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nqpaofu.com 1998-2003 jouke kleerebezem Notes Quotes Provocations and Other Fair Use
conversational drift, informatic license, exquisite enclaves
nqpaofu.com by jouke kleerebezem
73
notes, quotes, provocations and other fair use
72
history
portal
74
[27 July 2003] off-white
There's a near new moon out there. I think. Time to move on to 74.
[21-25 July 2003] re: cultural intelligence
I find myself home at the latter date, killing spam on a heavy dose of bongo fury. Two days off-line is more than the filters can handle. Luckily them days flew, just like the car on N151 tonight. Earlier we added three new researchers to our pool at JvE, on the Armand Mevis/Linda van Deursen Leuven identity project. OK. I met Paul over dinner at De Jaren. We compared notes and dreamt software solutions that would enhance our publishing. Too bad I did not get to meet N. Earlier that day Macha Roesink, Mark Kremer, Mike Tyler and I met at the Paviljoens for an introductory meeting to next year's show, June-October on a wandering theme. OK.
Dérive. On the way back this afternoon at their Roermond outlet I invest in Kenzo garb. Somehow whatever I try on from what is left in their sales really looks good on me, has purposely been saved for me, even conservative consumer G. (who returned from Maastricht however with 5 pairs of shoes) agrees, although our preferences in colour slightly differ, my favorite since a couple of years that almost indiscernible bleached out Felix Gonzalez-Torres blue F1EFF9, hers for an electric blue and saturated red. I end up buying 6 shirts, 4 pairs of pants, 2 suits, one of which a three piece greyish purple outfit, which goes well with the F1etc. Now to organize plenty events to wear them. Invite me for a suitable occasion.
a local paler blue
Felix Gonzalez Torres 1957 born in Guaimaro, Cuba, the third of what would eventually be four children 1964 Dad bought me a set of watercolors and gave me my first cat 1971 sent to Spain with my sister Gloria, then went to Puerto Rico to live with my uncle 1979 returned to Cuba to see my parents after an eight-year separation 1981 parents escaped Cuba during Mariel boat lift, my brother Mario and sister Mayda escaped with them 1978 met Jeff in Puerto Rico 1976 Gloria and I moved to our own apartment-small, but full of sunlight 1977 Rosa 1976 met my friend Mario 1979 moved to New York City 1980 met Luis at the beach 1983 received BFA from Pratt Institute 1981 and 1983 attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program 1987 received MFA from the International Center of Photography and New York University 1983 Ross at the Boybar 1985 Jeff gave me Pebbles and Biko, two Lilac Point Siamese cats-hardly able to support myself, and now with two cats to feed, only Jeff 1985 first trip to Europe, first summer with Ross 1986 summer in Venice, studied Venetian painting and architecture 1986 blue kitchen, blue flowers in Toronto - a real home for the first time in so long, so long, Ross is here 1987 Wawanaisa Lake: beavers, wild brown bears, Harry retrieved every buoy he sees, New York Times every morning, duck cabin 1986 Mother died of leukemia 1990 Myriam died 1991 Ross died of AIDS, Dad died three weeks later, a hundred small yellow envelopes of my lover's ashes-his last will 1991 Jorge stopped talking to me, I'm lost - Claudio and Miami Beach saved me 1992 Jeff died of AIDS 1990 silver ocean in San Francisco 1992 President Clinton - hope, twelve years of trickle-down economics came to an end 1990 moved to L.A. with Ross (already very sick), Harry the Dog, Biko, and Pebbles, the Ravenswood, Rossmore, golden hour, Ann and Chris by the pool, magic hour, rented a red car, money for the first time, no more waiting on tables, 'Golden Girls', great students at CalArts, Millie and Catherine, went back to Madrid after almost twenty years-sweet revenge 1989 the fall of the Berlin Wall 1991 Bruno and Mary, two black cats Ross found in Toronto, came to live with me 1991 the world I knew is gone, moved the four cats, books, and a few things to a new apartment 1991 went back to L.A., hospitalized for 10 days 1990 first show with Andrea Rosen 1993 moved to 24th Street 1987 joined Group Material 1991 Julie moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan 1992 the forces of hate and ignorance are alive and well in Oregon and Colorado, among other places 1993 Sam Nunn is such a sissy, peace might be possible in the Middle East 1992 started to collect George Nelson clocks and furniture 1993 three years since Ross died, painted kitchen floor bright orange, this book.
