No, there is no "problem"... and the only thing simple are the people's
minds who are viewing that work... because truly at the simplest level,
every thing, and I literally mean everything in the field of perception has
become, in one way or another, pigment.. Painting is a moot category, as
soon as the plasticity of cognition began to express itself in Modernism,
basically the Cat was out of the bag.. (like it was ever in)... "Painting is
as false a category as "human", or "animal".. these categories are wholly
arbitrary subjective and cultural.. What we are viewing here are the
ambiguous essences of the noosphere as embedded in material praxis... a book
is a painting is a video is a scream is an email is a murder is a birth is a
poem is an explosion.. they are all molecular vehicles for relations of
symbolic nexus in that referential ether called the noosphere..
Ever heard of "biosemiotics"... Imagine making a painting using lving
biocultures, bacteriologically designed to omnisexually mutate (as all
microorganisms) are wont to do.. Is this a painting or is it "LIFE".. why
its both of course.. the language generated by such an object is necessarily
"dumb" and behind the complexity of that very object.. IE.. the
categorization of "painting" is a kind of romantic cultural reductionism..
all "production" may be seen as a form of the delire of
language/desire/movement placed into the field of materiality..
Painting is opitcal alchemy is sculpture.. Its your job to bend the notes,
masturbate the categories, trick the language nazis, burn through the ghost
walls of lies.. to "SEE" like don Juan.. the nagual of the chimeric image
like the sword in the stone to extract and set to relief.. the new
"machine".. the new "arrangement"... and there is no other content other
than this play between phenomenon and epiphenomenon that lies in the
object.. and that is why "human" is the first surrealist object.. he is rock
who sees the river from its head (in its head)...
anyway.. I just awoke.. I am moving into my "day" it being "night".. I am in
my big old black leather chair in my underwear.. does that make a painting
in your mind. a sentence, nothing.. I would challenge you to look deeper
into your notion of "content"
I have made the night my chair.. and sit naked gazing at the stars.... now
that is a painting...
fresh meat for art buzzards
come and get it...
www.hevanet.com/solipsis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Aaron Kimberly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2000 2:11 PM
Subject: Re: FLUXLIST: Painting
> > 31, British artist, received hordes of free publicity when his collage,
> The
> > Holy Virgin Mary, which featured a black Virgin Mary with elephant feces
> on
> > one breast and cutouts from pornographic magazines glued in the
> background,
> > was part of the Brooklyn Museum of Art's October exhibit, "Sensation:
> Young
> > British Artists from the Saatchi Collection."
>
> I'm going to be argumentative. While your description of this work was
> interesting... it said nothing of painting. It sounds as though this work
> received attention because of the *content* (Virgin Mary/Christ + dung +
> porn), not *form*. Could this content have been equally provocative as
> writing, as photomontage, as video, as performance? I don't believe that
> form should be incidental/secondary to content. In fact, I would say form
> *is* the primary content of really great work. Simply pissing people off
> with contentious content seems simplistic. But, it is difficult to imagine
> painting as newly invented. Newer media doesn't have the history to
contend
> with - but can also suffer from this "advantage". That's the problem I'm
> grappling with here (as a painter).
>
>
