WHAT, HOW, AND FOR WHOM? (Questions for the art scene in Manila)

Clever artist-curator types know that foundations, institutions and similar grant-giving bodies give support towards a credible cultural/artist community. We often write in proposals terms like "community", "art scene" or whatnot, and juxtapose them with pretty words like "thriving, burgeoning, innovative, etc" -- are we really writing observable facts, or simply filling in for the holes? To which community are we referring to? The one we are in? Or the none yet existing one we are trying to help create? Is there even such a thing here? Hard to admit, but I often get confused. Yet we still try to pursue whatnot. It often feels like a perennial struggle.

I can only speak for my city -- Manila. As it's often ridden with bullet holes that form into questions and gaps amongst communities. Oftentimes, the delineation is not so obvious as various people wander and come together in artist-watering holes/centers, where scenes form and decay: Penguin, Greenpapaya, Mowelfund, Club Dredd, Mayrics, Inka, Cubao X, Crazy Daisy, Saguijo, Espasyo Siningdikato, B-side, The Collective, etc etc...

Actually how is a center formed and what are the factors that contribute to it? Is it possible to create one deliberately? If not, why, and is it at least possible to optimize conditions for/encourage their spontaneous generation? - resounding a friend's response to my 18-page proposal with an intention to cultivate/network art practice/communities.

As I see it, networking only becomes relevant if it happens to contribute / hasten / improve / support a particular idea or set of ideas (and ideas leading to projects) that would benefit the participating folk, the institution where these were hosted/developed, and the audience and environment in which the particular project or idea revolves in. Why do we have the tendency to network superficially? Or don't network at all? And how easy or hard is it to do that with our context here in Manila? How do we achieve or formulate a science of encouraging spontaneous networking/convivial spaces? Are there existing methods available here? Are there clues or collated data on how it has worked/ hasn't worked so far? (debatable)

A friend wrote on her wall while describing her "ethnography":
"Social, technological and discourse innovation happening simultaneously: Hackerspaces? FabLabs, Techshops, NexFab? Community Labs? Maker community groups and spaces?
DIY organizations? Coworking experiments? Community labs? Membership-based, high-tech workshops? Prototyping centers? Gym for innovators? Living labs open innovation communities?

More questions.

Tengal on STATUS

Shameless plugging again.

Check out a mini-feature and interview on this new Manila magazine called STATUS.

Status07 Maestro Tengal

Status07 FP

Two-part essay on Love

“HEART, BEATING IN THE DARK”

“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.” – Roland Barthes

“I have an empty head on love in general. I'd either have nothing to say, or I'd just be reciting clichés”, as philosopher Jacques Derrida aptly put it once during an interviewⁱ. Sharing the same sentiment, this is not an essay about love in general. However, I would like to question what this quote below means:

"There is no love; there is only proof of it."ⁱⁱ

Until now this quote is still as puzzling as it was provocative when I first encountered it many years ago. Its conclusiveness is kind of demanding especially towards a subject that has seduced many people: especially philosopher and poets who have elaborated or ruined (whichever way you want to think) its meaning. The paraphrased quote (it was translated from the French) is from Robert Bresson’s classic film Les dames du Bois de Boulogne, whose dialogue was written by poet Jean Cocteau. Despite it being a very elusive quote to fully grasp intellectually, it had somewhat made some sense to me, in perlocution. Despite having told myself to avoid talking too much about things I don’t really know much about, I’d like to muse on this quote.

A female friend who always fights with me once said “isn’t our fighting a form of love?” If that would be the case, what would that imply about love? Many people will say their favorite cliché notions of what love is: love is compassion, honesty, trust, admiration, the thing that compels one to be attracted to doing this or be attracted to this object, person, idea, etc, this and that… Much of the modern concepts of love have seemed to reduce love into materially contractual states¹ of one’s experience to the other. It means that love in some way has become a sort of commodity, or a tangible, self-conscious and self-evident, useful social “contract” among people. Unlike the idealists of the ancient world, the Greeks for example, have elaborated on love significantly and prescriptively of what love is and what other people should be doing when enamored with it. Plato presents eros as being consistent with his notion of “The Forms” – unchangeable, eternal metaphysical concepts of Truth. Aristotle on the other hand, considers philia, and its importance to egotism² and altruism, as necessities in order to achieve happiness. And more memorably, St. Augustine’s famous take on his religiosity and idealism on God and love (and he uses love as contingent with God)³ is evident in his beautifully-put adage: “the measure of love is to love without measure.” My point is: love, (like much of modernity and the so-called post-modernity)⁴ seems to be always defined through something else. It is impossible to define what love really is as it really is.