(from Catalogue Raisonné Cantz 1997, courtesy Joke Robaard)
[20 July 2003, early, like 0:58-1:39] ogle me! 01ogleU
I ogle you! Returned from dinner with H+R, a couple of Miles from Moulin. Re: those discussions which ended in tears in some Groningen bar. We're older now. It's a fair wind. Almost cut etc. Y'all know that grand mood of recognition and nostalgia. It's my last night alone at the mill before I leave for NL tomorrow, err... later today, for a mid-vacation flash visit to JvE, a meeting with Mark and Masha in Almere and family reunion. The guitars sure keep me on track.When I finally get myself together... Which song was that? Aren't all songs about getting yourself together, to get to sing. Because it's hard to find someone you love, who loves you — but you can begin, at least, by finding some one who loves your love song. (Dave Hickey, Air Guitar)
18 hours later on the Paris-Liège Thalys 1st class I relax for the first time since I got up at 8. Last night's party and today's heat made it a heavy burden to get away. I pitied everything I had to do and did it clumsily. Had to keep the crying ducklings locked inside. That hurt. Could only one more time water the garden, which hurt too. Did not place the community's signs to announce the 2 August vide grenier so I had to dump them in the commité de fêtes shed. Too bad. I couldn't finish all the good food and had to throw it. Such a pity. Joost brought me all the way to Laroche Migennes. Very nice of'm. That helped. The afternoon train to Paris on the other hand was an ordeal, hot and crowded. Just now a Thalys hostess has asked me if I eat. I certainly will. The sun's low. I enjoy a well deserved three hour vacation within a work interval halfway my holiday. So I eat. I drink. I write. I de-google.
[19 July 2003] "post-biographical identity"
Whenever Google pulls me no hits on a query I know I'm after something. Innovation's knocking when Google tells you 'your search did not match any documents'. Yeah, hm. Doesn't mean it didn't match any bright ideas... Do I hear de-googlization anyone? Now there's something better!
So "post-biographical identity" doesn't bring you any hits today, but at least one, over here, in some time. Feed it to Google: it would make sense and be fun to list challenging date-time stamped two word max, err, word combinations, concepts, or naming that makes sense, at least to you, in a document, or make it a site: onlygoogledhere.com, offgoogle.com... for future reference, you might even use it as a sort of IP stamping tool. Wonder what the status of name protection on the Internet is with all the date-time stamping going on? Someone ask Creative Commons?
BTW, just that you don't get any ideas, I registered offgoogle.com just now. There within 48 hrs., they say. Off! Go ogle!
...after having checked Alamut: happy b'day belated Jente! It's been a while.
[18 July 2003, early] écriture
Listen to Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's Master and Everyone. Later after at least 7 uninterrupted spins, change to Joi's One and One is One to wake me up to the drum of a different mood. Entering the space of writing is a beguiling experience, especially when the landmarks of sociability, like friends and family, have left the stage for you to concentrate. Where are you?!
I found myself badly dressed for the occasion wandering the Moulin's terrain at odd times, like a sleepwalker sauvage performing some duties, mixing habits in an attempt to reach a new temporality, one that synchronizes with the read/write routine of taking in and putting out in a sane and sensible way my text — the text that wil carry me through days of writing. Taking down words needs an apparatus, thinking them up needs fresh air. That's why I pace back and forth, in and out of the house, into the house, around the house, over the bridge, along the river, up the stairs, down again, into the bureau finally, to sit connected. Loud India, drive track 10 one and one is one. Like the Moulin low rider humming.
[18 July 2003, day] s'écrire
La honte d'être un homme, y a-t-il une meilleure raison d'écrire?
Gilles Deleuze, Critique et Clinique, 1993
If NQP was to change direction in any major way I would steer it out of here, into fiction, to live on in it, invisible, silent, weeding my plot.
The older you live, the more you learn about time. Thinking time is the prime subject of old age.
Écriture, Criticure, Correctif, Ridicule qui dure. (French children's rhyme)
[17 July 2003] Rolf is ten
Rolf is ten today. The family is distributed and depends on tele-communications to get together. R+r are with neefjes Timo and Jouke (indeed), my sister's youngest sons, in NL North. G. is with her parents in NL East. I'm in la France profonde in the company of vegetables, testing MacJournal (courtesy Alamut a couple of days ago) on the essay that I write.
My 'journal' bears the essay's working title, its 'entries' contain like the main text, quotes per author, a basic structure outline, reading list, core reading list, old notes, notes from a telephone conversation with Joke, spin-off ideas, search terms that spring to mind, etc. This is good software. A nifty new utility is LightSwitch X, a keyboard application switcher. Had to get used to it but now it gives good toggle.
