I want to take a moment and liberate myself of something that has been on my conscience of late. I believe in our inalienable rights and freedoms. I also believe in circumstances that can come about when certain rights and freedoms can be limited, usually temporarily. For instance, I am aware of what is going on in the world, I have access to the same sources as the next person. However, I choose to refrain from making public statements that are political in nature and have to do with political matters that for me are not domestic.
In other words, I believe in my fundamental and inalienable freedom of speech, as well as my freedom to have what political beliefs and opinions I might choose to have. The problem, as I see it, is that as we are living in a more and more globalized world, I do not feel that I have the freedom to say whatever I choose. I believe that with rights come responsibilities.
I believe in my freedom of conscience, which goes both ways. With responsibilities can come limitations. I am free to have a conscience, which means that I am not free to do whatever I please. I am limited to doing, saying, even thinking, things that accord and concord with my Conscience. And for the time being, I find that there is too much social unrest in the world, that contributing my thoughts to the matter will not provide any solutions.
Therefore, I resolve myself to only making political statements about domestic matters. I am a Canadian citizen and feel justified in making statements about political matters at home, even though I rarely indulge in sharing my political opinions publicly. Again, I am all too aware of what is going on in the world. I just do not feel that sharing my opinions on matters of foreign powers and their constituencies, their governments and citizenries, is going to be helpful in any way, shape or form.
Lastly, I do believe that my brothers and sisters domestically do have a right, so to speak, to know what my positions are on political matters, economic matters, as well as social and other important matters. If you are my neighbor, I find that part of being neighborly is sharing what my thoughts and feelings are with you. I want to live in peace and I have found that being genuine and speaking my mind with those in my immediate surroundings tends to be fruit-bearing, not only for myself, but for the community at large. It tends to lead to more social cohesion, which I think is a great good, especially in such hard and trying times as these.
Again, my freedom of conscience, my freedoms of speech, of holding opinions and having beliefs, are not only my inalienable rights, but they are my responsibilities. They are not merely my responsibilities in that they are my prerogatives. I believe that my freedom of conscience limits me to think, say, and do only that which abides by my own conscience. Once and only once I have limited myself to that which I can live with comfortably, in my own conscience, do I feel most free. And at the moment I do not feel that the social, political, and economic context in the more and more globalized world permits me to speak freely about situations in foreign places, at once sharing my opinions publicly AND being limited to that which I can live with comfortably in my own conscience, which is always private.
And so I limit myself to only speaking publicly of matters that are domestic and usually local, in the community in which I live. Any other statements that I might make, if they have to do with foreign places, should always be taken with a grain of salt, since the only place I truly know is the place where I live. I fear that social networking technologies can back-fire. They can be great innovations, they can be truly great things, but they can also spread chaos and disorder, confusion and discord, and that I fear I must fundamentally stand against. For what makes up the content and substance of my conscience are fundamental principles which I stand by. I believe in rights and freedoms, but not at the expense of social unrest, disorder, anarchy, and the like. I fear that taking a position on some foreign power, some foreign government, nation, and its people, when they are experience trying and tough times, is tantamount to interference with matters that are patently not domestic.
I might have a power to do something, to change something, globally, with my Voice, but I cannot have a voice until I thoroughly understand a situation, and I trust that those whom I and my compatriots have elected to our highest offices, I have full confidence that they have taken the time to understand such situations occurring on foreign terrain. And so in times like these, trying and tough, I put my faith and confidence in those I have elected to speak on my behalf in foreign matters. It is the most important and powerful thing I can do, put my faith in those I and my neighbors have elected as our representatives. I shall let them speak for me in matters I do not thoroughly understand, and for which they are in the very best position to deal with. This means that I might disagree wholeheartedly with the position my elected representatives take on foreign matters, and so to abide by my conscience, silence and faith are my virtues, and not the other way around, noise and bad faith or anarchy and discord.
