diatomaceous earth

the old boys network demonstrated certain admirable skills but mostly i met it with a shrug after learning its proclivities and rites. so too the old girls network. despite any difference in method, presumed virtues and pragmatisms, they both claim an elitism, exuding exclusion. (revolution has been more about revolution than anyone thought!) like all hope, things have been oversold

it’s not what precedes the –archy

but the –archy …

my feet are on the ground, but only because the grave chains them there

my feet are on the ground – or rather in it, rooted in the grave

these scholars who seem to specialize in little more than de-essentializing and essentializing simultaneously, according to no criteria other than ones unacknowledged and self-serving

there are no rules

that is how art is born

how breakthroughs happen

go against the rules or ignore the rules

that is what invention is about

but this is said by one lacking challenges

in money or access to art’s hierarchies

it’s not that we disagree with her

but the conditions from which words are born change the words

increasingly i can only speak the unspeakable

as the unspeakable can hardly be spoken i cannot speak

writing then becomes about this inability

in these nothing days

days of death voices scamper

through my distributed bod

y, chuckling scrubbing

from the guardian –

in moma’s magisterial, blockbuster show of 2012, inventing abstraction: 1910-1925, af klint was excluded. reflex alarm at the occult seems to have been the explanation. what was harder to fathom was curator leah dickerman’s contention that af klint disqualifies herself by not having defined her paintings as art. isn’t it amazing, i remark, how conservative art historians who specialise in the radical can be?

i read

hell’s orgy is the apotheosis of the neutral

as

hell’s orgy is the apothecary of the neutral

which after realizing what the original is seems more evocative

the differences and similarities among the amorality of childhood, adolescence, youth, middle age, older age … a cartography of amorality

the end-to-end costs of happiness (wellness, wealth – pick a commonly desired state). we can only function because we relentlessly decontextualize and then impose on this decontextualization rhetorics of holism to simulatedly compensate for our embodied splinteredness … the growing gaps between consciousness and our singular conditions, gaps we fill with flesh

who isn’t tired of listening to the white man? but who isn’t also tired of listening to the human (somewhat less so than the white man?)? the few white men i’m not tired of listening to are less white men than things-barely-human hidden in the skin of white men. but for these things-barely-human colour, gender (but also – class, psychic-emotional configs, the manifold intelligences …), these skins and hidings, are just movies one might watch twice or once –