If you cannot know it, does that logically imply that you cannot believe it? If beliefs are representational we can only believe things we are sensitive (senses) to.ⁱⁱⁱ Love is after all simply a four-lettered word too. And like many other powerful words, we know its power and its implications since we use language to better the understanding of our experiences. So is love simply just a concept? Maybe so, however uncertain I am, there are seems to me “only proofs” of love that we could account for. This is so since love as a concept can be understood and experienced through something else that exists in the external world.⁵ If we would only relate love to our thoughts without having any actual transactions or “proofs” that define what love is, then love can never completely exist in our heads, and we may never know what love really means. It has to relate to something else “out there.”⁶ And it is through these things that are in the external world that can help us conceive of concepts. These concepts are compelling or convenient ⁷ for us to justify our beliefs about a thing in the end. And the implication of having knowledge could also imply that our beliefs are true. (Maybe, but I am not sure. I am simply speculating. I am still open for doubt.) If we believe that love exists, it is because there are data and experiences that we gather from the external world and it provides us justification to our beliefs.^iv Therefore, love is a relatively abstract concept. A concept defined through real transactions in our world of experience. So the cliché notion that “God is love” is nonsense. Because God is supposed to exist outside (or beyond) our world of experience.⁸ I won’t expound too much on this but my point is you can experience love more easily because it is defined through something else that already exists in our world of experience. Its results are more direct and case-specific. The main quote is peculiar because it is opposite of the doubt that religious people or “believers” usually encounter: “there is a God but there is no proof – or there is a God but how can we prove it?” But this is rather a boring subject to talk about, and a circular argument so I won’t get into it. A deadend. In a way, love is more important than God, or at least for me; because I can have direct transactions or “proofs” of love than I would with God. I am not really claiming that I know what love really is. Everything I can know about love is based on what I have experienced. And from my experience it is not enough for me to talk about it further. I have really no general opinions of what love is. I’ve only talked about the quote on the first page.
It is impossible to define what love really is without relating it to something else. Reductionists would say that love is simply a result of certain chemical imbalances that occur in the brain that makes us feel this and that – but this is a rather extreme point of view. Are we really ready to accept this?

The pioneer of deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida, also had shared similar idea that love is defined through its relationship with other things; but for him there is a clear division on the who and the what.

“The history of love, the heart of love, is divided between the who and the what. I think that whoever starts to love, is in love, or stops loving, is caught between this division of the who and the what. Do I love someone for the absolute singularity of who they are? For example, I love you because you are you. Or do I love your qualities, your beauty, and your intelligence, etc? Does one love someone, or does one love something about someone? Often, love starts with some type of seduction. One is attracted because the other is like this or like that. Inversely, love is disappointed and dies when one comes to realize the other person doesn't merit our love. The other person isn't this and that. One wants to be true to someone – singularly, irreplaceably – and one perceives that this someone isn't x or y. They didn't have the qualities, properties, the images, that I thought I'd loved. So fidelity is threatened by the difference between the who and the what.”^v

Since childhood, we are taught to think of love as a singular entity. Whether it is God's love, marriage, passion, or patriotism, we are taught to think of love as a unique and exclusive prize. But as semiologist and philosopher Roland Barthes' points out in his book “A Lover’s Discourse”, love is built upon fragments, many of which are mundane. The most compelling part of "Lover's Discourse" is Barthes’ dissection of the phrase, "I love you". Drawing upon literary examples and common sense, Barthes asks us what we mean when we state that we love someone. Do we love what they do for us? Do we love how they make us feel? Do we love the idea of them? Are we in love with love itself?^vi This concept is borne out by the protagonist Merseault, in Albert Camus' novel, “A Happy Death”. The first thing Merseault says to his lover when she wakes up in the morning is: “hello image”. Extracting love from ideology and examining it under a microscope, the deeper inquiries about love may confuse our eyes even further; but the view contains more than a glimmer of reality as much as faint murmurs of a heart, beating in the dark.

References:

Roland Barthes: A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
Fred Dreske: The Epistemology of Belief (excerpts)
Plato: The Symposium
Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics
Albert Camus: A Happy Death and L’estranger
Jean-Luc Godard: Éloge de l'amour (In the Praise of Love) (2001), b/w and colour, 97 mins, feature film
Jacques Derrida: TV interviews (culled from youtube.com)

Endnotes:

1 Love as a form of social contract – this idea is usually associated with marriages. This is based on my own experience and observation, but at the same time is resounded among many modern cultures and cultural expressions (literature, movies, etc) and in some writings of post-modern philosophers like Derrida and Barthes. For example, this experience of bliss and joy that I find in love is defined through the relationship between me and the ability of another person to project a kind of comfort that I seek (materially, sexually, socially, or intellectually) with whom I project my love to. That’s why I think marriages are done, more often than not, out of necessity and practicality.

