Thursday, February 18, 2010

Infinite Plastic Knives


I don't need to sit here and write about my general sense of disconnection to faceless strangers I don't have the energy to be interested in. See that picture? There's my face. I must exist; the multitude of vantage points sends me dizzy. I'm commenting leisurely to nobody that it is too cold to paint. I now pay tribute to the folk at mid-city studio for lending me this heater that I position 4 inches from my legs and cannot detach myself from. Do I name this good samaritan carrying out the neighborly ways of ore? Do I post a link to his art so that you can look up his name and scavenge to find potential unpaid parking tickets? I do not know how to go about things now that we are living in the future. Segways and bottomless juke boxes? This is the future? The internet is getting disappointing because I can't believe people could possibly be so interested in each other. Is this really all a reaction of fear & forelornment as we anticipate being forgotten?
I want to be something profound and stable that you can turn to. Maybe I want to hide a few objects in the world that make it seem a little bit easier for you to breathe. A bunch of bastards have naively confused the nature of this exchange; When I read saul Bellow I don't need him to squeeze my shoulder and approve my understanding. The chatter argues shrilly, "Well, how do you ever understand if you really received something how the person who made it intended!?!" and that voice waves a finger and has pointed eyes, to counter and pacify another one soothes, "Ah, well everyone is different and understands things differently." But that does not soothe me! That statements is the basis of a conversation, not the conclusion of one! So, what I'm not gettin over here, is if most of our verbal communications are stunted and generalized- why are we creating multitudes of new tunnels to pass these through?
In a way it is practical for verbal exchanges to be generalizations or banalities; they are safe, and when people are face to face there is always present, though rarely acknowledged, potentiality for violence. I wonder how often bad news is being presented via phone or text message these days. In another scope verbalizing takes place in the moment, often suited for pragmatic events, which is why it's a useful novelty to be able to call someone at the grocery store and remind them to grab some milk. The written word bares a different relationship to time; it can be lasting. Images have and have not suffered the same fate. A very slight minority would assert that seeing an image on a screen or in a book is basically the same as seeing an original in person. Yet 'hand touched' giclee prints are selling for sums that could pay my rent for months.
This all makes me come to wonder if humanity has just never really come to terms with the finite. We are obsessed with replication, with the comfort that comes from knowing if something falls apart if can be almost identically replaced. We assume confidently that no two things can ever really be the same, because at the very least they are composed of different atoms and occupy different spaces in time. This is basically the paradox that everything is unique; because then what value does the 'unique' have if it doesn't differentiate and all is interchangeable? I'm really feeling like we've been building something running off a misperception for awhile now and I don't understand how it keeps going.




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