https://chumly.com/n/2377f3b
vendredi 28 février 2014
vendredi 21 février 2014
jeudi 20 février 2014
mercredi 19 février 2014
lundi 17 février 2014
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Letters Through Time
March 19th, 2007
I
The Letters Through Time Project is a painting project whereby I am attempting to achieve the art of Writing-Without-Writing, or WWW. The theory behind this has to do with what goes on neurobiologically during the pure act of writing. But there never is a truly"pure” act of writing. We are always writing"about” something,"trying to elaborate” something, etc. A purely"naked” act of writing would have to be making a"mark”. What is the mark, is it like the brushstroke in painting? Is the mark part of an image or part of a text? What is the ratio in size between the mark and the full text? The ratio between the lines and the marks, the marks and the pages, the lines and the pages? A vaccuous, aimless writing. The ethic of the graffiti or scribble. To write is to form a character, a letter, or a word on a given surface. The tabulation mark on a scoreboard is an act of writing.
Musical notes on a score, is an act of writing. But pure jibberish on a page, is that writing? When does nonsense start making sense? When are we writing-without-writing? Or when are we just plain writing? Consciousness of one’s aim and intention during the act of writing is commomplace. Consciousness of another aim than writing while writing is genius. The aim of writing is not the aim of writing. The aim is making marks, the means is writing, the end is an image that feigns a text seen at-a-distance.
We are playing with legibility, distance, and partial erasure. Also we are falsifying ancient stone tablets, medieval"illuminated” documents. We are falsifying old textual modes. This is the Textbook of English Grammar. The Textbook of Writing Forms. The Alphabetic Tabulation Rites of the English Language. The Encyclopedia of Grammatology.
II
This spring equinox is stronger than words. I am restless, in a feverish craze. I want to dominate the world with my innate personal power. I want to vibrate with electric energy. Itis the birth of the engineer. Can’t you see it, it’s in plain writing before your eyes?
The writing on the wall can be seen in plain view. Is it jibberish or does it make sense? Is it a historical chronicle, a fable, or a personal narrative? Who is it put these phone numbers in the public bathroom written all over the walls? The invisible, erased writer. The author of words or word-formations.
From the primordial ooze, the primeval soup from which life sprang, come the words of my philosophical journal. We are the erased authors of postcolonialism. We are the postcolonially repentant. We walk in the pageant of repentance. We write the words on the walls. We are the naked, tamed beasts of burden. This is the spring equinox.
The moon is absent on this day. I can feel a surge of biomagnetism in my body, in my brain. The truth is mine to bear. To bear witness to. I am the avatar of his lordship’s grace. I gratify myself under the shield of the black moon. I am the aviator Benny Jezebel, old Jesse Jezebel. I write black as night across the sky, in invisible ink, the words of my personal anthem or motto: I believe. Credo.
Tactics: syntax and taxidermy. My new paintings are stuffed animals. I am slowly painting Noah’s ark and all its inhabitants. Two of each kind, male and female, my taxidermist’s shop is being filled with the naked beasts of wonder and awe. The naked beasts of expressivity in the transmission of the genetic code.
Biotic code, code of life. Coat of arms. Armored code, battalion of the aegis of Time! Temporal markers, the passage of the cycling of the moon. Man has a biochemical need to express himself, his knowledge, his experience. Artistic expression is always one kind of writing or another. Poetry, painting, both are ciphers marked down on a surface. Music’s surface is the inner coil of the ear. It is empty space. Like sculpture, too, which embodies empty space. Qualifies it.
Man was born to write. But it’s not the content that matters, it’s the intonations. The balance lies in accidents. Accents, punctuation, the circumstantial. The rhythm and rhyme of the lines, the tracks marked down. The trace. History remembered. The object’s trace in the memory of the mind. Representational space. The space of thought. Metaphysical space.
The writing surface. The body? The mind itself? The inner turmoil of emotion. The embodiment of emotion in painted surfaces. Think of a landscape. It is made up of, say, one thousand and five hundred brushstrokes. Now take these one thousand and five hundred brushstrokes and mix them up. The landscape is gone, but the same brushstrokes exist.