'original format: thirty-two page booklet, 8 inches square'
[16 July 2003] stare, store
Traditional art invites a look. Art that's silent engenders a stare. In silent art, there is (at least in principle) no release from attention, because there has never, in principle, been any soliciting of it. A stare is perhaps as far from history, as close to eternity, as contemporary art can get.
(yesterday's 'silence for zero noise' link out Susan Sontag, which already then was courtesy, you know, wood s lot)
It's not like NOW we need thus-or-that-such-or-so art, sympathetic to such-and-such now this here commentary: we need whatever art, just-like-you-know art-kinda art, no-claim-disclaim art. What are you staring at art.
local fatigue
> local fatigue after more fiona apple and justerini & brooks i hit the bed on the 1st floor landing, where it's been since 1407, when the moulin pajet had its loud party. no sign of a thunderstorm yet. the temperature inside the house is limite. what keeps a release? man, let me end with four tops' bernadette... that refrain's piping!... i swear i'm 16 and i smell the girl's hair.
[16 July 2003 day] stareware — unfinished bites
That(which in the source reads like: 'strike that unstrike') art which is neither silent nor loud but probably somehow loquacious (for lack of a better word just now) would perform as well outside as from within — taking shifting overlapping positions relevant to — the discourse of contemporary media culture, or 'visual culture', which by the way are not necessarily identical data sets.
Art 'without content' (Agamben), in Sontag's words probably 'ahistorical', would just as well inform its relationships to whatever 'content', from a never fixed position vis-à-vis its sources and addresses, or its signatures and interfaces.
(...) all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
Roland Barthes, 'Death of the Author'
(appearing with above Sontag essay and George Kubler's 1967 'Style and representation of historical time' at the same rich URL.
George Kubler:
(...) the idea of style is best adapted to the description of synchronous situations involving groups of related events. But style is a notion unsuitable to diachronous durations, because of the composite nature of every imaginable class as a bundle of durations, each having widely different systematic ages.
The trouble('strike trouble unstrike') problem with reader/user input tolerant 'art' is that it reintroduces an authoring identity (signature), whereas pioneering artists have moved away from the market monumentality of the signing act. I'm not talking art market production here of course, but such art which fades in and out at the periphery of what one would consider 'autonomous' or fine art (two data sets), where it blends/curdles with other practices and precisely in that fading in and out of its stature gains its constitutive performance.
We're not, however, to stare at those moments where art drops all its signatures/encryption handing over a simple key, in favor of becoming another more readable practice altogether, as has been common practice in the past two decades. At the turn of the century art as commodity in a social-political practice followed up art as a commodity in the art market place, where it flourished roughly since the 1980s. To protest commodity with commodity might seem like a sound critical practice, 'outside' the museum branded discourse. Yet art which drops its signatures and/or encryption confuses at a very basic level what is its capital (splendid isolation, no content, ahistorical, etc.), changing that golden standard currency for the badly minted social cash of democratic didacticism.
Not that the signature all by itself encrypts fine art. The validation of the signature provides art economies with a branding iron, which will work where it'll work, selling whatever product that it sells, to whoever, for whatever reason, at whatever price. What does encrypt fine art (a key quality) is precisely encoding/decoding of/as contemporary content, using a long tradition of both its own languages and those of contextual cultural discourse. Fine art easily looses its ground when it competes/mimics other professional codes — like those of design, fashion, architecture, politics — if it is not at the same time competent in its own tradition.
Thus encoded fine art will never open to its recipient when s/he uses a wrong key. Art's simplification hands down such false keys. Already every curatorial theme opens the gathered works under a spell which was never on the artists' minds. Other-/outer-medial keys might unlock parts of the art at hand, showing relevance to parts of other media/disciplines where keys were forged, yet at the same time might very well hide what, for the sake of art, is a more relevant narrative.
One might romanticize about the well locked secret content art work while standing face-to-face with it, struck by the stubborn unreadability of its very 'message'. One might attribute all of art's superior quality, finding its final proof as fine art, from such mysterious silence, one might be struck dumb by its horrific beauty, all very well. One might be puzzled, dazzled by its coming into being from the mind and hands of genius, one might commit suicide in front of it, one might, on the contrary, even attack the splendid work, out of sheer negative appreciation, or frustration of one's own lack of performance and expression. One could dramatically articulate ones experience of the splendid dumbness of the auratic artwork in any whichever way... just like one can exalt in front of any other commodity, or natural phenomenon, or whatnot, if one witnesses its migration from history to eternity — if only temporary!
Promoting art from history to eternity (as Sontag privileges 'silent art') is in the first place in its reading/reception, in that moving focusing activity.
