Lists and Memories

OK so this comes from a rambling that I am trying to be more conscious of.


LIST and MEMORIES
I got an email yesterday. It was from Kate. Kate whose son no longer speaks to her… She was with him everyday when he was in Walter Reed going through rehab. But he won’t speak to her any longer. I guess she said too much. I mean she started screaming and yelling… like an image of one of Kathy Kollwitz’s weeping mothers.
I find myself living in a state beyond rage - noticing it more clearly than I had until a few weeks ago. When I hear terrible news, it is as though I can just add it to the already hefty gathering of concerns. No more sudden "pit in the stomach" - but rather a constant seething that I find very healthy and useful.
Today, I took another good look at Democracy Now's exposure of the Suicide Rate and particularly that of Adam Lieberman who served in Iraq and came back to Fort Carson, completely unable to cope. In his final fury, before he took his life, he wrote on the wall of his living quarters:
"I faced the enemy and lived; It was the Death Dealers who took my life." The Death Dealers being the name of his group - which is a fine topic for another discussion.

Death Dealers
Death Dealers
Deal death
Death, sometimes a good deal…
Sometimes
Perhaps
I’ve been looking back threw my journals trying to put all these lists together. Trying to find my core argument, but I continue to wander. It’s like the memories that can’t be found; yet memories, to obsess over, are found.
Today I realized how crazy I am…
I could not control what happened nor do I understand
I do not want this… I want to belong. This is why I long for love…
Protection but I know I will never relate to it…
I cannot relate to myself let alone another
I cannot understand myself let alone share it…
I am lost, scared, and alone… I have lies upon lies but no truths just anxiety
I am simple. I want love,
To love,
To help,
To make…
I get stuck and cannot move as Rothko sitting before his work with a shotgun…
Love, peace, art…
Fear… I must turn this fear into my strength… art!
Crazy last anxiety
I hugged a concrete wall
I cried
I yelled
I was scared
I don’t understand…
I held the concrete as if it was my mother…

I wrote this after three hours of screaming and shaking on the Hudson River holding onto a concrete bearer for life.
I wrote it after sitting in a shitty bar, in the middle of the day, drinking jack and cock doubles, one after another, just to stop the shaking.
I just typed this out after reading threw my journals looking for something to glean and I find Rothko sitting there before the sublime with a shotgun about to find the American Sublime.
How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?
When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
Blinking and blank?
But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In a vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

I guess that is what it always comes down to; but the sublime is so much like the trauma, like the real, like the events that are not yet mediated into narrative… into some type of consumable meaning.
Meaning that I try over and over again, as so many others, to make out of the sublime, the trauma, the real, and all the spaces that are with out language.
But why?
Why create more meaning for consumption?
For control?
For power?

Wait. Meaning is not control. It is not power. It is the beauty that orders the chaos. Meaning is the symbols compiled into narrative.
Narrative the first mediation, “like life its self”
Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.

Wait.
Then what is all this I cannot say? Is humanity just a narrative? Is all eternity a narrative? What does that mean if all this is meaning? There must be points outside the systems
The order
The beauty
The mediations
The control
The oppression

What does it mean to articulate and share humanity?
Humanity that is constantly moving towards control. Like gravity pulls the mountains down.

But mountains return with the rupture of a volcano; and I guess, I want my work to be like that volcano. The moment that the spectacle, the system, the what ever the fuck you want to call all this mess is ruptured, and the lava spews out, and forms new ground to build something on. That is where I want my work to function. On this new formed land that is still cooling and remaking itself. It has not been mapped out, and I do not plan to map it out. I plan to just sit there Share my understanding of all the chaos. Share my idea of how connected we all are. Share it with whom ever is willing to listen to the rupturing volcano.
The volcano like the rupture
Like the sublime
Like the trauma
Like the real
Like the mediation
Like the meaning
Like the narrative
Like the order
Like the beauty
Like the control
Like the oppression
Like the dehumanization
Like the repetition

Mapping thoughts

GAAG

On January 19, 1971, Hendricks and Toche delivered a communique, Esthetics and Revolution, at the Art Students League of New York. Many of these dictums remain quite useful to consider for artists who are interested in working collaboratively. GAAG’s statement, in its entirety:

TO BE INVOLVEDWITH USEFUL LABOR –AS A REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST – YOU MUST:

1) BE AVAILABLEWHEN NEEDED
2) FORGETABOUT IMPRINTING YOUR OWN STYLISTIC ESTHETIC
ONTO THE REALITY.
3) DEALWITH DAY-TO-DAY REALITIES, NOT FANTASIES.
4) BE ABLE TO OVERCOME YOUR PERSONAL HANG-UPS.
5) DEALWITH ISSUES, NOT PERSONALITIES.
6) BE ACTIVE, NOT REACTIVE.
7) BE ABLE TOWORK ALONE ORWITH OTHERS.
8) BE FLEXIBLE.
9) BE ABLE TO TAKE INITIATIVEWHEN NEEDED.
10) NOT BE AFRAID OF MAKING MISTAKES.
11) NOT BE AFRAID OF BEING INCONSISTANT.
12) BE VERSATILE.
13) BE IMAGINATIVE.
14) GET RID OF PRECONCEPTIONS.
15) CONSTANTLY REDEFINE YOUR ROLE AS REALITY DICTATES.
JON HENDRICKS.
JEAN TOCHE.

