exploration... had “answers for everything.”
The claims made for Fuller by this author were so upbeat as to claim he was, what the future wants to be now; or at least what present futurist-types want to be: retro-modernist hu-mechs;
bright and civic minded cyber-sapiens who will release the world from the filth of emotional baggage and jettison it space-long into the universal age of solubility capable of dealing with even the toughest mega-dimensional problems. I found these claims so appealing, I decided to do a little more research into Fuller so that I might see for myself how well his character met established canons of Modernism and Post-Modernism, as well as 21st century visions of itself. I of course went to Wikipedia, my ideal world-co-lab-o-pedia; and I also read a few other online articles to learn that Fuller was indeed as remarkable as Sterling described. He held 28 patents, wrote over 24 books, left 270’ of text in journal entries made nearly every 15 minutes from 1915 to 1983, was a popular professor, lecturer and friend to many artists, was the inventor of the geodesic dome (now numbering over 500,000 worldwide... though admitedly abysmal living space), and was an acclaimed inventor and creative impresario’ professing ideas such as sustainability and renewable energy, ‘omni-successful education', and "sustenance of all humanity’. He propagated amongst his followers a ’do more with less’ optimistic view of humanity’s future; and he hoped that society might come to define wealth in terms of knowledge while simultaneously developing the “technological ability to protect, nurture, support and accommodate all growth needs of life”. He thought the cultivation of these views made
“selfishness unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable.”
What I find so charming about Buckminster Fuller, is that he was incredibly creative, hopeful, resilient and industrious in his visions of the future; and that he saw himself as:
“not a category, …a thing, …noun”, but a “verb, …an evolutionary process, …an integral function of the universe”.
I believe that if Modernism could have at least into the space-age, and better yet into the electronic era, held the strength of its’ 'emotional/irrational pole" (beautifully engendered by Buckminster Fuller) against its’ 'scientific, rational pole', (engendered most brilliantly by Fuller) than the force field generated by the tension between the two, might have projected sufficient power to have repelled the now historical shift to Post-Modernism, from having occurred and placed with its' deadly nihilism and black hearted righteousness, a cold elliptical tombstone at Modernism's head. Perhaps if the force of the tension's field had been strong enough, the soulless, machine -like tendencies inherent in Modernism's mechanistic, hard-selling, over-consumptive indulgence, might have been sublimated so as not to have given rise to Post-Modernism's trademark movements steeped in slick sarcasm, sardonic back-stabbing, desperate deprecation, irresponsible defecation and deadly deconstruction.

Yet, from the contents of the grave there is preterit hope, and it is from the congeries of the past, the future is forged. To look toward a man such as Buckminster Fuller for inspiration is worthy, for he certainly bridged the past and future with genius aptitude for the proclivities and desires of the cybersapien generations of today. Fuller anticipated the humech, self-personafying, cybernauts of the present-future world, whom while longing for mystery and communion with nature and each other, are disembodied by over-abundance and an irreverent lack of honest reflection and humility inherent in post-modern culture. Sterling points out that if today’s retro-modernist
"techno geeks knew themselves better, they would be sure to try and know Fuller".
I would agree with that and would take it one step further to say in Fuller, their/our better side is the reflection we seek and might cultivate and admire. Fuller was a Neo-Modernist, with all the , honesty, freedom, creativity and responsibility (*Joseph Beuys' traits for healing), as well as the energy, discipline and loving care to be a 21st Century model for Neo-Modernism. He could see and acknowledge short-comings while standing firm in the resolve to contemplate them deeply and act on them courageously. At the same time, he hoped to cultivate and sublimate the urges, preferences, needs and proclivities of the universe's collective and divergent offspring in all its matrixial worldly forms (creatures, forces, objects and ideas).

Yaay Bucky!

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Text Transgression In Pursuit Of Virtual Materialization

69*[( KENNETH GOLDSMITH )]*96
21st Century Practitioner of Text-Transgression
In Pursuit of Virtual Materialization.