2 This does not mean that Aristotle is egotistic, but he considers self-love to be the highest form of philia, following a logic where in order to love another, one must love himself first.

3 This contingency is popular to most Christians (let alone religious people of any religion), and even more extrem e that its usage, because of popularity has gone beyond the contingent relationship and became interchangeable – as evident in this popular phrase “God is love”. Which I will show in this essay that this is not so.

4 The plight of modernity and even more, post-modernity is that everything is defined through a historical spectacle. Philosophy, technology, cultures, etc – all cannot escape the clutches and demands of history.

5 External world is the living, real world that is independent or separate from our thoughts/mind. The world of experience.

6 Again, the world of experience.

7 If there are substantial sense-data, facts, etc, but we’ll not go into that… it is obvious that I am leaning towards externalism.

8 The world of appearances or the world of sensible things.

i Jacques Derrida - TV interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj1BuNmhjAY

ii Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), Robert Bresson

iii Fred Dreske: The Epistemology of Belief

iv Fred Dreske: The Epistemology of Belief

v Jacques Derrida - TV interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj1BuNmhjAY

vi Roland Barthes: A Lover’s Discourse

Lifetime Warranty: Notes on the Khaosan Road Project

Something I wrote for Asia-Europe Foundation as part of the 5th ASEF Art Camp series last March 2008. The series brings 22 artists from 19 countries in Asia and Europe converged in Bangkok to work on the theme, Re-Vision Bangkok | New Media Art and Interactivity, a process to explore the possibilities of connecting new media art practices to the relational aesthetic concept. On their website, they have the publication of the whole event out already and can be downloaded here for free: ASEF Publication

More info here: Re-Vision Bangkok: New Media art and Interactivity 

LIFETIME WARRANTY 

"In my opinion, the majority of tourists come to Khaosan road because they want to visit and touch authentic Thai culture. The real conditions of what comes close to Thai culture will be the Phad Thai Trolleys, Thai Massage salons and even hill tribes who sell jewellery and wooden toys, but Thai people don’t buy such items because it doesn’t represent authentic Thai culture."    

-  “Kawtoo” Preeyachanok Ketsuwan 

Khaosan road is a tourists’ ghetto.  

Despite the crude, derogative, and exploitative connotations of that sentence, there is a sensitive eye and much vibrancy that could be discovered at this tourist squalor of contemporary Thai society. Electrical billboards and sizzling sounds begin at dawn and last until late night hours. The road itself is a plethora of touristic clutter: one shop/bar/restaurant/hostel situated one afer the other with no particular order. This road is a very active and vibrant community in its own right; where local and foreign people alike commune and interact daily in a fringe habitat filled with commercialism, transience, relaxation, discovery, and amusement. With this in mind, constant change is a given, where transience becomes a vital part of a transition between people and the road. 

Amidst this chaos, there  is a pre-school hidden against a background of billboard clutter and commercial noise. This school, Phimarnvit, has been situated on this road since 1919, and is run by a Muslim family who has had a  long enduring  tradition of religious, political, and racial tolerance. The discovery of this school has given our group a fresher perspective towards

the road itself, providing a contrast and adding signifcant meaning to the road. The fieldwork presentation of Khaosan road group was a result of the group’s  immersion with  the school: interviews, befriending people, playing with the children, attending their ceremonies, as well as sitting in their classes. The simplifed documentary on the school was a result of this immersion with the road; however was derived from a long group process that was as tumultuous as the Khaosan road itself. The process of documenting the school and the process of working with the road is as important and interesting as the actual process of our group’s individual conficts and approaches towards the task given.

The 2-minute trailer seemingly familiarises us with the family-run school and its daily life. In many ways it is a rough sketch of a myriad of possible pages, chapters, stories, and relationships between the school, its inhabitants and the road. This sketch was done with the intention of expanding and evolving the initial result (the trailer and the various collected documentation) into a full-blown documentary about the school and its relationship with the Khaosan road community. 

