this is the final step of art. and it was taken years ago. the destruction of the border, of the limit between art and life. the annihilation of our attempts to create and preserve a bubble here on earth. i am talking about acceptance. about understanding our life as something beyond understanding. about removing all the crutches. falling face flat and eating dirt and knowing you are alive by the grit between your teeth. it is time to stop the modern project. it was time long ago. abandon. no more progress. there is no progress. abandon all desires. abandon all goals. abandon all objects.
these are our weakest moments, when we live life through a video camera. stop. (and the other day the girl got out of the van stopped in the middle of the road at the plaza with the calder sculpture and the mies buildings, and she stood in front of the big red object and her mom took her picture and they were gone, without looking up, without taking a deep breath.)
abstain. abstain from recording. abstain from painting. abstain from photographing. abstain from writing. abstain from creating. abstain from controlling. abstain from thinking. abstain from limiting. abstain from utopia.
do not attempt to destroy them from within. this only adds to their power. it allows them to include larger and larger areas. until the entire void is saturated with satellites and GPS. art includes anti art. this is how da-da was killed. it was absorbed. is revolution impossible? society has put to rest the rebellion by making it a symbol, by objectification. by absorbing its power. by applause. by psychologist. society has empty shells, cadavers sucked of all their blood, propped at the beginning of the parade. empty symbols, the shells of figures sucked of all power by a mighty sponge. rebellion is a commodity. and the day you are absorbed is the day you are cashed in.
abstention. but how can i stop my self. i feel life slipping you know. this is what separates humans from the animals, the realization of death, and from this stems our whole culture, our whole language, our whole society, all of our attempts to destroy time. “one plays dead so that death will not come. so nothing will happen and time will not take place.” (hollier, against architecture 36) this is why i want to record the sound of the L, because i fear one day it won’t be there. but i refuse to buy into this entire culture of preservation and simulation. if you want to hear the L, go down to an L tracks and stand there and listen. really listen with all your body. don’t think about it. don’t wait till it comes out on video because i am not making any videos. find art. this is how the entire world reproduces, an enormous parasite on the void. by assimilation. by taking what it finds beautiful and objectifying it into something that can be bought and sold. this is economy… skins traded for beads. take a video, or paint a picture, or make a cd, or shoot a photograph, or make a virtual environment, or write a story, or a poem, or better yet a web page about the beauty of the L. no. in no way by reading should you believe that you know what it is like to stand underneath the L. this is not a valid substitution. there are no substitutions. the substitution becomes the reality. and then when people come to the L and it isn’t like the picture, be assured it soon will be exactly like the picture. by making the L into a destination i have objectified it. by telling you to go stand underneath it and listen i become the parasite. hoping to gain some sort of power, hoping to gain some sort of authorship of the experience you will have when you go there. so here is what i will say, if you are there, listen. if you aren’t there, fine, it isn’t that great really. i mean there are a million experiences within every life, within every moment, that are just as great. the important thing is to find art. to keep your eyes open. and please don’t turn it into a commodity. abstain.
i think this brings us back to the question of limits. we have to limit our selves from objectifying every experience we have. but more than that, we have to look really hard to find the void where it has apparently been abolished. we need to find great joy in the fact that in disneyland, on main street, somebody is throwing a cigarette butt onto the fake cobblestones right this very instant. and now somebody is sweeping it up. entropy. reality is the difference between the design and the manifestation of the design. ok, i’ll admit it, there isn’t much joy to be taken in the fact that somebody is throwing a cigarette butt in disneyland. it’s funny, but there isn’t much real joy to be had by that thought. the only real joy brought by the thought of disneyland is that i am not there. i do believe that we will never be able to eliminate the void. we will never be able to attain absolute control. the fulfillment of the modern project will never be attained. there will always be some little glitch that reminds us things are out of our control. we hate that glitch. my question is how can we incorporate the glitch without assimilating it. how can we enjoy reality without assimilating it into the realm of design, without objectifying it. does the choice to not design, to abstain, assimilate the un-designed into the realm of design? if we could silence the L, and chose not to, does this not make the sound part of the design? can we not design if we are designers? can we stop being designers? even the ability to make sound changes the silence, for your self.