roundup ≠ scrapbook

was ist
mit einer
million
was ist
mit einer
million

faul

he du
dummkopf

dummkopf

was
ist
mit
deiner
million
ich
will
es
wissen

aus die rosen der einöde, Thomas Bernhard

Rule of Thumb – the Instagrammability of things:

Aspiring artists should judge their work by one criterion and one criterion only: Do people want to take selfies in front of this thing? If the answer is no, then it’s back to the drawing board, friend. You’d do well to make something immersive, something participatory, something that’s such an experience that it acts as a magnet on the surrounding population, much as a Six Flags or a new Shake Shack might. To make anything quieter or less immediately spectacular is to risk irrelevance.

sounds like i’m doomed to be a failure with my obsession for the un-instagrammable!
*

Wie kam es eigentlich zu diesem grossen Missverständnis? Wann entstand die aberwitzige Idee des Individuums, ein Individuum zu sein? Mit allen dazugehörigen absurden Individuumsansprüchen. Glücklich sein zu wollen, nur mal als eines genannt? Wann begann dieses Ahnen des Einzelnen, mehr zu sein als andere? War in der Steinzeit alles noch in Ordnung, oder ging es da schon los? Der Rudelälteste, die Urform des neuzeitlichen Egowahns? Keine Ahnung, das wissen Soziologen bestimmt besser. Die meisten wissen alles besser. Auch so eine Unsitte. Eine eigene Meinung haben. Fing das in den 60ern an? Zusammen mit dem Therapiewahn? Ich muss meine Bedürfnisse erkennen, formulieren, und es verletzt mich total, wenn du much ignorierst? Aufmerksamkeit will jeder für seine ungemein interessante Persönlichkeit. Seien Sie ehrlich – denken Sie, einzigartig zu sein? Mehr zu wissen als die meisten anderen? Besser auszusehen, ein spannenderes Leben zu haben/verdient zu haben? Un jedem steckt ein ungesunder Grössenwahn. Vielleicht kann man den mit Evolution erklären und damit, dass der Mensch leider dieses Gehirn hat, mit drei Windungen mehr, und es nicht ertragen kann zu erkennen, dass er sich in seiner Zusammensetzung, seinem Intellekt, seinem Äusseren und seinen mittelmässigen Ideen nicht ein Prozent von Millionen anderer Leute unterscheidet. Wär ihm das klar, DEM INDIVIDUUM, dann stürzte es in eine Krise. Aber wie der Grössenwahn das so mit sich bringt, eine richtig gesunde Sache ist es halt nicht, oder wie wäre es sonst zu erklären, dass trotz der vermeintlichen eigenen Überlegenheit Millionen widerspruchslos einzelne Kameraden als unbedingt überlegen akzeptieren? Ein paar alte Männer verkleiden sich mit roten Umhängen, und Millionen jubeln ihnen auf dem Petersplatz zu. 600 Bedienstete arbeiten für die Royal Family, sie warten bei unbeabsichtigten Begegnungen, bis sie von der Queen angesprochen werden, senken das Haupt, fallen in einen Hofknicks, weil das Tradition is und das ja so einen Halt gibt? Millionen weinen, wenn Lady Di, eine durchschnittlich aussehende Dame mit durchschnittlicher Intelligenz und unterdurchschnittlichen Leistungen zur Steigerung des Gemeinwohls verendet. Als wüssten wir um unsere Nichtigkeit, sind wir bereit, Macht- und Wissensdarsteller unhinterfragt zu akzeptieren. Als lauerte das Wissen um unsere Belanglosigkeit tief unten, versteckt unter einem Laubhaufen aufgehäufter Überheblichkeit. Die zunehmende Einsamkeit des Menschen der Jetztzeit beruht zu grossem Masse in der individuellen Überschätzung des eigenen Marktwertes. Des Sozialstatus und des Aussehens. Die vermeintliche Überlegenheit, geboren aus übermässigem Medienkonsum, Therapiesitzungen und dem Umstand, dass es scheinbar nicht mehr viel bedarf, um zu einem Star zu werden, führt zu einer Stagnation der eigenen Entwicklung. Dummheit ist die Akzeptanz des Status quo, das vermeintliche Wissen um die eigene Perfektion. Das hilft niemandem. Der Gemeinschaft nicht, dem Einzelnen schon gar nicht. Er wird aufwachen, der Grössenwahnsinnige, in einer mässig attraktiven Wohnung, mit einem mässig interessanten Beruf und einem uninteressanten Leben, erwachen, alt sein und sich betrogen fühlend sterben. Und dieser Punkt kommt immer. Egal of Genie oder eingebildete Ausnahmeerscheinung, die meisten von uns werden nur noch 20 bis 30 Sommer erleben. Wow, ist das knapp, und das Leben hat nicht gehalten, was die meisten sich vom ihm versprochen haben. Was für eine Ungerechtigkeit. Der Mensch is mehr, als er zu wissen glaubt, könnte jedoch meinen: Der Mensch is ein austauschbares Teil einer grossen Masse. Der ausserordentlich dilettantische Wahrspruch der 70er Jahre: Kein Mensch is wie der andere, ein fataler Irrtum. Es ist eher ernüchternd zu sehen, wie wir alle einander gleichen, in unseren kleinen Träumen und Sehnsüchten, in unseren Ideen und dem Aussehen, wenn wir das akzeptierten, uns als Teilchen eines grossen Ganzen begriffen, mit einer sehr begrenzten Haltbarkeitsdauer, könnten wir erleichtert aufatmen, dankbar sein, irgendeinen Menschen zum Teilen der Nichtigkeit zu finden, ein Dach, eine Decke, ein Buch, wir könnten us gestatten, uns nicht zu wichtig zu nehmen, und die Welt wäre ein erfreulicherer Ort.