The Khaosan Road School 

The Phimarnvit school follows the lineage of family tradition of passing the school duties from one generation to the next. Mrs Lalita Phimarnvit, the head dean is a judge and an educator. Which one she considers as a profession or a passionate hobby from the two, I don’t know. The school itself is a small, dilapidated, primary school ofering the usual prescribed curriculum in Thailand. However, what sets it apart is that it offers various interestingly peculiar classes such as: foreign language classes (English, Japanese, Chinese and Italian), they do short time workshops like Thai massage, hair braiding, and henna tattooing. These extra classes are taught by a unique set of volunteers, usually travellers themselves in Khaosan, though some are professional tutors or teachers, who are eager enough to ofer their skills with minimal or no salary at all. As my group mate, Birte, puts it:

 

“The very remarkable thing about this school is the children participating in each others religious practices. In my opinion it’s the base for freedom and wisdom, and it seems to be one of the most modern pedagogic systems. You can feel this spirit in the way the family runs this private (self paid) institute. It certainly points out that in the middle of a commercially established place someone is giving an impressive example of non-commercialisation and taking the chance of a situation by involving the development, instead of just resisting the pressure of commerce and the backside of globalisation. In this very place the most valuable good is handed over sometimes even without payment.”

In one sense, one could see the school being an “island of  its own,” though this label would do them no real justice since they are active members of the community. How then would one explain the extracurricular classes offered? The school seems to have evolved through the years roughly at the same pace as the road’s evolution, inspired by its surroundings; keeping themselves updated with the advancements of trends and tourism of Khaosan road. However, the documentary trailer on this school let alone the sudden shift of focus towards the school and not the road, was a surprising turn in our group’s tumultuous process of fnding the right solution amidst our varied and diferent initial approaches towards the Khaosan road. 

The Process

I think it is best to talk about the context of the presentation through the process on which the series of events that led to it, in retrograde. By turning it upside down, I attempt to avoid straying too far away from the main result, also to discover things as opposed to narrating it chronologically. The trailer for the documentary was a result of a sudden decision we as a group undertook in the very end. Having already enough footage and sound bites to make a trailer, we were clear that we were going to forget all previous ideas and plans we all had with this footage we collected. We decided to “forget about a fnal result or an art piece” and present a socio-cultural documentary flm instead. We decided that we should also “try to get to know more about the people’s motives, focusing on the connection and how they afected each other.” It was not just a simple socio-cultural documentary; we wanted to make it more intimate and personal between us, the documentary filmmakers, and the people who populate the school.

The day before the public presentation at Bangkok University, we had a pivotal group meeting with Noraset Vaisayakul, the artistic advisor, who wanted to check up on our progress before the presentation. We presented him the idea of what we would be doing: a video installation that would show a visual contrast between the school and Khaosan road. Simply put, there would be a black box with a small LCD screen and headphones that would be positioned in the middle of the exhibition space. The video playing inside the box would be footage showing daily life in the school. The exhibition space would then consist of 3 projections of footage on the walls and the floor, familiarising the audience with 3 different angles of Khaosan road. The exhibition space with the black box would be filled with the recorded ambient sound taken from the road, bombarding the viewer with its noise – both visually and aurally. This would be an explicit contrast between the school and the road that we all wanted to explore. There had been unsettled disagreements whether or not to present the installation in a gallery or a non-gallery space, within Khaosan road itself. But the gallery exhibition was too unfeasibly expensive to pull of; we revised the idea by involving performance and intervention, by taking the black box and deciding to exhibit it in the road itself; literally getting people’s attention towards the existence of the school. In turn, elements would be added or taken out with the installation idea, without resolution. It was inevitable to realise that our attempts on this project were merely superficial, and did not prove anything significant, but just presented contrasts and comparisons, and failed attempts on placing depth and meaning. This realization would change all our ideas and tighten our knots as a group.

From the beginning we all had diferent approaches and ideas and couldn’t really agree completely on what to do with the Khaosan road project, even from the beginning. Hence, we reassessed the material and data we had collected, and decided to forgo all initial ideas and make a documentary film trailer instead. 

Initially Maris and I suggested leaving out the school. Birte was bent on discovering  the ‘opposite’ of the road within the setting itself, by observing and researching the road’s historical and present contexts Preeyachanok was more concerned on challenging the road’s  “fakeThai- ness”, since she had mixed feelings towards the road and had a completely diferent point of view – that of a citizen of Thailand. I was more interested in leaving out socio-political issues and focus more on the psycho-geography of the road, by seeing the road as an important trading stop, like on a trade route (except it pertains this very strong notion of touristic trade), and how it unites and dislocates groups of people and how they relate to each other, also on fnding new ways of awareness on urban landscape. Timo and Maris were more open to discovery and receptive towards the road by having little preconceptions towards it.

Atfer having spent days researching and being in Khaosan road, we all had mixed half-baked ideas and proposals with potential, but all proved to be dead ends. It took us a longer time to figure out what to decide on doing than researching and collecting data on the road. Until we discovered the school, then Preeyachanok proposed an idea for a ‘black box’ video installation which we focused on realizing frst of all; consequently one thing led to the other – the rest is history.

