Artist Statement

This is yet true. And nothing less than a tortured howl, an abscessed shriek, a spasmodic ejection of the voice or body, a convulsive waving of the arms like spinning blades; nothing less could respond to (though fail to correspond to or let alone destroy, with deserving and savage passion) these conditions —themselves coolly, pragmatically, offensively impassive and indifferent— which govern, manage, subject, and debase the totality of contemporary life in both its human and non-human forms — urbi et orbi. 

And where response could embody either end of an emotive spectrum or trajectory, but a trajectory that —one would come to realize— has no beginning or end, or where the ends perhaps meet at an omphalic point, at the conflagration of extreme and opposing states that alloy and mint the coin with which to pay the remaining wages and tolls, each side the other’s invisible yet necessary foundation: howl or silence, psychosis or catatonia, horror vacui or minimalism; a desire to saturate the void or a desire to highlight the void with the impudence of a mark or smudge —perhaps even a bruise or puncture—, a single utterance (graphic or linguistic) that would nonetheless contain and italicize, in a kind of ravished paralysis or stupor, the accretions of one’s life. 

Are “cosmos” and “mystery” mere carcasses? And why do I write or utter these words (and so many others: “love,” “human,” “life,” “world”) with a muffled shame, a shame inculcated, as if uttering them betrayed a degree of pathetic naivety, childishness, or downright imbecility that would provoke, in turn, a certain pity that itself arises from either a presumed “groundedness to reality” or intellectual sophistication, yet undeniably laced with mute derision and mockery? Because I do not see a sun rising from this night, nor a dazzling firmament surging from our universal corpse, a newborn myth emerging, as it perhaps did yesteryear, from the absence of myth. Is, beyond God, the human dead? We never became gods, but neither have we evolved into animals. But perhaps the human only truly begins now as it devastates its world irreversibly: at summer’s end, the bumblebee, its existence no longer tied and subsumed to that of the hive, consumes each day before it dies by winter’s cold writhing in joy and frenzy inside golden pools of aster — with a force it had not yet recognized.

To choose the work over the task, the act over the activity, creation over production, and, in doing so, to erupt in furious wounds throughout one’s body, indeed inside one’s very body, its inner walls, like a chapel profaned by frescoes; wounds from which a simmering hatred or love —which feel nothing short of immense and infinite— must at some point puncture a hole —or holes— and gush out, like a human gamma ray burst, in equal yet opposite jets of ravagement: love of art, hatred of culture; love of the body, hatred of the organism; love of the day, hatred of the clock; love of time, hatred of the calendar; love of the human, hatred of society. And so on. 

And to only find oneself, or rather willfully ensconce oneself in the vertigo of that “wounded fury” where Camus found the surrealist body spasming nearly a century ago — a sickened, revolted state which the present conditions give us no reason or justification to arrest or abandon, but, if anything, to intensify. 

Thus, the question that arises, which is that of whether I should squander my life, the remainder of my existence, is a question that differs from the question, “Have I squandered my life?” Not only does the latter concern the past rather than what is to come; it also connotes an unconscious and unwilled befalling, a fundamental passivity on my part as a subject; whereas the former and more crucial question (“should I squander my life?”) implies a decision and a resolve; more crucially, the potential for an explosive, constellational liberation — like a human gamma ray burst.

The fundamental rebellion, the cardinal struggle: is it not to embrace, with every fiber and molecule of one’s being (Camus again), the refusal to be treated as a thing? And in assuming this rebellion, would we not open up or reveal another form of squandering (a squandering beyond the one that attains its definition vis-à-vis its mere opposition to accumulation), one that refuses to take ground or that waits for no ground to fulfill its purpose: when the seed coat, fittingly called the testa, explodes with a life that refuses to be bound by the hand that should toss it, to the point that it begins to break open before it leaves that hand, yet sprouts into vegetative life and takes root, not in the amended soil or in the prepared furrow, but outside, in the very air that should have otherwise desiccated its roots.

Thus, and finally, from the perspective that subsumes human life to production or accumulation, art (both its creation and contemplation, our engagement with it either creatively or receptively) represents a form of irresponsible waste; but from the perspective, or rather worldview, that subsumes human life to life itself, art rescues something infinitely more precious and truly invaluable (more precious, that is, than the accumulations garnered from a life “unsquandered”): the profane unction of play. In this way, art incarnates the most responsible and ethical form of squandering. Responsible because irresponsible toward a debased and debasing society that seems to accept the mere persistence of mud as its future; ethical because immoral toward its norms and injunctions. And irresponsible and immoral in a way that seeks to conjure, but most importantly to bring permanently to presence, a life that is no longer, as it currently is, mere survival; in other words, life itself rather than its humiliated supplement. In this way, we cannot doubt that “The person who recognizes the powerlessness of work … is dazzled and fascinated by the play which serves no purpose” (Bataille).

So scatter and wander: on the sea and on the prairie, on the plains and in the desert, in the city and beyond the city; scatter all over and over all. Widely, and without purpose, or, if you must, with the purposeful and concentrated joy of play. Give and receive the gift that strews and drifts, that scatters while wandering, completely and through all parts possible. For as many have said, yet for me in particular a contemporary song sings: “not all those who wander are lost,” but may be merely (a “merely” that shines with a blinding, indiscriminate and ferocious light) awaking to and lusting after a life that is for the first time human, first and foremost that of the being called human.