Now take a text. Reorder the words: a new text. Take out all the words and just leave the blank spaces with punctuation: you are closer already to the real text. The body of the text can be said to still be there. What is the body of a painting? Of a landscape? It exists in the in-between space between artist, work, and spectator. It is controlled. You cannot have access to the image, not immediate access, or your mind would fend in half.
III
The experiential"track” of life, like a soundtrack. A personal anthem. A kind of private scribbling form of writing, or a graffiti. Iconic graffiti, automatic pistols of senselessness.We brandish steely knives of senselessness, pockmarked sense, old sense, Old Spice scents.
The body of the textual image, the textured image. The text, a.k.a. word-image. Time-image, space-image, image-image. The lines of sense. The decrypted signifying sense. The received native sense. The cultural iconography of sense. Manmade sense, human sense, simian sense. Primeval sense. Sense of the stars. Sound of the stars. The spring equinox. The body, my body, of the world. The space on which the world is mirrored. On which surface the world echos. The body of perception, proprioceptively sensing itself in space, localized on that very spot that here-now I wakenly slave over time-perception-of.
A.G. (c) 2014
https://chumly.com/n/231aaad
March 19th, 2007
I
The Letters Through Time Project is a painting project whereby I am attempting to achieve the art of Writing-Without-Writing, or WWW. The theory behind this has to do with what goes on neurobiologically during the pure act of writing. But there never is a truly"pure” act of writing. We are always writing"about” something,"trying to elaborate” something, etc. A purely"naked” act of writing would have to be making a"mark”. What is the mark, is it like the brushstroke in painting? Is the mark part of an image or part of a text? What is the ratio in size between the mark and the full text? The ratio between the lines and the marks, the marks and the pages, the lines and the pages? A vaccuous, aimless writing. The ethic of the graffiti or scribble. To write is to form a character, a letter, or a word on a given surface. The tabulation mark on a scoreboard is an act of writing.
Musical notes on a score, is an act of writing. But pure jibberish on a page, is that writing? When does nonsense start making sense? When are we writing-without-writing? Or when are we just plain writing? Consciousness of one’s aim and intention during the act of writing is commomplace. Consciousness of another aim than writing while writing is genius. The aim of writing is not the aim of writing. The aim is making marks, the means is writing, the end is an image that feigns a text seen at-a-distance.
We are playing with legibility, distance, and partial erasure. Also we are falsifying ancient stone tablets, medieval"illuminated” documents. We are falsifying old textual modes. This is the Textbook of English Grammar. The Textbook of Writing Forms. The Alphabetic Tabulation Rites of the English Language. The Encyclopedia of Grammatology.
II
This spring equinox is stronger than words. I am restless, in a feverish craze. I want to dominate the world with my innate personal power. I want to vibrate with electric energy. Itis the birth of the engineer. Can’t you see it, it’s in plain writing before your eyes?
The writing on the wall can be seen in plain view. Is it jibberish or does it make sense? Is it a historical chronicle, a fable, or a personal narrative? Who is it put these phone numbers in the public bathroom written all over the walls? The invisible, erased writer. The author of words or word-formations.
From the primordial ooze, the primeval soup from which life sprang, come the words of my philosophical journal. We are the erased authors of postcolonialism. We are the postcolonially repentant. We walk in the pageant of repentance. We write the words on the walls. We are the naked, tamed beasts of burden. This is the spring equinox.
The moon is absent on this day. I can feel a surge of biomagnetism in my body, in my brain. The truth is mine to bear. To bear witness to. I am the avatar of his lordship’s grace. I gratify myself under the shield of the black moon. I am the aviator Benny Jezebel, old Jesse Jezebel. I write black as night across the sky, in invisible ink, the words of my personal anthem or motto: I believe. Credo.
Tactics: syntax and taxidermy. My new paintings are stuffed animals. I am slowly painting Noah’s ark and all its inhabitants. Two of each kind, male and female, my taxidermist’s shop is being filled with the naked beasts of wonder and awe. The naked beasts of expressivity in the transmission of the genetic code.
