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.

back to the basics

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.

happy new year!

the sun hasn't been showing up much in the past two months wherever i happen to be. but i have my little escape:

kaiserwetter

tinghaug, rogaland. 15:11, 30.12.2011

another longitudinal project in beta form, by yours truly, the hoarding collector of eternal rubbish, since 2003. enjoy the invisible sunshine.

Re: 04.11.2010

(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".)

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.

Common sense is very uncommon.

Owen Land, 2004.

le pain quotidien

take a piece of the daily painzurich, may 24, 2011

Self as object but not as specific personality

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

Doing work:

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.

i love

how the summer sun
tanned your skin over the seas
but your pale eyelids
still bear traces of spring

last night:

documentation of "15 seconds..."
invisible.

Rescheduled due to technical difficulties:

Tonight (tomorrow morning) at 04:19:35 CET

at Museumplein, Amsterdam
or online at http://www.yournameinlights.nl/

15 SECONDS FOR EVERYONE I'VE EVER SLEPT WITH (via Baldessari & after Emin), 2011.

SAVE THE DATE:

Coming Tuesday, 07.06.2011, at 23:33:35 CET
at Museumplein, Amsterdam
15 SECONDS FOR EVERYONE I'VE EVER SLEPT WITH (via Baldessari & after Emin), 2011.

http://www.yournameinlights.nl/

Kafka, the BigBrother

is watching you.

for the dead:

what i did, how i felt today, up until 2 minutes ago:

Drink up baby, stay up all night
With the things you could do
You won't but you might
The potential you'll be that you'll never see
The promises you'll only make

Drink up with me now
And forget all about the pressure of days
Do what I say and I'll make you okay
And drive them away
The images stuck in your head

Drink up one more time and I'll make you mine
Keep you apart, deep in my heart
Separate from the rest, where I like you the best
And keep the things you forgot

elliott smith, between the bars

nothing extraordinary:

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

Beauty Recovered

Sparkling kiss

ode to love

movement
exchange
transfer
between synapses
perception
detection
of traces
of you
cues
memories
traces for retrieval
pain
fear
tears in the rain
like waves coming and going
gone
and here again

it is but my heart.

From "Working Memory #02":

Zürichsee, 12. Juni 2010:

Every belief or ideology that one holds implies a certain risk. Every act or decision that you perform based on that will involve consequences, be they positive or negative.

***

Two horrors:
1. The amount of sadness or suffering which one can inflict on another without intent nor realization;
2. the faux-kindness which is in fact only irresponsibility in disguise.

reference for the politics of confession

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. M. Foucault, 1978.

How I work, and how some people work:

"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