It is also important to note, that we are not documentary flmmakers. We come from diferent backgrounds and have diferent aesthetics and methods. Preeyachanok studied traditional Thai art in school and is more interdisciplinary in approach; Birte is mostly into process-based installation and performance; Maris is a photographer and designer; Timo is into programming and interactive installations, and I never formally studied art, but have a self taught multi-faceted interdisciplinary media art approach. We had come to a point where all rivers merge towards the ocean. Diversity has proved its worth, the process towards things have made us forget our own individualities, our aesthetics and jumped  into a thing with which we were all unfamiliar. I think it all came to point in one direction by unforeseen circumstance. There is merit to that discovery. It was as if we were all unconsciously mapping out our differences and these connections were unconsciously done with a logic we couldn’t foresee. Like Khaosan road or any other road, the road is a pathway for connecting diferent points on a map.

Art should sometimes be viewed as a map -- mapping out diferent connections, movements, routes, ins and outs of traditions; locations and dislocations between various histories, cultures, contexts, and traditions. Like vital trade routes, things have the power to cross-pollinate and fertilise each other, expand the reach and deepen productions with the increased richness that comes with drawing new and unexpected connections. Mapping exploits contrast, digs-up unexpected links and builds spontaneous bridges into the unforeseen. 

Maps encourage boldness. They’re like cryptic love letters. They make anything seem possible.

On behalf of Khaosan road group, Tengal, Manila 2008

BIOGRAPHIES

Preeyachanok Ketsuwan  |  Thailand

Preeyachanok fnished her frst major degree in Traditional Tai Art from Silpakorn University in March 2008. She is the only student in her department who focuses on interdisciplinary art. She explores Tai feminine culture, which has been handed over from one generation to another, from her mother to herself, being the source of  limitations in her beliefs and way of living. She uses various art media including photography, VDO, 3D objects, and performance. Other than exploring feminine culture existing in Thai society, she is interested in working with local communities.

“Tengal” Earl John Philip M. Drilon  |  Philippines 

Tengal  is an  interdisciplinary artist, based  in Manila, Philippines, working with  sound, music, video, flm, performance, and computers. He curates, organises and performs in various new media shows in the Philippines. He founded and organises SABAW –a Manila-based artist initiative and non-proft platform for all kinds of information and communication carried via modern electronic media. SABAW also represents a cross-section of new media artists, performance/interdisciplinary artists, and contemporary musician-composers who find it difcult to release their material through more conventional channels.

Timo Toots  |  Estonia 

An Estonian artist, currently on an exchange in Iceland, Timo is a Computer Science university dropout. He realised that the school of informatics was using the right tools, but in the wrong way. He found the output to his ideas through art and photography was his frst medium, which enlightens his mode of observation. Since then Timo has been working through several mediums via interactive installations, mostly stimulating the viewer and the artist to transform roles. 

Birte Endrejat  |  Germany 

Born in 1979 in Langen / Germany, Birte studies Fine Arts at the University of the Arts, Bremen since 2004, in the class of Professor Katharina Hinsberg and Professor Yuji Takeoka. Her work focuses on installation art in combination with action or performance. During her studies she actively participated in the international projects “Bremen-Nagoya art project”, including two exhibitions, in Nagoya/Japan 2005 and Bremen 2006 and in Switzerland for the “dazwischen projekt #1 and #2” 2007-2008 including a collaboration project between Lahore / Pakistan, Cambridge / USA and Bremen / Germany, 2007-2008.

  

Maris Lagzdins  |  Latvia 

Maris is based in Riga, Latvia, studying his fnal year at the Art Academy of Latvia in the Department of Visual Communications. Maris is also working as a freelance artist/designer and photographer; he has taken part in various art projects and workshops in Latvia and abroad. 

ALL WRITING IS PIGSHIT

All writing is pigshit.
People who leave the obscure and try to define whatever it is that goes on in their heads, are pigs.
The whole literary scene is a pigpen, especially this one.
All those who have vantage points in their spirit, I mean, on some side or other of their heads and in a few strictly localized brain areas; all those who are masters of their language; all those for whom words have a meaning; all those who are the spirit of the times, and have named these currents of thoughts -- and I am thinking of their precise works, of that automatic grinding that delivers their spirit to the winds --
are pigs.
Those for whom certain words have a meaning, and certain manners of being; those who are so fussy; those for whom emotions are classifiable, and who quibble over some degree or other of their hilarious classifications; those who still believe in 'terms'; those who brandish whatever ideologies belong to the hierarchy of the times; those about whom women talk so well, and also those women who talk so well, who talk of the contemporary currents of thought; those who still believe in some orientation of the spirit; those who follow paths, who drop names, who fill books with screaming headlines,
are the worst kind of pigs.
And you are quite aimless, young man!
No, I am thinking of bearded critics.
And I told you so: no works of art, no language, no word, no
thought, nothing.
Nothing; unless maybe a fine Brain-Storm.
A sort of incomprehensible and totally erect stance in the midst of
everything in the mind.
And don't expect me to tell you what all this is called, and how
many parts it can be divided into; don't expect me to tell you in
weight; or to get back in step and start discussing all this so that by
discussing I may get lost myself and even, without even realizing it,
start THINKING. And don't expect this thing to be illuminated and
live and deck itself out in a multitude of words, all neatly polished as
to meaning, very diverse, and capable of throwing light on all the attitudes
and all the nuances of a very sensitive and penetrating mind.