Biotic code, code of life. Coat of arms. Armored code, battalion of the aegis of Time! Temporal markers, the passage of the cycling of the moon. Man has a biochemical need to express himself, his knowledge, his experience. Artistic expression is always one kind of writing or another. Poetry, painting, both are ciphers marked down on a surface. Music’s surface is the inner coil of the ear. It is empty space. Like sculpture, too, which embodies empty space. Qualifies it.
Man was born to write. But it’s not the content that matters, it’s the intonations. The balance lies in accidents. Accents, punctuation, the circumstantial. The rhythm and rhyme of the lines, the tracks marked down. The trace. History remembered. The object’s trace in the memory of the mind. Representational space. The space of thought. Metaphysical space.
The writing surface. The body? The mind itself? The inner turmoil of emotion. The embodiment of emotion in painted surfaces. Think of a landscape. It is made up of, say, one thousand and five hundred brushstrokes. Now take these one thousand and five hundred brushstrokes and mix them up. The landscape is gone, but the same brushstrokes exist.
Now take a text. Reorder the words: a new text. Take out all the words and just leave the blank spaces with punctuation: you are closer already to the real text. The body of the text can be said to still be there. What is the body of a painting? Of a landscape? It exists in the in-between space between artist, work, and spectator. It is controlled. You cannot have access to the image, not immediate access, or your mind would fend in half.
III
The experiential"track” of life, like a soundtrack. A personal anthem. A kind of private scribbling form of writing, or a graffiti. Iconic graffiti, automatic pistols of senselessness.We brandish steely knives of senselessness, pockmarked sense, old sense, Old Spice scents.
The body of the textual image, the textured image. The text, a.k.a. word-image. Time-image, space-image, image-image. The lines of sense. The decrypted signifying sense. The received native sense. The cultural iconography of sense. Manmade sense, human sense, simian sense. Primeval sense. Sense of the stars. Sound of the stars. The spring equinox. The body, my body, of the world. The space on which the world is mirrored. On which surface the world echos. The body of perception, proprioceptively sensing itself in space, localized on that very spot that here-now I wakenly slave over time-perception-of.
A.G. (c) 2014
https://chumly.com/n/231aaad
vendredi 14 février 2014
jeudi 13 février 2014
mardi 11 février 2014
lundi 10 février 2014
Painting at The Edge - Painting [in] The Noise Field
Assuming there is an avant-garde in painting, I predict that there would always be an avant-avant-garde, a "garde" before the avant-garde. It is from this position, hypothetical at heart, that I begin painting.
I want my paintings to stand out in the history of art, locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. I attempt to do this by sticking as faithfully as possible to the traditions I was "thrown" into, to use a term borrowed from philosophy.
I choose never to diverge from tradition. It is my choice. It is also a first principle in my art. I have seen too many contemporary artists, painters, fall into a kind of Bureaucratic Painting, a vulgar Technocratic form of painting. All technique with no spirit, no soul.
If all the painters were currently wearing red squares on their vests, I would wear an orange triangle, just to stand out. I strive to imitate reality with such fidelity that when I'm finished, reality begins to look like my paintings.
Collectors of fine antiquities will be familiar with the term Patina. In essence, Patina is what happens to Bronze with time and exposure to the elements. With regard to antiques, Patina is similar. It's the character that the piece has. If it is a piece of antique furniture, a small knick in the finish might give it character, and would be part of its "patina", the character that it has from the passing of time and exposure to the elements, part of the life of the antique, its history, and so forth.
What I did as a painter over the course of several decades was observe patina everywhere I could. I observed objects when they broke, how they broke, what paint looked like when it dried and began to flake. I have "cured" boxes and boxes of paper, from newsprint to all sorts of pieces of paper, meaning that I kept them to see how they would "age" with time. I therefore studied the processes of yellowing of newsprint and so forth, over time.
Anything that could grow old or begin to decline or decay, I studied as carefully as I could. I spent countless hours staring at the walls, observing how my cigarette smoke caused them to yellow and to eventually turn brown. I studied tears in paper and cardboard, as well as fractures and cracks in other materials, all within the confines of my Atelier, or art studio.
