KWZEROOOOOOOO
in memory of Ernesto de Sousa
JG: You write that language, and ultimately Nature, is already a package of quotes.
JR: Nature quotes as a slave. Quotes the genetic codes. Everything derives from basic elements that introduce themselves, repeat, contextualize. Worse. Nature is ad dicted to self-quotation. We can quote more freely, even though we are also Nature. A weird part of natura.
JG: Quotes that want to devour us…
JR: And that want to devour each other or self-devour. The world un-devoures & reappears radiated by the game. It is a debate to consolidate uncertainty. So makes (too much) sense. With or without branches of God.
We’re not even here right now & never will be there is no here & no right now!
Genius hesitates-irritates.The very foundation of art is to keep the door open to doubt & mistery.
What is eco-interactivity? Should we be imersed in noise or work in the direction of a living swetness in upgrading order from noise, velocity and changes?
1 — PEACOCK ZERO
Bittersweet anarchy or post-epistemological neodadaism these are some of the expressions with which significantly one is triying to name the present state of art knowledge. What is important to underline in this general and... “cold apocalyptic” overview, is that the simple re-emergence of the pseudo-new, novelty/(vanity) is less intersting than the production of (in)dif ference: post-paradoxical, inter(a/u)topic, transmenipaeic... Throwing it into a multi-systematic opening, a vast sea of constraints-indeterminancy, a rigorous methodical adversity-cumplicity.
Besides which, frequently the blended innovation does not go far beyond a fashionable arrangement of the (c)old, already re-codified... On the contrary, the search for instability, the post-paradoxical blow tends to effectively alter, sooner or later, the pragmatism of knowledge and power, expectations and tastes...
From the Processions to le Salon, from the Museum to the social net works, the expansion of the art exhibition slides mutated into curatorial infla tion. The place is its duplication and its multiples. The expository experience is its confrontation and presence, but also its documentation and diffusion. Innocences, having been lost a few decades ago, gave way to malaise and cyni cism. The reconversion of all the resistances of art (institutions, the market, and museology) into what they precisely denied has been demonstrating the powerlessness and paradoxical triumph of the futuristic strand. The utopia of the articulation of art with life and the world is concrete and vertiginous. Art has been in the last decades this confusion, this mix of irony, sublime, banality and joy that gives us the frisson or causes us to shake our heads. The artist oscillates between complying with the rules of the game and the desire to recover innocence. The dilemma already occupied Duchamp. Art must go underground, he said, we must continue going underground, in privacy. Since art, due to its voracious and expansive character, apparently lost its disciplinary
locus of beaux-arts, when mixed with the paraphernalia of disciplines (these are sometimes condescending), nevertheless maintains an embryonic connection with painting, sculpture and drawing, and all the legacy that comes from the caves. In essence art is the phenomenon of having audiences, whatever they may be. With the advent of social networks we can no longer just call the Spectacle Society the channeling of the masses. The hypnotic and alienating character in the use of telecommunications coexists and feeds the viral character of the spectacular, which at the same time has become somatic and eco-interactive
Interlude — t Ime
Time is information we don’t have. Time is our ignorance. This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn’t absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion. We cannot change the past; we can have regrets, remorse, memories. The future instead is uncer tainty, desire, anxiety, open space, destiny, perhaps. We can live toward it, shape it, because it does not yet exist. Everything is still possible... Time is not a line with two equal directions: it is an arrow with different extremities. The present is like the flatness of Earth: an illusion. “The “present” does not exist in an objective sense any more than “here” exists objectively, but the microscopic interactions within the world prompt the emergence of temporal phenomena within a system (for instance, ourselves) that interacts only through the medium of a myriad of variables. Physics does not describe how things evolve “in time” but how things evolve in their own times, and how “times” evolve relative to each other. (Rovelli)
When we identify the avant-garde, or a rift, one is dealing with a mini mal life. But profanation no longer has a meaning (other than operational, didactic), though Festive Society (the open-dialogical-carnavalesque-loving Society) still constitutes our trans-u/a-topos, our unknown place as permanent invention. To be able to think of it in terms of risk and a clean conscience is to play Time, bringing it to us. Time badly played is Hell, but well lived is Paradise. Paradise now. And so, since profanation is devoid of meaning in a society where everything is profane, neither does it make sense to insist on the creation of Works (of Art) which, as Hegel intended, would have “an end in themselves”, obsession with preservation or veneration. Works of art, more than objects, are processes, performances, the magical appearing of things in between disappearances.