Ah, these states which have no name, these sublime situations of the
soul, ah these intervals of wit, these minuscule failures which are the
daily bread of my hours, these people swarming with data... they
are always the same old words I'm using, and really I don't seem to
make much headway in my thoughts, but I am really making more
headway than you, you beard-asses, you pertinent pigs, you masters
of fake verbiage, confectioners of portraits, pamphleteers, ground-floor
lace-curtain herb collectors, entomologists, plague of my tongue.

I told you so, I no longer have the gift of tongue. But this is no
reason you should persist and stubbornly insist on opening your mouths.

Look, I will be understood ten years from now by the people who
then will do what you are doing now. Then my geysers will be recognized,
my glaciers will be seen, the secret of diluting my poisons will
have been learnt, the plays of my soul will be deciphered.

Then all my hair, all my mental veins will have been drained in,
quicklime; then my bestiary will have been noticed, and my mystique
become a hat. Then the joints of stones will be seen smoking, arborescent
bouquets of mind's eyes will crystallize in glossaries, stone aeroliths will fall,
lines will be seen and the geometry of the void understood:
people will lean what the configuration of the mind is, and
they will understand how I lost my mind.

They will then understand why my mind is not all here; then they
will see all languages go dry, all minds parched, all tongues shrivelled up,
the human face flattened out, deflated as if sucked up by shriveling leeches.
And this lubricating membrane will go on floating in the
air, this caustic lubricating membrane, this double membrane
of multiple degrees and a million little fissures, this melancholic and vitreous membrane,
but so sensitive and also pertinent, so capable of multiplying,
splitting apart, turning inside out with its glistening little cracks,
in its dimensions, its narcotic highs, its penetrating and toxic injections,
and
all this then will be found to be all right,
and I will have no longer further need to speak.

-- Antonin Artaud, (circa 1924 - 1937)

Translated by David Rattray
Transcribed by Tengal from Artaud Anthology (edited by Jack Hirschman, City Lights Books, 1965)

Barthes on the Semiology of Love

The lover is the natural semiologist in the pure state! He spends his time reading signs -- he does nothing else: signs of happiness, signs of unhappiness. On the face of the other, in his behavior. He is truly a prey to signs.

So the proverb is a lie: love is not blind...

Love is not blind. On the contrary, it has an unbelievable power to decipher things, which is related to the paranoid element in every lover. You know, a lover combines bits of neurosis and psychosis : he's tormented and crazed. He sees clearly -- but the result is often the same as if he were blind.

Why?

Because he doesn't know where or how to make signs stop. He deciphers perfectly, but he's unable to arrive at a definite interpretation, and he's swept away by a perpetual circus, where he'll never find peace.

Roland Barthes, Playboy, Sept. 1977 (interview conducted by Philippe Roger)
Photo by Toni Blay

Ruminative Quote

"Cuando su imagen se borro del espejo. Aparecio en el vidrio la palabra libertad."
(When the reflection faded away from the mirror it gave way to the word "Freedom")
- Fando y Lis (1968)

FINAL NOTES "ON FASHION"

“Fashion is empty”

Probably sums up my musings towards fashion on a previous blog entry: HERE


This produced a lot of reactions from people I know (and don’t know), but the most interesting reactions would be from two young talented fashion designers, upon reading what I wrote, wrote their own reactions against and to/for it.
I actually found it endearing that they felt so compelled to write their own essays on it.

Read Mara Reyes’ essay: HERE

Read Alice Sarmiento’s essay: HERE

Interesting as their essays were, I must clarify on certain issues I had said.

First, in what way do I mean by Fashion?

Fashion, by definition, changes constantly. The changes might even proceed more rapidly than in most other fields of human activity (thought, language, etc). However, I was talking more about fashion as the negative embodiment of capitalism (it results in waste and encourages people to buy things unnecessary) and its relationship with the human condition of slavishly following these ephemeral trends; which I find so appalling.

