All I do these days is filling pages or shapes with hatches. Like the fill-in sheets of childhood. The exact same thing. Practicing repetition, for tomorrow, for some (im)possible time. Same but without the shapes. The color without the apple, the rake, the rooster. Color without difference. I should do something more in the theme of my drawings, but I would end up with a steady mechanical activity: filling shapes with a color. Is that even called “work”? Work without action! Maybe those who extract active inactivity out of work have realized this inactivity at the start, just after doing. Maybe active inactivity is an unrealized dream of Marx’s predecessors: abstract, on paper. But it is indeed the remedy for today. That Today that has stopped. Today of night–impermeable. Which lightens up in light. Light that does not lighten up objects, but creates them. No objects, 1
Text by Ali Meer as translated by Golnar Abbasi, for the exhibition “Project of My SELF” held at Post--Office, Rotterdam (Jan. 2014)
I do not usually write with ballpoint pens. I do not quite like writings with them because of their strokes; fineliner pen of 0,2. Not because of a change in my preference though. The reason I write with this blue pen now, well,.. it has no reason. I was doing something (like sketching) and in the steady continuation of it I ended up in writing this–and I just did not change my pen.
only images. All cinematic images, outcome of repetition, repetition of tangible moving gestures. Images are not valuable but have become value itself. Surprisingly enough there is no wonder in image being the substance of value today. The democratic-imperialist world has chosen us–all of us–from any class, to be the classless workers of a machine that keeps the apparatus of the system working. Dispersed images not under our control. None of these thoughts come to my mind while sketching, though. For me these are neither worthwhile nor the result of the work-thought. But at least this action (sketching) does not create anything; in creation one falls into the pitfall of value production, since creating something, concretely and by default, is production of image. To sketch is to prefer to not continue temporarily–which I do not know for how long would last. That is why when you ask a person in the work of writing what he is doing currently, you hear “nothing special, just sketching stuff for a while”. And that is assembling ruptured words for a text that is not (yet) under his control; he continues to twiddle for as long as he has not extracted a form of narration out of these ripped-off words–to regain his subjectivity. Words so generic in their ripped-off state that cannot even stutter, coming from the image (translation) of the 2
word. And who is that wouldn’t wish to finish this clueless sketching? To overcome the invulnerable boredom, to create wonderful images, and make it of his own, the original subjectivity of a literature worker?! : Beckett that moves forward, in place. Anyway I would keep on sketching, and meanwhile keep a glance on dispersed images, listen to sounds, stitch together couple of stuff, and dream at night; Agamben in his pure experience and Benjamin in language. In their Messianic timelessness that all comes true. In that Messianic fervor I would toss and turn in my bedsheets again and again. Writing over and over again, putting together and crossing out again, I started writing the desolate draft of this text several times before it reached this state in front of a (possible) reader now. Now of mine, now of your eyes in front of my writing. And something changed in this process: nothing but that, as the person taking this text forward, I have to apologize in most modest gestures expected from a well-disciplined labourer. Please accept my most sincere apologies, for I strived to make an image of night and light, (just like the worker of incarnated writings) and claimed to have been “sketching�! An indispensable contradiction.
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So if you would possibly excuse me, I would destroy the image I made in front of your eyes out of negligence. And to recover from it you would have to make another poor image. It is not night, I have to confess; I do not know if it is daytime or when. The only thing that made me make this mistake is the excessive imminence of synoptic situations, whose too little distance from me not only made this prediction more difficult, but also made me fall into mistakes and delusions; an image closer to us than our nose fuzz, so close that makes every prediction a delusion. The state described here is fog. It is so foggy that I do not see further than two meters away. And now I do not know how to leave you with those images as you have been involved in them now; and fog like an excess to the situation, misplaces and bewilders everything. As supposed to be in this situation, either images tear down or the logic of writing. But, with deepest condolences, that is not the case here.
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