“Modernists came to knowing language better ultimately through deconstruction. I’m more interested in knowing language better the way Warhol was knowing image better, by simply turning the camera on it and letting it run”

( K. Goldsmith: Simon Morris “07 Film: Sucking on Words)

Kenneth Goldsmith, conceptual artist, writer, poet and originator of Ubuweb (an online avant-garde treasure trove of video and audio going back to original films of Man Ray, to Francis Bacon, to ethno-poetics and much more), is true to his words… he lets language run to know it better. Only where Warhol used a camera, Goldsmith uses a word processor. While his literary works, like Warhol’s film works are not exactly masterpieces of plot or drama, they are telling nevertheless. And if it is true, as Goldsmith himself proclaims , that he is the most boring artist whom has ever lived, and that he finds a project interesting only if it appears to be nothing more than copying and scribing, his work says plenty about language and its‘ underpinnings. To know what Goldsmith’s work looks/reads like, one need only imagine a daily issue of the New York Times in entirety, stripped of all fonts and headers, transcribed word for word, left to right, top to bottom with absolutely no regard for columns, lines or content separations; and then pasted into a 836 page book called “Day“ with every number, letter and grammatical indicator printed intact, exactly as spatially located on the newsprint. It may not be scintillating, but it sure is interesting.

Goldsmith wrote Day(2003) from the September 1st 2000 edition of the NY Times, and it may be, as Goldsmith himself believes, the greatest story every told ; an epic masterpiece full of mayhem, mystery, murder, mirth and romance… not to mention science, economics, and every imaginable form of everyday reality. To any critics whom might say about Goldsmith’s work what Capote once said about Kerouac’s: “That’s not writing, it’s typing!”; Goldsmith retorts: “yes, in fact it is writing, because… well, …it’s not baseball!’

Quotidian language is what Goldsmith finds so fascinating in Day, that and the poetic rhythm and cadence of it that when qualified, can be seen as a rather surprising object. This objectification of language by one exercise or another is easily recognizable in all of Goldsmiths works, such as his books previous to Day : Fidget and Soliloquy. Fidget (2000), a transcript of the poet's every physical gesture taken over a 13 hour period, suggests to Stephen Cain of Wilfred Laurier University, that: ‘Goldsmith is engaging with an James Joyce-like attention to day to day minutiae when he records his activities such as masturbating, having breakfast, and walking along the beach. He also deploys Joyce’s use of poetic defamiliarization, by rendering common activities near unrecognizable via Spartan text... for example, drinking coffee becomes: "Arm lifts. Swallow. Arm drops. Swallow. Arm lifts. Arm drops. Eyes move to left." ( Caine [19]). Then Soliloquy (2001), in which Goldsmith records his every utterance over an entire week, captures all nuances of idiosyncratic speech, effectively transforming spoken language into physical material, thus as Caine believes, expanding on Warhol's A: A Novel (1968) - in which Warhol recorded and transcribed a friend's monologue for 24 hours. Soliloquy, designed to investigate how much a person speaks in an average week (500 pages, or about 5 pounds), is for Caine audacious, original and completely consistent as are all Goldsmith’s works.

Further proof of Goldsmiths undeniable consistency may be found in Traffic (2007), which is a word for word transcription of a 24hr segment of the traffic report on a NYC radio station. Goldsmith credits his inspiration for Traffic to Warhol’s Death and Disaster Series of paintings created by Warhol, after he heard a radio reporter state on the day before a major holiday, that ‘millions of people were going to die that week end. Ultimately however, proof of Goldsmith’s originality and audaciousness is less clear and subject to scrutiny. To see it as Goldsmith himself does, as “…uncreative writing (wherein)…the writing is the idea and the idea is the writing” creates a paradox. But Robert Fitterman, poet and professor at NYU seen in Simon Morris’s 2007 film on Goldsmith: ‘Sucking On Words”, says that ’an experimental writing community’ from ’radical to moderate’ would not accept Goldsmith’s work as writing at all‘. He says that the same thing was true of Joyce’s : Ulysses, Kerouac’s: On The Road and Whitman, all of whose works were dismissed as drivel. In Fitterman’s view these opinions are meaningless and old fashioned at a time when so much has been written about ‘blurring the boundaries‘. He explains that ‘writings last hoorah to make a modernist attempt to ‘make it new and interesting‘, became boring after 1990, but that Goldsmith’s exercise of post-millennial options such as the use of a computer, (the central invention of our day which also happens to be language based), and the practice of taking large chunks of language and making them his own , are valid and relevant because the “if it is on my computer, then it is mine’ mode of operation is the rule of the day. (Fitterman in Morris Film: Sucking on Words 2007).