So I will not (and have not) talk(ed) about the other aspects of fashion, it’s sociological implications (it has enforced an entire nation to uniformity when it made use of Mao Suits as the national uniform of Mainland China); and it’s constant change that contributes to diversity and identity (which appeals more to the youth’s desire to experience “new” and “interesting” things, and the sense to belong somewhere -- to quote the 70s gay icon, Quentin Crisp: “Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.”)

Second, the use of the word “enterprise” (I had meant as the shorter term for “free enterprise” or capitalism) might have been an inappropriate word. Yes, fashion is a global enterprise worth billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of painstakingly invested man-hours. However, I wasn't really talking about the global “business of building and killing trends” which I deliberately skipped in my previous entry. The two reaction essays provide interesting points of view towards this omission; and both essays are worth noting.

Claiming that fashion as an “empty enterprise”, can easily be judged by face value. I would like to expound on that. But to further our understanding on this, we should focus on the adjective that basically defines the two words: “empty”.

Everything we wear (be it clothes or just masks/personas we wear to deal with our daily social lives) can be considered as “extensions of the self”. Why do we need to feel and look good? Why do we need to be vain? That is because that is human nature, to desire and to want, to be part of something (or not be part of anything – but being not part of anything is already being part of something by logic, in math they call it the “null set”) and etc, etc.
There is nothing wrong with all that. But I find there must be something wrong when someone becomes enslaved by all these things. And fashion has a strong effect on most of our follies (because it is a combination of most of the basic needs and wants as human beings: clothing, identity, a sense of belonging, expression, vanity, social factors, and the like); and can enslave anybody as easy as alcohol or drugs. We spend lots of money to fulfill this need (when it’s going beyond what is needed), but we don’t really need too, but we do.

Now why did I say it is empty? Because at the end, does all this matter? Is it meaningful? I don’t know, but I’d like to think that it doesn’t mean anything, except I’d like to see it as mere means to satisfy some of my needs and to understand and express some of my self and experiences in this world. It is the same thing with mathematics or gravity, or say even god. Math, gravity, and god are all important to people even though they are just vital concepts in a conceptual framework, and has no real connection to the world we live in. Math is just a bunch of numbers that have nothing to do with the things in the world, except to aid us to further our understanding of our experiences to calculate yet again theoretical stuff (parabolas, density, force, etc), things that we don’t even see but we assume that they are there, like gravity or god. Because it helps us understand things and our experiences in the world, BETTER. They are logical fictions, or fictional truths. As puzzling as this Jean-Luc Godard quote: “Not a just image, just an image.”

Now, going back to fashion, combine all these ideas then make ourselves victims and let’s ride on the billion-dollar capitalist vehicle that changes trends faster than human thought, and at a gargantuan level! It sure sounds tempting and personally I think I would jump on it, but I'd jump as someone who likes fashion and not someone who worships it. Hence, I say it is an “empty enterprise”, because it does not grow into something meaningful other than to satisfy ourselves (and others who produce these needs for us.)

Lastly, towards the ethical notes: What has fashion have to do with all the poor?
Some have argued that fashion contributes to economic growth, through the provision of jobs from designers to seamstresses, etc. Providing jobs is one thing, but I’m not talking about a clothing industry but about the business of setting trends that is inevitable of its demise. But then again, maybe it can have something to do with the poor, and that there might be theoretical models that discuss that. However, I don't know, nor am I am well-informed about that.

But most importantly, the issue I would like to focus on is the predicament of human choice. Who cares if someone spends 400 dollars on a shirt when they could have fed a miserable African baby? Then again who cares about feeding a miserable African baby when they could have bought a 400 dollar shirt?

This is entirely up to the individual. Regardless of how ethical one would want to be, this does not prove anything. It still is, human choice, error or not.

That at the end of the day, fashion, very much like money can NEVER bring us happiness.
BUT we do like to keep a lot of it around, so we can choose our kind of misery.

-- Tengal

On Fashion

Tengal on Fashion:

"Regardless of its sociological implications in culture and society, fashion, personally I think is an empty enterprise because it celebrates more on the realm of superficiality and all its derivations; exemplifying existential transience (trends come and go) magnified and expounded by mass media and popular culture at a engrossing level, building trends, defining counter-cultures, up to the point of catering sickly obsessive compulsions of people to buy buy buy all these things because there is a need for fashion, rather than on its basic prime, the need for clothing.

That is to say this mere "make-up" of societal expression, etc associated not only with youth but with the roles we portray within a society. i.e. wearing the expensive classic nike airforce-ones [those rare all white dunks] or some louis vs define top prestige and put you on the upper classes in society. Fashion focuses on these superficialities, and like in science, we're all stuck in the dominant paradigm; in the case of fashion, in someone else's shadowy trends, and we live day in day out trying to make ourselves look good and hip.