from Die Fahrt, Sibylle Berg. KiWi Verlag.

If you’re not paranoid, you’re crazy
how to live in the world of surveillance?
*
feminism as an utopian project for universal justice: an interview with nancy fraser

“The mainstream feminism of our time has adopted an approach that cannot achieve justice even for women, let alone for anyone else. The trouble is, this feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to “lean in” and “crack the glass ceiling” – in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the professional-managerial class. And absent structural changes in capitalist society, those women can only benefit by leaning on others — by offloading their own care work and housework onto low-waged, precarious workers, typically racialized and/or immigrant women. So this is not, and cannot be, a feminism for all women! ”
*
Funny Money: When the law is lawless.
a wonderful guide to the strange world of counterfeits in china. from fake money to fake universities, fake banks, even a fake government.
*
Hipsters on food stamps? Stop exploiting yourselves. Working your asses off in 5 different temp jobs in order to live means the society is unfair.

“The rage directed at the figure of “a hipster on food stamps” is only intelligible in terms of the rotted ideological foundation that supports it: an ideology that simultaneously glorifies the suffering of the exploited and vilifies those among the dispossessed who are deemed to be insufficiently hardworking or self-reliant.”

*

You had left that world behind in the hope it might be thoroughly transformed in your absence, but nothing of the sort has occurred. It got along quite nicely without you and it adjusts quite smoothly to your return. People and things conspire to make it seem as if you had not been away. For my own part, I left without regrets and I come back to it again without any great emotion. People are a thousand times more preoccupied with their own little lives than with the strangeness of another world. You are best advised, then, to land discreetly, to come back politely into this world keeping anything you may have to say – along with the few sights still gleaming in your memory – strictly to yourself.

Jean Baudrillard, America, pp. 77

*

“In the process of composing Visage I, repetition presented for me not so much a process as the observation of the social organisation of time. Thus observed, time organises itself in layers and according to different points of via – social, political and sentimental. That is the sense in which repetition fascinated me. Repetition is thus an area where there are resemblances as well as differences: if I repeat the same phrase twice, the moment has changed. One can hope even if one is very pessimistic, that thought accumulates an experience or a memory, and that if you superimpose a purely mechanical repetition, it is seen every tim as an event and not a redundancy.”