But profanation, more than a state of affairs, is an old structure, (our) knowledge of which corresponds to a diachronic mode: the fruit of time, the illusions of history. A happening, a “time”, a slowness, in which we still partici pate. Also, the way to the Festive Society is diverse, contradictory and multiple, meandering the rules that are blooming on the surface of knowledge. Today provocation is in the field of prophylactic mainstream. Or it only has the reach of regular hygiene. There is more to be done ... To risk, to gamble on dissent. In such a slow & deceptive meanwhile not everything is a step forward… is much a Penelope-like retreat-meandertale (Joyce). Words also die, their semantic networks enmesh and dialectic, more than to open processes, is often used to reforce the system.
Humour-love. As a working method this humour has but one rival friend in modern society, which has not shown all its strength: the desire to take on, to include in itself the Other.
Interdisciplinarity, interculturality, interaction between languages and metalanguages, between the body in external action and the small brain performances.
There is not an ‘I’ and ‘the neurons in my brain’. They are the same thing. An individual is a process: complex, tightly integrated. (Rovelli)
My body is our body. Your body is ressurrecting in my body. Even after/ in our death we are being ressurrected by others in each other. Or further: not being face to Face with God, I am altogether and irremediably facing-myother-faces, which is the only way to discover different ways of being a self in/ with others: the Feast.
Deconstruction, glosa, differance and provocation, questioning and humour (or even scorn) are only primordial elements on the catastrophic but necessary way towards a break and something new. Trans-u/a-topias, paradise breath and madness or marginal or questioning savagery would be other elements that come together here.
…in body art, and in spite of everything that has been said, the body is still a material obstacle. That is, it still belongs to the society of the spectacle. What is important in the body is not the apparent spectacle, strip-tease or some visible gesture, but that which in all this is more than conceptual, imper ceptible, evanescent, though not necessarily transcendent. So, in fact, what? Let each person call it what he will. I shall use the term common to anthropologies and trans-a-u-topias (Festive Society, precisely as opposed to Society of Spec tacle). I call it GIFT.
Body art is body-giving. A huge operation. Because to give one’s body, but the body-itself, is to poetically give oneself entirely. If anyone doubts the decisive and gravely immediate importance of going into the notion of gift let him study anthropology, and above all rend Marcel Mauss.
It’s the state of my/our body that undoes the Last Judgment.
In fact it is a question of reaching THE PEACOCK ZERO, the easy complete freedom of conscience dancing, of the many selves, reached directly, like satori. A passage to a safe refuge of freedom? Freedom is never safe, neither a refuge, but adventurous, enthousiastic, fearless.
2 — DO WHAT YOU SHALT NOT DO (Almada Negreiros)
All you see is doubtful. All you call unseen is false there is no conceal ment facts, sensations, imaginations, are unconcealments.
Our Zero is the growing complexity Peacock Zero: restart and un ending at the same time. J’ouvre le paysage et j’abolis les objects. Time is the great revolutionary destroyer (Shiva).
I
nterlude — t h I ngs
I think that quantum mechanics has revealed three aspects of the nature of things: granularity, indeterminacy, and the relational structure of the world. Things change only in relation to one another. At a fundamental level, there is no time. It isn’t things that enter into relations but, rather, relations that ground the notion of ‘thing’. The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects: it is a world of events. The world seems to be less about objects than about interactive relationships. The world is like a collection of interrelated points of view. (Rovelli)
And how have “the arts” come through all these conceptual tempests?
Let us say, strangely wounded... and prepared for love and fight! A factor of disintegration, the real work of art contains a) its own destruction b) its returning c) its transformation in itself and other works
I nterlude — s pace
Space is created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity. Physics does not describe how things evolve “in time” but how things evolve in their own times, and how “times” evolve relative to each other. Space is a spin network whose nodes represent its elementary grains, and whose links describe their proximity relations. Space-time is generated by processes in which these spin networks transform into one another, and these processes are described by sums over spinfoams. A spinfoam represents a history of a spin net work, hence a granular spacetime where the nodes of the graph combine and seperate. This microscopic swarming of quanta, which generates space and time, underlies the calm appearance of the macroscopic reality surrounding us. Every cubic centimeter of space, and every second that passes, is the result of this dancing foam of extremely small quanta. (Rovelli)
It is a rupture therefore in the concept of space and involvement. In this space all of us are multi-actors ready to live life as a creative experience; and coauthors that is, absolutely (i)responsible. Space in this case is an involvement created on the basis of our thoughts and actions and an opening of the landmind-scapes... We work with our internal multiplicity in interaction with others multiplicities. There is no escape from interaction and multiplicity, neither from love and desire.
