Friday, October 17, 2003

when i go to the art sections in book stores i pick up each work in turn and i sniff it real hard to see if it has the stink of money on it. i am disraeli's england: my greed and my righteousness intermix. ain't it money i want to therapise upon? has money not decided that perpetual war is the economic shining path? i have an ambivalent godlike trickster relationship with money. i need offerings of it that i might ridicule it *. i think this is the cogent career stance. if we built a huge sand tray for society to work out its problems in is that what iraq is? i don't know, fuck, maybe it is. maybe this is what fuctional looks like. but it ain't a nightmare? --- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXbuilding prisons and fighting wars are not economic programs kind to the working man. and i don't want to sell crap to poor people neither. i want to sell crap to rich people. they deserve it. and they need it. so when i go and delve into the economic needs of rich folk and report back i get from everybody i swear a twisted up face like i farted. i say; "that high european money be looking for some blueish american da das, let's corral up some blueish american da das and run 'em over there." i get fish face. "when you pull down them ubiquitous eurotrash art and fashion magazines, when you manage to lift the monstrous tomes dedicated to the vennice bienniale or documenta whatever, you don't smell more money than when you flipping through house beautiful or even texas monthly?" i plaint. i whine. i get sulky and stomp around like rumplestiltskin (?). i'm crazy and fucked up and forty five fucking years old and america doesn't seem to be going in any kind of direction healthy to me. robert rauschenberg was sort of dorian gray (grey?), charming his way through the salons of new york culture and making people take his ghastly portraits. as a refugee from texas robert rauschenberg did better than leadbelly or woody guthrie because "art", commodities of originality or at least limited tangible physicality, can be sold to rich folk. but of course he started a little later.... mmm but it would be true rauschenberg vs. terry southern.... when Harvey returns he's gonna build his tires into a shape of which he has dreamed and then that will attract flying saucers and sometime soon i shall interview J. Evardd Herman and discover his love for chinoiserie (i know that can't be how you spell that). * but not that much. one of the huge capabilities of an artistic education is that it teaches you how to be elegant on the cheap. more later/dear sissa....... 3:51:53 PM    comment []

beuys, rauschenberg, (giacometti in his way) - difficult pronunciations and spellings are a primary aspect of 'high' art - 'high' as in 'that which belongs to rich people', rather than 'high' as in 'smoked', like me..... dubuffet (i said, i think, to you, dufy - a silly mistake i sort of cherish as evidence of my non-integration, my 'outsiderness') pushed "Art Brut", where 'brut' here translates as "Raw" (hence spiegelman's penguin published undreground comix compendium) "Raw"... the art of crazy people and street scribblers. it was the philosophical card dubuffet placed on picasso's card of primitivism. they were playing the game of 'where does art go now?' when machines can always best man where 'realism' or 'technique' are the aesthetic.... Beuys and Rauschenberg put Art back into the Arena of Shamanism. beuys had a show where he carried a dead hare around and explained the paintings to it. he didn't let anybody in to watch. he had photos taken. (note that everything in art is about photography because that's what people actually look at when they're skimming the books. beuys obviously knew and played the power of photographs. he'd seen how that worked. beuys was a bigtime nazi soldier. a war hero. beuys was an outstanding young son of the fatherland so he got a bigtime semiotics lesson. cheap texts in semiotics will take you back to paris 68. ignore these and remember that semiotics is always an enquiry into the power of the swasitika and that silly charlie chaplin moustache. {the putting in power of which was conspired in and financed by families of the same chickenshits who run our country today - to that extent any 'happy' art on the part of an american will always seem tasteless and crass.}) beuys took his dead hare from painting to painting, murmurring his explications, or maybe just moving his lips, taking from time to time the lifeless beast's paw and pressing it to the surface of a painting. thereby, by that 'action', turning the individual paintings into artifacts, souvenirs, of a ritual. of course it's meaningless and silly and nothing. you've been to church, sissa. rauschenberg was not a war hero, he was an east texas fag. he was a soda jerk down on the drag the semester he spent at u.t. as i remember. his was the rise of beauty i think probably mostly in the faggy bohemian new york art world where he ended up up here for much the same reason i think woody guthrie ended up up here married to ballet dancers more later/dear sissa 12:31:02 PM    comment []