Luc Ferrari, I was running in so many different directions, 1994

“Since i want to make something, I need rules….My option is to follow the rules of the game that I invented, so I also have the option of infringing upon them. We cannot but be aware of the manipulation of opposites: law and freedom, seriousness and derision, abstraction and realism.”

from Jacqueline Caux, Presque rien avec Luc Ferrari

*

Today’s reason to give in to sloth, which is to fight sloth, to justify the action of customising my cardigan with a needle and some thread:

Early Church doctrine generally viewed free time as a temptation, leisure as an invitation to sloth. This feared applied particularly to women. Eve was the temptress, distracting man from his work. The Church Fathers imagined women as specifically prone to sexual licence if they had nothing to occupy their hands. This prejudice bred a practice: female temptation could be countered by a particular craft, that of the needle, whether in weaving or embroidery, the woman’s hands kept ever busy.

The needle as a remedy for female idleness traces back to the early Church Father Jerome. As is the way of prejudices that mature in time, this sexual negative became by the middle ages also a source of honour. As the historian Edward Lucie-Smith points out, “queens were not ashamed both to weave and sew”.

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, pp-57-8

*

Die Wahrheit ist, dass ich nur im Auto sitzend zwischen dem einen Ort, den ich gerade verlassen habe und dem andern, auf den ich zufahre,  glücklich bin, nur im Auto und auf der Fahrt bin ich glücklich, ich bin der unglücklichste Ankommende, den man sich vorstellen kann, gleich, wo ich ankommen, komme ich an, bin ich unglücklich. Ich gehöre zu den Menschen, die im Grunde keinen Ort auf der Welt aushalten und die nur glücklich sind zwischen den Orten, von denen sie weg und auf die sie zufahren.

Thomas Bernhard, Wittgensteins Neffe, 1982

*

Die Leute begehen in den Museen ja immer den Fehler, dass sie sich zuviel vornehmen, dass sie alles sehen wollen, so gehen sie und gehen sie und schauen und schauen und brechen dann plötzlich, weil sie sich ganz einfach an Kunst überfressen haben, zusammen…

Ich gehe durch die Stadt und denke, dass ich diese Stadt nicht mehr aushalte und dass ich nicht nur die Stadt nicht mehr aushalte, dass ich die ganze Welt und in der Folge eben die ganze Menschheit nicht mehr aushalte, denn die Welt und die ganze Menschheit sind ja mittlerweile so entsetzlich geworden, dass sie bald nicht mehr auszuhalten sind, wenigstens nicht für einen Menschen wie ich. Für einen Verstandesmenschen wie für einen Gefühlsmenschen wie mich ist die Welt und ist die Menschheit bald nicht mehr auszuhalten…

Thomas Berhnard, “Alte Meister”, 1985

*

“Universities used to be communities; they used to be places where intellectual life really happened. They were also places where avant-garde stuff was happening. And that’s – in England anyway – completely ground to a halt. Universities are largely sold as factories for production of increasingly uninteresting, depressed people wandering around complaining.”

…

“For me, the big problem in politics has always been the problem of motivation – how can you motivate a self to act on some conception of what it believes to be good. We live in a context of overwhelming, de-motivated cynicism, let’s say, which we could talk about separately. But what’s been amazing over the last year is watching how a certain movement caught fire, which to me is a kind of ethico-politico response to a wrong. To put it in a slogan: ‘60s struggles were about a kind of self-liberation, whereas more recent struggles have been about liberation of the Other, or issues of equality or fairness that might not be ones that I directly experience because I live in a state of relative privilege, but ones that I’m prepared to engage with because I think there’s a wrong here which needs to be addressed.”

Simon Critchley, interview on Figure/Ground with Andrew Hines, July 29th, 2012, http://figureground.ca/interviews/simon-critchley/

*

The agent of the spectacle placed on stage as a star is the opposite of the individual, the enemy of the individual in himself as well as in others. Passing into the spectacle as a model for identification, the agent renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the course of things. The consumption celebrity superficially represents different types of personality and shows each of these types having equal access to the totality of consumption and finding similar happiness there.

The Society of the Spectacle, 61, Guy Debord, 1967.

