This post, Unruly Heritage, like so many of Levi’s, feels like a confirmation of what I do in making art (what drives me, if not often in what I actually accomplish!) . It was my fascination with detritus I’d find on the street that got me started again, after a 40 year detour. That all these things, these fragments, in being broken and discarded–existed in a present– that was also, a Time of shattered chronology–like the shards of broken mirrors I often used–and represented, for me, a kind of freedom. The former use-identities still clung to them, but thinly, like dust, that in rearranging them, they asserted a new identity in their assemblage. It felt very political. Yes, I thought, or felt — THIS is what we have to do to make a new, and humanly habitable world!Right to left, above: #10 “A piece of the Puzzle,” #1, and #131. In the center, the first piece I made, July of 2012, in this numbered series that’s now at #903.
For weeks I’ve struggled with how to compose this post because my thoughts feel all chaotic and jumbled. However, the name of this blog is “Larval Subjects”. This blog is a place for the development of half-formed, perhaps ill advised or poorly conceived thoughts. For no thought can be thought before it is thought, and thinking a thought has a certain element of materiality to it, found within speech and writing. Contrary to Aristotle’s Peri hermenaias, where speech is a sign of thought and writing is a sign of speech, such that thought is conceived as an origin or spirit that precedes speech and writing, there is always something nachträglich in thought. One never truly knows what they think until after they have done, said, or written it. Thought is not what precedes our action, speech, and writing as an arche or origin, but is what will have…
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Jacob Russell's Magic Names 