It was a serious artistic practise of observation and contemplation, theorizing, and envisioning. That is the physical reality that I strove to imitate in my art, and I succeeded. Now whatever you look at will look like my paintings, for I have imitated reality as closely as I could. You can vandalize my paintings, throw them in the trash, and they will always be beautiful. They will stand out, even in the back of your closet, if you chose to store them there.
That is the secret sauce, however. I also had to make sure that my paintings would stand out, so I designed them with a secret twist, to make them contrast, so that they actually would be differentiable with regard to actual physical reality. The paintings would grow old, break, decline and decay, but they would do so more beautifully than Nature itself would. In that sense, the art I made was and is a statement: That beauty endures all things, that at the End of History, Beauty perseveres.
But I have moved onto other things. That was mainly The History-Project, begun in the Summer of 2001. Now, at the start of the year, 2014, I am moving into the Noise Field, with Noise Field Paintings. Stay tuned. It should be remarkable, if not outright spectacular.
[A.G. (c) 2014]
https://chumly.com/n/22f0d8a
I want my paintings to stand out in the history of art, locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. I attempt to do this by sticking as faithfully as possible to the traditions I was "thrown" into, to use a term borrowed from philosophy.
I choose never to diverge from tradition. It is my choice. It is also a first principle in my art. I have seen too many contemporary artists, painters, fall into a kind of Bureaucratic Painting, a vulgar Technocratic form of painting. All technique with no spirit, no soul.
If all the painters were currently wearing red squares on their vests, I would wear an orange triangle, just to stand out. I strive to imitate reality with such fidelity that when I'm finished, reality begins to look like my paintings.
Collectors of fine antiquities will be familiar with the term Patina. In essence, Patina is what happens to Bronze with time and exposure to the elements. With regard to antiques, Patina is similar. It's the character that the piece has. If it is a piece of antique furniture, a small knick in the finish might give it character, and would be part of its "patina", the character that it has from the passing of time and exposure to the elements, part of the life of the antique, its history, and so forth.
What I did as a painter over the course of several decades was observe patina everywhere I could. I observed objects when they broke, how they broke, what paint looked like when it dried and began to flake. I have "cured" boxes and boxes of paper, from newsprint to all sorts of pieces of paper, meaning that I kept them to see how they would "age" with time. I therefore studied the processes of yellowing of newsprint and so forth, over time.
Anything that could grow old or begin to decline or decay, I studied as carefully as I could. I spent countless hours staring at the walls, observing how my cigarette smoke caused them to yellow and to eventually turn brown. I studied tears in paper and cardboard, as well as fractures and cracks in other materials, all within the confines of my Atelier, or art studio.
It was a serious artistic practise of observation and contemplation, theorizing, and envisioning. That is the physical reality that I strove to imitate in my art, and I succeeded. Now whatever you look at will look like my paintings, for I have imitated reality as closely as I could. You can vandalize my paintings, throw them in the trash, and they will always be beautiful. They will stand out, even in the back of your closet, if you chose to store them there.
That is the secret sauce, however. I also had to make sure that my paintings would stand out, so I designed them with a secret twist, to make them contrast, so that they actually would be differentiable with regard to actual physical reality. The paintings would grow old, break, decline and decay, but they would do so more beautifully than Nature itself would. In that sense, the art I made was and is a statement: That beauty endures all things, that at the End of History, Beauty perseveres.
But I have moved onto other things. That was mainly The History-Project, begun in the Summer of 2001. Now, at the start of the year, 2014, I am moving into the Noise Field, with Noise Field Paintings. Stay tuned. It should be remarkable, if not outright spectacular.
[A.G. (c) 2014]
https://chumly.com/n/22f0d8a
dimanche 9 février 2014
Introducing Historiomics
[Hypothetical Design Science, see: Historiome Hypervisor. A.G. (c) 2014]
https://chumly.com/n/22ec5a2
https://chumly.com/n/22ec5a2
samedi 8 février 2014
vendredi 7 février 2014
mercredi 5 février 2014
mardi 4 février 2014
samedi 1 février 2014
Inscription à :
Articles (Atom)