An artist’s manifesto

4

Up from the basement studio–preparing a block for a woodcut, and began a painting that will be 20 in my Pavement series. I may do this to the end of my days. I see years of possibilities in this–and the metaphor of broken foundations is exactly where my head has been. Who knows what may grow out of the cracks–what we can build from the rubble.
All our high culture (especially “high culture”)–white Euro-American, grew in the service of kingship, empire, and from there–slavery, war, capitalist economic colonialism and expansion to the end of life on the planet. What is there to do, but renounce it–all of it. Build a new world from the ruins.

On Reading Anti-Oedipus… again…

S.C. Hickman's avatarThe Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

the-shadow-of-the-blue-phallus

I’ve been re-reading Anti-Oedipus again (is one ever finished reading this work? – that is to say, Shall we ever come to the end of our writing?) . A passage I came across seems to suddenly jut its ugly head up out of the pages, one in which that duplex figure of Deleuzeguattari seem to become almost utterly angry, ready to cry out to the world: Freud, you are wrong: the Oedipus triangle – Father, Mother, Son do not reside in the psyches of modern humans. Then as if coming upon a truth they’d only just now registered in the midst of their struggle with Freud’s familial romance they insert an offhand dismissal: “The family is by nature eccentric, decentered.” This bit of news sits there between two vast metonymic onrushes of the eccentricity of the family with its brothers in the military; a cousin out of work, bankrupt, or a victim of a…

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Review: Ari Figue’s Cat

A Library Things review of Ari Figue’s Cat.
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

24449754When I was offered this book to review I was genuinely excited. Any novel by a visual artist is likely to discard a lot of the tropes that professional novelists have bound themselves to and which frankly just get in the way of a modern take on literature. I first recalled Hebdemeros by Giorgio de Chirico and the novels of Alasdair Gray and Jan Cremer. I waited patiently and when the book finally arrived I started it almost immediately.
Russel does indeed provide a different take on the novel – abstract and fragmented the chapters, if chapters they be, do not narrate a story of any traditional mode. Impressions, memories, false and true, interior, visual description and musings on the nature of reality and perception drip through the book like Pollocks sprawling canvases and fragments like the cubist paintings of Braque.
Ari Figue’s Cat puts a marker in the ground for contemporary writers. I’l be revisiting soon.
papalaz | May 29, 2015 |

To be honest, I’m equally pleased with the two who didn’t “get it.” They got what I didn’t want to do.
Not everyone is going to like this book. 🙂

(reworked) #355 Missing pavement block, 2nd Street

#355 12x17cm

12×17 cm watercolor, ink, acrylic on paper. Pavement Series 19

Reworked this a bit. I was standing there, gazing at this… the missing block of sidewalke,  and noticed the guy selling photos near by. I explained what I was doing… how beautiful that missing pavement block, the patterns of stones and cig butts… I think he thought I was an hallucinating homeless dude. I told him, I saw this in color… like, ya know?

Tell us, Chris Hedges, What will be the course of this Revolution?

Chris Hedges on Salon

Question is… can we do the revolution, like digging under the foundation, and as the Empire collapses, a little here, a little there, replace it with what we’ve been working to build together, like the ship of Theseus, piece by piece, plank by plank–and at last, transformed into something unimaginable until it emerges, whole and free of the empire of money and death that had engendered it? Or must it come from a bloodbath, where force will replace force, and the boot of Authority emerge, unchanged, but with new names, and new victims, and our new masters?

Which will it be? And do we even have a choice?

Grey Walter: The Non-intentional Consciousness

There is so much to think about here–in how we interpret legal intention, the least of it.

S.C. Hickman's avatarThe Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

consciousness

Grey Walter was another of the marginal figures in the Macy Conferences and pioneer of the cybernetic field, but he is best known for his biomedical engineering and the development of electroencephalography (EEG) and in his engineering of modern technology work on radar.1 But as Johnston observes he was known for one other astounding thing. –

He also developed a method of measuring what is called the readiness potential in human subjects, which permits an observer to predict a subject’s response about a half to one second before the subject is aware of any intention to act. As Walter J. Freeman notes, this cerebral phenomenon can be interpreted as evidence “that intentional actions are initiated before awareness of such actions emerges, and that consciousness is involved in judging the values of actions rather than in the execution of them.” (ibid. 47) The notion the our conscious mind is non-intentional rather than intentional…

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Anna Longo’s essay on Meillassoux and Deleuze

S.C. Hickman's avatarThe Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

In Anna Longo’s essay The Contingent Emergence of Thought in Quentin Meillassoux’s Time without becoming she explicitly states that Meillaussoux’s goal is to demonstrate that reason is not only able to know the in it-self but also to know it as completely heterogeneous and totally independent: thought can know dead matter as something with which it shares nothing, not an origin, nor the condition of its being.1 Two things this does: first, it makes of Meillassoux an absolute dualist; and, second, it seems to align him with the trope “dead matter” or the inorganic that has been a staple of both mechanistic philosophy and scientific naturalism for centuries. As she tells us Meillassoux’s materialism is defined by its ability to “access things as a total exteriority, to access them as completely different from the living intelligent subject. This materialist assumption entails an original solution to the question of the genesis of…

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