Kenneth Goldsmith was born in 1961, to garment industry parents on Long Island and he attended RISD where he majored in sculpture before moving to NYC to engage in a successful career making and selling art objects that made use of language and took several months to construct. When the language became more interesting than the construction, he stopped making the art objects, or sculptures, and began engaging in the language as object, by its own accord. He started to collect and compile examples of “Concrete Poetry“, a visually emphasized form of poetry/typography that began in the early 20th Century with Dada and had an active re-emergence with the hippies of the 60‘s. This interest led to Goldsmith’s first book of ‘almost’ concrete poetry titled: 73 Poems(1993), which consisted a series of 79 textual overlays in which groupings of words are printed in bold text, then lighter and lighter text; and then appear to expand and contract before blossoming again to fully recognizable words and phrases that incorporate both "high" and "low" culture such as quotations from T.S. Eliot, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, etc. The quotes are apt reflections of Goldsmith's attraction to the quotidian and they rhythmically end in rhyme while creating a lively interplay of content and humor (…ex: "Gain Weight/ Jailbait/ Soul Mate/ Hesitate/ Penetrate/ Watergate". Goldsmith has published 9 books of poetry o date, as well as founding and continuing to be the editor of Ubuweb which he has dubbed: “The Ephemerid Of The Avant-Garde“. He lives in NYC with his partner: artist Cheryl Donegan and their children. He also teaches Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania and is Senior Editor of PENN sound, a radio and audio journal.

Pollock in 1951 said: “every age must find its’ way”. Goldsmith, whom quotes Brian Gyson’s 1959 statement: “writing is 50 years behind painting’, takes finding a way to bring writing up to date, very seriously. He sees the leading poets of the day as the ‘equivalent of 19th century figurative painters, …whom have no idea that modernism ever happened. He intends his work to be a “direct hit on poetry”, and aims at the materiality and conceptual nature of the word via defamiliarization of normative language structure, through pure run-on tactics. He intends that language be placed into a new container, one that is whole, but that still appreciates the cracks and disjunctiveness of the pieces from which it is formed. By this method, the cadence and rhythm of repetitive language becomes objectified to the status of a material thing which as such makes the invisible being of language, a tangible item to behold. Goldsmith says that ’torn, ripped language was at the center of 20th Century language writing, and had so thoroughly atomized and pulverized the word, that there was no more work to do. “Why take a grain of sand and chop it up even further? …why not forget about deconstruction and think about reconstruction of language? Put it in a new container. Acknowledge and rebuild the vessel, …look at wholeness and articulation, …at semantic intactness. Defamiliarize (the) sense of intact language, reframe it, and put it somewhere else (so that it becomes) … a different means of getting at disjunction through wholeness. We don’t need a new sentence, the old sentence reframed is good enough. (Proceed with) … the expertise of a secretary crossed with the attitude of a pirate”. (Goldsmith in Morris’s Film Sucking On Words).

Perhaps it is Goldsmith’s academic work that speaks the most loudly about his artistic practice. Wikipedia purports that his syllabus at the University of Pennsylvania, includes Uncreative Writing, Interventionist Writing, and Writing Through Art and Culture. It notes his class tools as appropriation, theft, stealing, plundering and sampling; as well as cheating, fraud and identity theft. Assuming this information to be accurate, it goes along with another quote from Wikipedia that “Goldsmith's practice embraces the performance of the writer as process and plagiarism as content”. Who could argue with that? But what remains most compelling about Goldsmith and his works, his art, his writing and his process is they are seamlessly connected, one and the same thing. He IS his own system as he systematically procures material from all walks of sensible life via sound and language that are made matter, and given equal weight with things, so as to metra-morph into enigmatic visual art that leads a double life in the world of ideas and virtual reality. He is simultaneously post-modern and neo-modern. Goldsmith is a 21st Century Bard-Artist border-linking with the virtual concrete... transgressing common language ground via text performance.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

What Remains After The Thought Object Has Been Dismissed?

Flag this mess

\/\/\/\/\/\/ :^v^v ?..(...o50...)..? v^v^:\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

Is art since 1945 nothing more than what remains after
the THOUGHT OBJECT has been dismissed?