An ugly map

I think that I need to think of creating a series of maps or diagrams. I feel like I am trying to over lap a road map, a geological map, a memory map, a topographical map, and a subway map... And well I just don't think that works.

I am thinking I need a...
1. Power diagram (The idea of fee cooperations and free relational work that is not abusive)
2. Narrative structures
3. Organizational: goals-strategy-campaign-projects-tactics
4. Questions: an exploration
5. Free write
6. The story of identity

3 Alternative Statement

What does it mean to develop a creative practice that challenges and critiques the systems that perpetuates dehumanization?
What are the structures that perpetuate dehumanization?
What are the strategies and tactics that directly challenge and critique dehumanization while presenting alternatives?
What does it mean to develop a creative practice that re-humanizes?
What would “art” look if there were no dehumanization?
What would it take for creative practices to function as an agent of re-humanization?
What art would be made if there were no war?
What art would I make if I did not go to Iraq?
What brings people together?
What role does creativity play in that?
What is narrative?
What is meaning?
What does it mean for creative practices to be a link between humanity and meaning?
What is beauty if it is not humanity?
What is trauma?
What are the ways art can order trauma?
What does it mean to behold the sublime?
Is like beholding life? Or love? Or humanity?
What is memory?
What creates memory?
What is freedom?
What does freedom have to do with art?
What does freedom have to do with expression?
In what way does expression communicate humanity?
What is the function of art?
Does it really help?
What does it even mean to help?
What are the ways creative work can unite with the oppressed?
What are the ways creative work can be controlled by the oppressed?
What would the world be like if only the oppressed could tell stories?
What does it take for us humans to value another human?
What does it mean to feel the pain of others?
What does it mean to share the joy of others?
What ways does all this perpetuate the same constructs that got us to this point in history?
What are the ways to destroy history?
What are the ways to destroy oppression?
Does that have anything to do with academia?
What does it mean to be an intellectual and conversely say fuck off to institutions?
What does it mean to say fuck off and fuck you?
What does it take for the world to change?
What is the military?
What are the myths of dehumanization and the military?
What are the myths of art?
What are the myths that I am perpetuating?
What are the ways to be free and share freedom and love?

Edited Statement

What does it mean to develop a creative practice that challenges and critiques the systems that perpetuates dehumanization? What are the structures that perpetuate dehumanization? What are the strategies and tactics that directly challenge and critique dehumanization while presenting alternatives? What does it mean to develop a creative practice that re-humanizes?
The experiments, dreams, concepts, systems, tactics, and strategies that investigate these questions are what make up my practice.
My practice always formally begins with a question and seeks to find better and different questions that can reveille humanity/beauty/the sublime/meaning/love. Formally, the structure of a question is crucial; it avoids an assumed conclusion or answers. Instead it presents a glimpse at an answer while always posing another question.
Currently my practice explores the question, what links narrative to dehumanization and re-humanization. I want to first review the definitions of narrative, dehumanization and re-humanization to begin creating a common ground to build from.
In postmodern theory, semiotics begins with the individual building blocks of meaning called signs — and semantics, the way in which signs are combined into codes to transmit messages. This is part of a general communication system using both verbal and non-verbal elements, and creating a discourse with different modalities and forms.
I will say that these “modalities” and forms can be interpreted as narrative. In other words narrative can be understood as a series of “individual building blocks of meaning” joined.
Narrative’s use of point of view, genres, and fiction and it’s connection to identity, cultural identity, and memory must also be considered but lets start with the idea that narrative is constructed from and constructs meaning.
Dehumanization is a deprivation of constructive human qualities while re-humanization is a assumed reassertion of these constructive qualities. The construction of human qualities is linked to identity, cultural identity, and the construction of meaning. This is where narrative becomes an active participant in dehumanization and re-humanization. This space is also where my creative practice inserts itself to explore the links between narrative and humanity.

I think that it is funny that we are looking at Hayden White to find forms for our practice. I had been looking threw Metahistory as a way to think of narrative and its influence on the construction of meaning.

2 Alternative Statement

Stolen...