On a more ethical note, what does fashion have to do with all the poor? What is its real social moral relevance apart from just building trends and conceptual prestige? Does it bring satisfaction on a societal level say on those people who can't afford to buy or wear all these designer clothes but strive to buy because they have to look good coz society deems it so?
Nada.

On another note, although it shares some primary essence in art, since both have evidence on the wonders of the rational mind to not only create but imbue extraneous meanings to things -- apart from just basic descriptions of what the world is say "I can see there is a color of this certain shade, etc" as compared to "this is bright red color is communist." Only humans can do that. And only humans can worship / be enslaved by fashion.

This is not to say I don't like fashion, in fact if you read my comment again, I was praising it albeit the sarcasm, and should have been viewed as rather a Self-deprecating opinion, since I'm guilty of it."

[Taken from an online response with a friend upon being taken aback by my comment:
"Viva la vanity and everything that has "empty" written on it, like fashion."]


"Fashion is a tyrant from which there is no deliverance; all must conform to its whimsical"
- French Proverb

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
- Jean Cocteau

Antonin Artaud, the Man Suicided by Society.

Here is a man, whose defiant brilliance emanates from the utmost of human anguish.
He was a true visionary of his age, but he also transcended all space, time, all caverns of thought and disrepute. Like a feral jackal he stalked the unknown, unexplored realms and states of mind in search of his true self, and in doing so, managed to share his own anatomy, his higher thoughts and soul with us, his readers, in ways that border on the occult in their brilliance.
But behind all these mournful blasphemies against man there is real love. And he is genuine, for every sentence was written as it had been lived.
-- Tengal





ON SUICIDE

Before committing suicide, I ask that I be given some real assurance of being; I should like to be sure about death. To me, life seems merely a consent to the apparent legibility of things and their coherence in the mind. I no longer feel like some irreducible crossroad of things death heals, heals by severing us from nature; yet what if I am no longer anything but a mere detour ridden by pains but not by things?
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will. I free myself between the beautiful and the hideous, the good and evil. I put myself in suspension, without innate propensities, neutral, in the state of equilibrium between good and evil solicitations.
For life itself is no solution, life has no kind of existence which is chosen, consented to, and self-determined. It is a mere series of hungers and adverse forces, of petty contradictions which succeed or miscarry according to the circumstances of an odious gamble. Like genius, like madness, evil is unequally apportioned in each man. And as with evil, likewise with good: both are the product of circumstances and of a more or less active leavening.
Certainly, it is abject to be created and to live and feel yourself in the darkest corners of your mind, down to the most unthought of ramifications of your irreducibly predetermined being. After all, we are only trees and it is probably written in some crook or other of my family tree that I shall kill myself on a given day.
The very idea of the freedom of suicide falls down like a lopped tree. I create neither the time nor the place nor the circumstances of my suicide. I do not even invent the thought of it; will I at least feel it when it uproots me?
It may well be that at the very instant my being will dissolve; but what if it remains whole? How will my ruined organs react? With what impossible organs will I register the laceration of this suicide?
I feel death upon me like a torrent, like an instantaneous bound of lightning whose capacity surpasses my imagination. I feel a death loaded with pleasures, with swirling labyrinths. Where is the idea of my being therein?
But look at God all of a sudden like a fist, like a scythe of slicing light. I willingly severed myself from life, I wished to turn my destiny inside-out.
This God has disposed of me to the point of absurdity. He has kept me alive in a void of negations and furious renunciations of myself; he destroyed in me everything , down to the finest dust of conscious, sentient life.
He reduced me to being like a walking robot, but this robot felt the rupture of his unconscious self.
And how I have wished to produce proof of my life. I wish to get back in touch with the resonant reality of things, I wish to smash my pre-destination.
And what does this God say to that?
I had no feeling of life, every moral idea was like a dry arroyo in my veins. For me, life was no object or shape; it had become a series of rationalizations. But these rationalizations, like a motor running, didn't even get off the ground, but were inside me like possible 'diagrams' which my will vainly tried to rivet on.
But even to get to this state of suicide, I must await the return of my conscious self; I must have a free hand in all the articulations of my being. God has placed me in despair as in a constellation of dead-ends, whose radiance culminates in me.
I can neither live nor die, nor am I capable of not wishing to die or live.
And all mankind resembles me.

Antonin Artaud

Translated by David Rattray
Taken from Antonin Artaud: Anthology, edited by Jack Hirschman
Portrait by Man Ray

Seven Poems: Fragments