*

“What interest does the modern individual have in being represented – the individual of the networks and the virtual, the multi-focal individual of the operational sphere? He does his business, and that is that. What does he care for transcendence? He lives very well in immanence and interaction. What does a political will mean to him, a collective will, that glimmer of sovereignty he delegated to the social organization? There is no longer any delegation of the will, or of desire. The screen of communication has smashed the mirror of representation. Now only statistical shadows circulate – on the opinion-poll screens. There is no social contract any longer: on the media screens, only the image-playback functions. The citizen’s only symbolic capital is that of his disaffection and political poverty, that very poverty managed by our official representatives (that is the secret of their corruption).”

Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, pp. 139-140.

*

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.

in John Cage, Silence pp.93.

*

“Let’s say you have a tube of paint; you didn’t make it. You bought it and used it as a ready-made…Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things like even his mother and father.”

Marcel Duchamp, quoted in David Joselit, “Molds and Swarms”, in Molesworth, Part Object Part Sculpture, 158.

*

(One day in September 1971 I discovered that if I made the slightest mark on a sheet of paper with a pencil, I was irrevocably altering the order of the universe. Any subsequent inventory or documentation of the order of the universe would have to include my mark, and therefore my act called for a new definition of the universal order. That means that changing the universe is a fairly simple thing, it is something that anyone can do, without any university studies. It is more difficult to try to convince the art market that you really did introduce a change, not to mention getting paid for the effort.

Luis Camnitzer, “Chronology”. posted 04.11.2010.)

You haven’t heard about the butterfly-wing theory? When a butter flutters its wings somewhere in China, they affect everything else in the world. That little flutter, what it causes, is connected to absolutely everything else. There is nothing, nothing, no action no matter how small, how insignificant, how invisible, between the blood cells…that does not set the next thing in motion, and that sets the next, and that goes on and on and on…And changes the world.

Jonas Mekas, “Step Across the Border”, 1990.

Three or four hundred yards from the Pyramid, I bent down, I scooped up a handful of sand, I let it silently spill a little further away and said under my breath: I am modifying the Sahara.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Desert”, 1984.

*

I try to pick things that would make people say, “I was just thinking about that a couple of days ago; I didn’t say it exactly like that but I had that idea.”

Laurie Anderson

—

I turn to the question audience to see of their experiences might enlighten mine and break the isolation of my experience, to see if performance art puts them into the same dilemma.

Barbara Smith

*

Anger and frustration are two very strong feelings of motivation for me. They get me into the studio, get me to do the work.

Bruce Nauman, 1987.

—

To be happy with a man and have nothing to say, or to be miserable and do something out of this misery.

Sophie Calle, 2003.

*

Just like having an idea is nothing extraordinary for humans,

“Simply wanting to do something is rarely a sufficient condition to enable one to do it.”

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks

*

Was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction: to say no to unproductive activities, to banish casual pleasures, to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procreation?

Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.

The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Michel Foucault, 1978.

*

“I don’t believe poets when they say I, and I wish people wouldn’t believe me. Poetic material starts by being personal but the deeper we go inside the more we become everybody.”

Interview with Donald Hall, The Paris Review No.120, 1991.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2163/the-art-of-poetry-no-43-donald-hall

*

“Capitalist relations increasingly shaped artistic production itself. Ideally, artists control their output, they create objects in accordance with the laws of beauty, humanising the natural world by transforming matter in a way that expresses their own human essence. The activity of the artist attempts a self expression that is denied in alienated labour. But once artists are at the mercy of the market alienation is reintroduced. The market separates producer from consumer. Ours is a social species that emerged precisely through co-operative labour. The fact that an artist must present a finished product to an audience who passively and privately consume it disrupts the free flow of ideas that are essential to real creativity.”

Chris Nineham, “Art and alienation: a reply to John Molyneux”, Issue 82, International Socialism Journal, March 1999

*

My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in lovemaking; that is to say: heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

John Barth

*

“We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts if, one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we have only the vaguest of ideas and, despite the false air of confidence which we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in the verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even sometimes, to find each other.