In this context art has many meanings, lots of “materiality” as such; everything is sensations thoughts of sensations sensing thoughts in each body. Many roads lead to this uncentred and expanding web, inside and out side the formal webs... there are no more Romes, Paris, New Yorks, only mondialité/glocalisation.
Environment devours objects as desire. Environment (in its porno-eco logical cintilation) is a whirlpool of desire, thinking and acting on us.
Choice presents itself as double bind. Ethics, in general, is double bind supported by tautology and paralogism, and sometimes nothing more than intransigence, stupid nonsense. What can solve our problems is mainly outside our capcity to perceive. So let’s gess! Guessing is the generosity of becoming — proposing new ways of openess, changing allways with the contribution of the unexpected, of the sharing of the unknowed transcomunication.
Myths and small narratives explain certain human states, both in a local and global fashion. They are still explaining much more than we intend. Stories are vital.
We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces left by the (re)mingling together of things in the world, and oriented toward predicting events in the future, toward the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this immense, chaotic universe. (Rovelli)
Nature is never created from nothing. Our constant changing of personality is created from interactions. As a free spirit I am emerging as a kind of an “I “, from logics and contradictions, that is, I am living by the fact that I accept a (more or less) individual self in relationships with lots of things (including my self). Actually I was born by the act of not have been chosen. I am being reborn by the fact that I can chose or provoke some ways of chosing. My freedom has
also to do to what is choiceless and chance, bringing the unexpected outside the cruelty of usual expectations.
Everything the artist takes care is a work of art.
ALL WAYS WILL LEAD TO SIX/NINE/ZERO
Irreversible direction of transformation, dialogical transformation of the past dragging grace, violence, love, humor and incomprehension in its wake; fighting for a best balance in complexity and freedom; making enthusiastic re forms; mutation of the aesthetic into the homeoastethical; definition of grow ing trans-a/u-topian freedom, the aim of all present actions.
A first step, freedom in all forms of eloquence, reduction to sixt-ninezero of all discourse.
3 — PERFORMANCE
I will cry unto God that performeth all things for me. (Psalms)
At the same time God is crying unto us that perform lots of things. We are bringing the gods to the bodies, even when we get rid of them.
In fact, an artist always gives of his divine body, gives his poetical word, gives his gaze, profoundly, beyond the epochs and the definitions of the different currents. Thinking poetically is allready giving the body. Thinking the paradise is giving forever the Body of Paradise.
Every look is already a theory about the world! (Goethe): how to disconnect the look from the gestures and the words that support them?
Co-Invent the time-timeless: for you certainly have time to invent, what ever happens, heaven or hell!
To (un)begin again with easyness, in my beginning is my un-begining — (growing unfinishness) to see or say again & again what was never said all the marks becoming, all the emblems transformed, all the signs of the earth, the sky, the texts, the arts, in your own body.
Accept the fact that wrongness can be your creative chance, your hope, your next wonderful faillure. Recognize your own Wise Ignorance, the breathing of Silence. It is not easy… But to invent the Time there is no other way: Time can only be performed. Time is the difference between performanc es, the variation of consciousness.
Word, look, gesture? These are the origin of some of our current perplexities, the question of all questions, questioning questions, saying in advance. …from the light of Parmenides to the shadows of Gorgias all is unconcealment. Whenever anything is illuminated it is by inner light of the unconcealment.
Art or non-art ignoring “Art”. Art and life and death and ressurrection (Why not?). Participation (secrecy?). Author, personage, spectator (spiting).
My life is, in itself, a plural performance of which I give some outlines, some relics. Have we lost Paradise? We are now working with/on it. What we are doing is only more than a rehearsal. The Paradise rehearses us.
Interlude — t he World
Quantum mechanics reveals to us that the more we look at the detail of the world, the less constant it is. The world is not made up of tiny pebbles. It is a world of vibrations, a continuous fluctuation, a microscopic swarming of fleeting microevents. The world, particles, light, energy, space, and time—all of this is nothing but the manifestation of a single type of entity: covariant quantum fields. It is entropy, not energy, that keeps stones on the ground and the world turning. (Rovelli)
Power is in the hands of the artists even when audiences ignore it. The artist enjoys himself. Art without the presence (whether or not fictional) of artists is not power.
To be immortal dying and being reborn perpetually.
We need both the narrative simplicity and the complexity in which we get lost. We need the drive that is variation. Myths want more variation and syncretism.
The Minotaur is the great performer from the moment texts and works of art are mazes.
P.S. This text is constructed quoting and de-quoting some Ernesto de Sousa originals
John Rindpest 2019