In 1945, Jackson pollack became heir apparent to
MODERNISM's search for "pure art". Jackson achieved
from within and without what Malevitch and Kandinsky
had tried to do beginning @1920. He reached the pure
feeling in art! The truth behind the concepts,
hidden-objects and things that art had until his
breakthrough been limited to representing. Pollock
achieved communion with the THOUGHT OBJECT! Now the
rest of humanity could too! Modernism having reached
its' objective was free to die.. The world entered
into an orgy with the THOUGHT OBJECT. Hell, you could
have anything in the Fifties... safe sex with a
THOUGHT OBJECT; and multiple climax too! Finally
Rauchenberg came along, looked the 'TO' straight
between the eyes and said: 'you can go now, you hold
no mystery' (chuckle, chuckle, hiss!). And so it
went, maybe to die. We now had nothing left to ponder
and only ourselves to search. The multitudes said we
have sex, and then we have death in this life; and
after safe-sex with a THOUGHT OBJECT, even death holds
no mystery. The time of the anti-climax had begun!
As John said, the Cage door was left wide-open; we
were all free to run... and so we did.
POST-MODERNISM, the multiplicity of duplicity,
the plurality of the Five Stages of Death (Anger,
Denial, Bargaining, Depression, Suicide and
Acceptance). There could be no turning back, only we
didn't know that then. We still had not reached the
stage of acceptance; so we made fresh attempts to cage
something, anything. The Sixties were born: sex and
drugs and rock and roll - and everything in-between...
Then came the Seventies: the last disco in
Pain-In-The-Ass. Caught with our pants down and our
faces dirty. God was dead, art was dead, even Zen was
dead. The necrophiliacs vision of the way it was. I
think I'll go talk to this dead hare; I'll wrap myself
in fat the world is so cold.
When the Eighties came around we were really
feeling bankrupt; but hey, anything to make a buck
right? Let's just make some money, it'll be just like
old times - the Fifties. Only now we can have sex
above ground. we can even let the homosexuals out of
the closet. And in Germany Kiefer can get in touch
with his Nazi roots. Why not? So Schnabel went for
the power, Koons reached for the gold and Madonna
became the Ave' Maria of the Anti-Climax. She proudly
pronounced herself the Icon of the After-Sex.
Finally by the Nineties we come to acceptance. We
readily admit there is such a creature as
Post-Modernism, and that furthermore, it is nothing
more than Modernism's Tombstone. We have reached
critical mass. Science, religion, and philosophy give
way to a glut of information and are no longer afraid
to admit they have no answers; that maybe the answers
don't exist. But the Nineties will not be without a
hero. In accepting death, we have earned the right to
embrace it. There is one man on this planet who has
no fears, shame or doubts that it should be so. That
man is Dr. Kevorkian. Just remember: you have the
right to die.
(1995)

Vide: ...Where are we now?

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

What Is The Child's Play Is The Genius' Game

_______________________
\*/ +-=-=-=-(+)-=-=-=-+ \*/
_______________________

Neutral in overload
tuff tuff tuff
Calm against the currency
rough rough rough
Tried to make a joke
can't afford ambition
Humor spoke of
an over-blown condition

How can something so simple
cause so much pain
What is the child's play
is the genius's game
For fear of a vision
the risk becomes vain
In the torque of transition
the putrid meets urbane

To make love to a demon
to transform like a queer
Is the key to the riddle
the veil we must tear
Mirrored in darkness
out of the clear
Mired in mystery
traces to bare









Sunday, January 11, 2009

The Best Has Bust

( ((( ( <^> ) ))) )


The best has bust

along a long line a long a long line preceptive progressive precipitous processive abyss of non-present past presence slipping slowly sliding away evidence of time no time what time


I bare my soul

selfless soul a droll soul a selfish soul soley human unwound wound up up tight unfit fit to be tied tied to nothing nothing happens everything matters everywhere uncertain certainly nothing nothing matters


In transition

unfettered unfocused uninformed unfathomed unfurling furling future fathomless future fecal future future fetish future freedom freedom not free freedom from freedom forever forgotten forever formless


Beauty becoming

becoming unbounding bounding begotten begotten beholden beholden and broken betrayed and unspoken spoken and spellbound spellbound and spacious

One Hundred Starts To The Dark Matter

/./././././././(+)\.\.\\.\.\.\.\.\

one hundred starts to the dark matter
i wait for the art to ravage the scene
they are turning the page on Einstein
as Heraclitus struts back in

a million volts of energy
discharged throughout the strings
the ground shall be the matrix
for that which steers all things

a zillion light years long
it streaks across the sky
the bolt that burns the heavens
the bolt that blinds the eye