In view of the last number of posts and discussions here – well, in view of all the posts and comments, all the redactions, the updates, the proposals, the critiques of pure reason, most importantly the beautiful rambling nonsense offered by all the contributors over the years – in addition to some long-simmering ideas – and piqued by the wondrous capricious never ending trudge of the calendar dividing itself and us so abruptly, so loudly, so expectedly, and yet so silently organizing and disorganizing our movements and objects – I think it is entirely pertinent at this point to begin to “publish” Pinko’s Copies in a physical, incremental fashion. By this I mean, with the sympathy and help of those of you who are reading or writing this, that we should begin to print and distribute what we are reading or writing. I envision this working only with a very heterogenous methodology. The beauty of the internet, having this zine here on this internet, is that it allows us to create, and not only to create, but to recreate. Our work interconnects rhizomatically, constantly forming new relations, constantly being rewritten. We achieve here a great balance of process and product, or rather we often collapse that distinction. How then, can we recreate this recreation in the physical world – Can we take this form and inject it into the linear moment, to alter, transmogrify the deferral of the passerby, cold and real, covered and rubbing, on the way to the gas, on the way to your pew, on the way to forget, on the way to the jukebox, on the way to away, on the way to another, on the way back again? I would like to see these roots we have mingled and willingly confused begin to extend beyond the borders of our screens to reach the things that they hold from view.
And now I ask, in the tradition and only reigning ideology of our site, what are your thoughts on this?
the ebb and flow of it is its power, print would only dim it.
it’s been going so fast the last week, I haven’t been able to keep up. it’s been such good good stuff. And it is terrifying to read good good stuff as I feel completely uncreative, super-sober, capital-oriented, logistically-immersed, and will I ever be able to twist words around eachother again?
January 2nd, 2008 | #
I think you will; though logistics are necessary too. Don’t worry too much, we’re all currently feeling the Lack in one way or another.
I also think the publication could be a good idea– if only to unearth a lot of wonderful pieces that have been left behind. Though I’m most impressed with what’s come together recently; I think both of the shopping pieces were in part a reaction to Inga’s Tradition, and it’s amazing to see pieces of writing connect so rhizomatically, as Jed says. If we were to have a publication, I think it would be great to have something like that (a little thinking-machine, a short-lived, happily-moribund organism) as a centerpiece — though we’d want to have a few little ditties on either end (for which we could draw from the archives).
Mainly, we gotta find a way to collaborate more — the royal pinko’s we. I would not have written that last piece were it not for Sturgeon’s post. I’d been meaning to write something using the Welcome lyrics for a long time, and his piece provided a framework. I’d love to see us continue to trade frames and canvases. Let one provide the pigment, one the stencils, another the content and still another the form. That would be something, and it might make it easier for all of us to twist words around each other again, and again, and again.
January 3rd, 2008 | #
Also, if you peeps have a chance, the main thing to look at in that convo b/w sturg and i are the quotes from Nancy and Foucault/Borges. They point to what a rhizomatic collaboration could be like.
January 3rd, 2008 | #
Collaboration is ideal, and we should persue it forever. But also, I think Sturg and I know I are itching for ways to make the products of said collaboration extend outside of our circle. So that our project becomes functional, for ourselves and for our culture. I’m in that post-graduate idealistic phase when it feels like I’ve got to find ways to penetrate the culture.
Guerilla publishing ought to be great. I’ve always wanted to just be able to print out thousands of copies of a thing, blanket a city with them, and get it read. But I think that this underestimates the size and depth of the urban environment, where everyone is so oversaturated. So I want to put out a call for strategic ideas for guerilla publishing activities? How can we incorporate INternet but not rely on it? How can we make people interested to read a block of text?
January 5th, 2008 | #
Hmm. I’m not sure I love the idea of publishing in print. I think we could all learn a lot by engaging in a greater degree of collaboration, and it could be a lot of fun… trading canvases and stencils and such, as TTL suggests. I guess I’ve just never taken my writing seriously enough to want to publish it for the masses to read. I like to write for myself and get feedback from the few; it’s a very personal process for me. I guess visual art is different — I’m more excited about the idea of hanging my thesis show than I am about publishing writing — but some of you know how strangely private I am about my art, too. I’m so fascinated by this push [some of] you feel to “penetrate the culture.” I’ve never felt that need or desire. I do hate generalizations of gender, but I can’t help but wonder if/how that plays into this drive to publish. Anyway, all power to you if you want to publish, and you’re free to print some of my work (well, it depends which work). It would certainly be an interesting experiment, and it really would be great to fish out and dust off some pieces from the archives.
