Values

Truth, Lie, Beauty, Artifice, Voluptuousness, Effulgence, Suspension, Movement, Contradiction, NonSensual Similarity, Particularity/Eternity, Critique, Expression, Intimacy, The Shudder, Sensitivity, Alienation, Negativity, Meaning, Love, Freedom, Commitment, Strangeness, Critical History

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Statement or Predigestion?

Go read the poetry! Go listen to the music! What else really needs to be said?

~ The Artist writes a statement begrudgingly ~

Oh … you need your art predigested for you? You need the aesthetic experience reduced, labeled and explained? You want to know first & foremost what this artist’s market value is? Whither the art?!

Though my digestion is healthy, I can’t digest things for you, too!

The Artist Statement — It sounds so profound, potentially the form in which an artist makes bold claims, takes possession & clarifies their independent imagination, draws hard lines in the sand of art history & forces viewers to take sides or recognize the side they’re already standing on.
Perhaps one it can be.

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And Yet…

I find all current modes of everything aesthetically tedious, reserving hope that art can offer glimpses of sur-reality beyond or beneath our tedium vitae. I always hope my art says And yet! to the closed-doors of what is possible.

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The Dissonant May Be Beautiful

More often than not I have a taste for the bitter, dissonant weeds over the domesticated heirlooms.
But where is the feast which offers both?

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Artist & Society

Art in the era of psychological self-imprisonment & fear of freedom resembles the art in prison movies: either scribbled chalk drawings of windows on cell walls, or posters concealing tunnels through which inmates might escape.
I value both, & neither.

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I write …

Essayistically: With no predetermined positions, to discover
Poetically: With Archilochean Lyrical digression, to express

~*~

I compose music …

Abstractly: Without hands or voice & with thoughtful thoughtlessness
Virtually: Like aural projections from prehistory onto the starless night

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Contradiction.

The hardest working slacker. The most truthful liar. The insider of the outsiders & the outsider of the insiders.
The most cross-eyed, with one eye into the mud & the other through the stars.

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Characters & Figures

Trying to articulate the abstract emotions of our era, I’ve cultivated some new complicated feelings — fragmentary or allegorical — & figure them as ‘characters’:
the hardworking artist who Hacks his way into heaven; the not-yet-resigned writer in the Genre of Silence; the self-exiling Deserter who chooses the private theater of the psyche over communal values; the underground insect who vaguely hears a calling; the leftover renaissance man-turned-dilettante who overspills art; the Most Constipated Man who can’t digest our so-called feasts; the person who is a thinking object curated into an ever-expanding museum; The Crumb flaked off some distant whole & drifting as dust in unknown storms; the irreverent Apperceptor of The Drone Years; the composer who lalia-speaks in cryptic electronic sounds; the outlaw galvanizer on ambivalent frontiers; Narcissus & Echo in tragic love.

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Critical History

Yes, of course (art) history is important to my “practice”, as it is to so many.
But in what way?!
As a critical historian, I eschew academicism & antiquarianism, but not the intellectual working through of history, which I choose to confront via the many incomplete art projects of history — as a creator. As a clarifier.
But one must be able to hear the incomplete, to listen for ghosts.

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Irreverence & Reverence

Irreverence is an affect used voluptuously, because nothing that exists in this apathetic state deserves reverence.
My reverence is reserved for what doesn’t exist.

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My Guts

The freedom to shoot from the hip & have guts
(instead of rationalizing, perfection. ie polishing turds)
But first one must learn to conceptualize & fabricate new hips!

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The Hanged Man

I have worked hard to sharpen my eagle’s eye for what is far.*
The rabble will hang a man for such aloofness!
Consider the “de-platform” under The Hanged Man

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Do I Sound Arrogant?

Many who claim their individuality today are mistakenly called narcissists (& by pseudo-psychologists).
The individual who values breaking free of the hivemind may appear to The Collective as a Psychopath. And yet, though only some admit it, we’re all god killers — & who’s more arrogant than those who are aware they stalk and kill god?
My arrogance is my historical consciousness.

Do I Dound Disaffected?

I’ve half-erroneously been called bitter, negative, sloppy, delusional, dangerous. lazy …
And yet …

There is much I drop & spill
I am full of scorn you think
If your beaker is too full
There is much you drop & spill
Without scorning what you drink
- Nietzsche

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*
His look is free of envy, hence you laud him
He does notice whether you applaud him
He has the eagle’s eye for what is far
He does not see you, he sees only stars
- Nietzsche