…

Why it is that while communication technologies continue to develop in a genuinely geometric progression, from improvement to improvement, the other form of communication, proper, real communication, from me to you, from us to them, should still be this confusion crisscrossed with cul-de-sacs, so deceiving with its illusory esplanades, and as devious in expression as in concealment.”

José Saramago, The Double

*

What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself. This is why modern art will continue, because this condition remains; it is the modern human condition…it is about the hurt of not being able to express yourself properly, to express you intimate relations, your unconscious, to trust the world enough to express yourself directly in it. It is about trying to be sane in this situation, of being tentatively and temporarily sane by expressing yourself. All art comes from terrific failures and terrific needs that we have. It is about the difficult of being a self because one is neglected. Everywhere in the modern world there is neglect, the need to be recognized, which is not satisfied. Art is a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.

Interview, 1988.

***

“The demands of love are too great, and you withdraw.
We destroy the very thing we most desire.”

Postscript to “The Puritan”, 1947/1990.

Louise Bourgeois

*

“What do you do?”
“I am omnipotent and do whatever the fuck I like.”

One day in September 1971 I discovered that if I made the slightest mark on a sheet of paper with a pencil, I was irrevocably altering the order of the universe. Any subsequent inventory or documentation of the order of the universe would have to include my mark, and therefore my act called for a new definition of the universal order. That means that changing the universe is a fairly simple thing, it is something that anyone can do, without any university studies. It is more difficult to try to convince the art market that you really did introduce a change, not to mention getting paid for the effort.

Luis Camnitzer “Chronology”

*

“The thing about relationships is, they are scary. The metaphors that accrue around vampires confirm it. Ward off a bloodsucker as you would an overeager date, by eating lots of garlic. If you need to stop him for good, drive a stake through his heart. Do you feel empty or drained in the sober light of morning? Maybe you shouldn’t have invited her in. It’s as if us monster junkies can’t stop reciting one of intimacy’s first principles: The person you love—your protector, your comfort—has, necessarily, an almost preternatural power to hurt you.”

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/10/29/my-werewolf-fantasy/

“Contributing to, or participating in, something that does not tolerate definition or other forms of circumscription (so being part of something that is ultimately unknowable: not knowing what we’re doing) is one of the ways in which “culture” in general essentially reproduces itself.”

Dieter Roelstraete, “What is not Comtemporary Art”, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/106

If so,

“In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.”

T. S. Eliot, 2.III, “Four Quartets”

*

When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same. I mean you compare time to a road, death to sleeping, life to dreaming, and those are the great metaphors in literature because they correspond to something essential. If you invent metaphors, they are apt to be surprising during the fraction of a second, but they strike no deep emotion whatever. If you think of life as a dream, that is a thought, a thought that is real, or at least that most men are bound to have, no? “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” I think that’s better than the idea of shocking people, than finding connections between things that have never been connected before, because there is no real connection, so the whole thing is a kind of juggling.

—

From an interview with Borges
From the Paris Review Interviews, now available online for free:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4331/the-art-of-fiction-no-39-jorge-luis-borges

“Kissing someone is actually sucking on a long tube the other end of which is full of excrement.

…her feelings controlled her rather than vice versa. As if her feelings were something outside her, not in her control, like a bus she has to wait for.

…

‘What are you afraid of?’
‘I’m afraid of absolutely everything there is.'”

David Foster Wallace, “Here and There”

*

“Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

…

The receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else’s – as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist – not that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.

…

If a man is infected by the author’s condition of soul, if he feels this emotion and this union with others, then the object which has effected this is art; but if there be no such infection, if there be not this union with the author and with others who are moved by the same work – then it is not art. And not only is infection a sure sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art.

The stronger the infection, the better is the art as art, speaking now apart from its subject matter, i.e., not considering the quality of the feelings it transmits.

And the degree of the infectiousness of art depends on three conditions:

1. On the greater or lesser individuality of the feeling transmitted;
2. on the greater or lesser clearness with which the feeling is transmitted;
3. on the sincerity of the artist, i.e., on the greater or lesser force with which the artist himself feels the emotion he transmits.”

—

That was the year 1896.

*