As for ways to get people to read things that are placed in front of them, that can be rather difficult. My suggestion for a guerrilla publishing activity: gifting. People pay attention to things that they believe are given directly to *them*, rather than to everybody/anybody. Leave something in a cafe wrapped with a bow and accompanied by a personal note, and someone will read it, engage with it, and probably think it was their fate to receive it. You can even leave things around with common first names on them, and then people will *really* be sucked in. If you’re targeting our age group, just try Michael, Matthew, Christopher, Jennifer, Jessica or Amanda… it won’t take long for someone with one of those names to come upon it!
Oh, and about that thesis show I mentioned. It will be hanging in List (2nd floor, unfortunately) from March 30 to April 5th, so if you’re in the area, come check it out!
January 5th, 2008 | #
‘I’m so fascinated by this push [some of] you feel to “penetrate the culture.” I’ve never felt that need or desire. I do hate generalizations of gender, but I can’t help but wonder if/how that plays into this drive to publish.’
That’s really interesting. I’m not really sure where the drive comes from, either, to be honest. I can’t tell if it is a drive to “penetrate the culture” because I feel alienated for some pathological reason, or if it is an internal battle between my senses which I want, perhaps out of arrogance or contempt, to expand back to its sources, or what might not exactly be its sources, but in fact its tributaries. Does that make any sense? I don’t think it does, and besides both of those options are kind of speaking in romantic terms of internal/external conflict, which I don’t want this to be about. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t know if this is the urge to propagate myself, to reconstruct myself as culture, to see myself in my own eyes (trying to Lacan-ize my masculine drive here), or if this is rather a more complex internal dialog, or rather polylog (there’s your polyvocity, TTL), a confusion of elements which is not so much the production of a “drive” than it is necessarily an amalgamation from which it would be absurd to cut off “culture,” or even to make such a binary distinction in the first place.
Honestly, I don’t know, but I hope it is the latter.
I mean, of course, this is a central question in the production and distribution of any art. Who is it for and why? I recently read an introduction to a book on this topic – the book is a large essay by Thierry de Duve concerning a contemporary art exhibition which he curated in Brussels (entitled “Look” in english, “Voici” in french).
Let me quote a bit for you:
Hamm – You’ve forgotten the sex.
Clov (vexed) – But he isn’t finished. The sex goes on at the end.
Hamm – You haven’t put on his ribbon.
Clov – But he isn’t finished, I tell you! First you finish your dog and then you put on his ribbon!
Hamm – Can he stand?
Clov – I don’t know.
Hamm – Try.
Samuel Beckett, Endgame
… Beckett’s little dog is what the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott would have called a transitional object. It is with the help of such objects that infants learn how to negotiate with absence. When they grow up, some inconsolable children become art lovers, and, if they are wealthy, art collectors….
For sure, Beckett speaks for the entire century. Endgame is not the only screeching comedy about a world in which mediation with absence is denied or which refuses it. Twentieth-century art as a whole was striving to make things that, to varying degrees, managed not to be transitional objects….
The pact that gives art its place in the community has been biased since the dawn of time: no society whatever tolerates works of art being transitional objects designed to fail without wrapping them in misunderstanding. You must be talking about avant-garde art? – there is indeed an abyss being a little stuffed dog and a marble Venus. No, I am speaking of works of art of all times. Artists have been driven to madness paying court to beauty because they’re no less human than any other mortal, and mortals cannot relinquish the desire to negotiate with Absence and cannot refrain from providing themselves with transitional objects to do the mediation. But artists have always known – and when they haven’t, their work has – that beauty is the veil for non-mediation, and that one can’t cut a deal with Absence. This truth is intolerable without a biased social pact. In their mad utopianism, the avant-gardes dreamt they might do without such a pact – no more misunderstanding! down with nostalgia! let’s be inconsolable, but with ferocious joy! – and failed….
The avant-gardes mistook the misunderstanding they rejected for misunderstanding as such – so long had it been the rule – whereas it was only one particular biased social pact they sought to do without: the one that made the artist the partner of the priest – and which presently threatens to return in the guise of the society of the spectacle.
Misunderstandings that oil the gears of society go unnoticed as long as society lives according to common beliefs. And as long as these common beliefs are a shared faith, art has its natural place within a religious relationship to the world no one would even thinking of doubting…
It goes on like this. It’s simplistic and couched in quasi-Freudian language, but I think that’s mostly due to the narrow purpose of the book, which is to memorialize the exhibit (quite a good one, it seems, actually). In any case, I thought it was interesting how this big contemporary art curator was talking about the production of art, even modernist art, as a mediation of absence. Eventually he restates that to mean that the best art terrifies us by first being a mediation and then forgoing that mediation. It’s also interesting that the distinction he draws between modernism and “the rest of art” is not in terms of non-mediation (i.e. formalism), but rather in terms of redefining the basis of mediation itself (i.e. relinquishing art’s association with religion, but not relinquishing art’s purpose as a “transitional object”). I think that’s smart and actually somewhat of a novel viewpoint. Is that what he’s saying?
I don’t know why I brought this up, actually. I guess it was just something Freudian talking about art. Thoughts?
January 8th, 2008 | #
ps. Inga, if you get a chance to comment more about your poem down there, I’d love to hear about it.
January 8th, 2008 | #
hmm, yeah, i didn’t feel like being the first one to respond to that, but I did have some thoughts, too. Sometimes I’m shy.
I don’t think that you hate generalizations about gender. Or, at least, you may hate generalizations about it, but you do pick up on it. Which is good–it’s one of the reasons I value your perspective so much. In this case, it doesn’t even have to be a generalization: I was the one who said “penetrate the culture” and so you could’ve just said it ’bout me. I’m a pretty phallic guy, or at least seem to be percieved by some as such. This makes me laugh and feel good.
But I really didn’t think of ‘penetrate’ in such psychoanalytic terms. I do like the word, I admit. I’m actually making a concerted effort (post-deleuze) to stop thinking in psychoanalytic terms.
When I wrote the comment, I was thinking about capital and myself as capital. I’m just in that pre-life stage, and I’ve made a private decision to try to make it as a producer-of-culture before I fall back on acedemia or raw-deskjobbing. I’d like to think of this not as a drive towards fame or recognition, but rather giving back and reproducing the cultural forms that came before me, continuing movements that were started by others, but in a new and revolutionary way. It’s just that it’s so hard to get published, to get read, that I’m forced to talk about it like a “breaking into” or a “penetration.” which is much less enjoyable than a sexual penetration.
ANYWAY, in the spirit of collaboration, I really want all of your reactions and ideas to my very very vague ideas for a next project, now that I’m untied to brown and before any other structure hits my life.
I’m going to go down and visit our old friend David and we together are going to produce writing. That’s the part I know for sure. There will almost assuredly be some fantastic schizoid creative/lyrical nonfiction produced. But I also want to produce an investegative and narrative piece about the state of drug rehab in the big pharma age, mental health, and the institutions that all this happens in. The central question: what means “rehabilitation?” Certainly not drug-free, when they’re prescribing him heavier drugs than he ever enjoyed. I want to find out what rehabilitation means to him, and, if this is a different question, what getting better means. This idea is really laden with problematics, logistical impossiblilities, foucaultian misnomers, etc., so I’d really appriciate your critical faculties, both now in the ill-informed idea stage and later when I begin to post sections and drafts and fragments.
January 8th, 2008 | #
I think it’s good to share thoughts and feelings and stories. That’s something that humans do. If you feel compelled to share your thoughts and feelings in Providence in a printed journal, then I think you should do it. Feel free to use any of my work for your publication.
January 8th, 2008 | #
and i like your idea jed
January 8th, 2008 | #
Men desire progeny. Whether babies or people they ‘influence’ (by means of art); or babies they later influence. I posted a bit from Plato’s ‘Symposium’ near the end of last summer about this; there, it’s actually a woman (Diotima) who makes this point to Socrates. In that post I also said lets make art not babies. At least for now. Because there’s always time for babies and not always for art. And let’s make art that makes others make art. Because there’s always time for them to make babies, not always time for them to make art. And by others I mean both men and women. And babies too; hospitals should give em crayons soon as they’re born.
Jed, I don’t have any advice for you at this point but I’m excited about the project. I hope you’re excited too. Are you thinking a research sort of project or a hunter s. sort of report/production?
January 10th, 2008 | #
¡MAKE ART NOT BABIES!
January 10th, 2008 | #