Eternity is in the reader, precisely within the act of reading. Eternity is outside such-and-such interpretation, as we know Susan Sontag knows so well. Her idea of a 'release from attention' I like very much, as it is a creative faculty: to release then leash then release etc. one's attention,
That superior reading activity which is the only faculty that exactly frees the human subject from history, from commodity, opening eternity against death. Situating eternity then, for example by situating art 'close' to it, away from situated 'history', means finalizing it. Susan Sontag concludes:
Exactly what a totality is, what constitutes completeness in art (or anything else) is precisely the problem. That problem is, in principle, an unresolvable one. The fact is, that whatever way a work of art is, it could have been — could be — different. The necessity of these parts in this order is never a given state; it is conferred. The refusal to admit this essential contingency (or openness) is what inspires the audience's will to confirm the closedness of a work of art by interpreting it, and what creates the feeling common among reflective artists and critics that the artwork is always somehow in arrears of or inadequate to its "subject."
return here for the 24,800 and counting
[15 July 2003] slow dive
About silence. The ancient silence for zero noise sanity habit, habijt. Habile.
About slowness. When not conforming to this world's economies, I easily slow down. Slowness is the divine path of pleasure. Whenever I find myself slow, I live. Warming up at near zero speed or slow rubbing, being slow happens in detailed attention, required for all the love the world needs to expand in diversity, not easily bestowed upon things that move at the speed of their economies, investing their inane functionality in a culture which lives at the pace and mass of industrial(-ized) exchange rates, data transmission, advertized consumer goods, upbeat leisure opportunities, in short: is subject to mass market speed and volume.
A taste of slow. But: in music. But: in mobility. But: in discotheque never stop.
Any mass market satisfies itself, some say and I tend to believe/(to) have seen abundant proof of, with 2nd rate goods (when volume/mobility functions optimally — a mass market's sole purpose being to endlessly increase 'economic' activity as we've come to be determined/live by: mass volume transaction at artificial value exchange rates, aimed at capital profit maximization). It's (a) mass market law. Mass markets don't naturally lean towards quality improvement, but of their mechanisms to increase transaction volume and margin increase at the same time. Win-win. Coming to think of it, the general idea of 'mass' seems to not persist in 'quality': mass rule, mass freedom, mass diversity? Your mess or mine? But my theme here is slow-ness, not economy, of which I am ignorant, a face-to-face step by step player in Ding for Ding chest-to-chest bartering at that.
The creeping quality amassing economy of slowth. Except there is no measure for quality. All quality, if not defined as sustainable functionality, is acquired knowledge. My house, my quality. Our knowledge, our quality. My speed, my quality.
P.S.: a case for mass elitism. It's not the mass but the mass+market+industry that kills our appetite: in old school commerce, entertainment and politics. Ubiquitous point-to-point infinite transactions doesn't. If my ambiguous disgust multiplies with the generations to come, maybe in another couple of decades we'll see a new world rising.
local colour situated slowth
Slow dive days. Before 8: watering the vegetable garden. Check Gladiolus and Dahlia flowering, budding. Early round of the despite-the-draught greens. Setting free the feathered friends. See them paddle. Tea then coffee. Read some Beuys. Eat some fruit. Some music. More reading. Then a slow but just-in-time mopping of the salle de fêtes. I promised last night. Picking up the mail before lunch with Agniet and Marjolein, Tjalle and Linde. Here's an envelope closed with two blue tapes. Some reading on the island, on a felled tree. I tend to doze off over Anna Tilroe's Het blinkende stof. She doesn't get it right. What else can I say. Read the August Essay. Who else calls the communication media 'cold', these days?
I lay down next to that trunk to take a nap when I hear a mother duck calling her ducklings. I reunite them at the run. Later we fetch one of the babies to take a look at its limp foot. Return to the bureau behind half-closed shutters. Some of these notes are taken down. I take a plunge to wash off the heat. Don't forget to check the Villiers-sur-Beuvron garden shots that I added earlier this morning. And posted the price at € 91.000,- Slowth included. After 20: watering the Rose and Vine. Then dinner. 1407 left-overs on one of the fires we have burning on the island since two decreasing moon days. After dinner T. and L. have another late night swim. Tea, coffee, Calvados time. In preparation of the thunderstorm that might hit us tonight we close all shutters. M. and L. sleep in their blue bus on the island. A. and T. draw to the guest room. I fire 01Tunes for a heavy sucking version of Almost Cut My Hair, by 'Derek Trucks, Gov't Mule, & Bill McKay', whoever and whatever comes after, alphabetically, in what is only 10,7 hours to come.
[14 July 2003] quatorze juillet
I serve my community instead of write. Quatorze juillet 2003 is marked by repetition of old games, children's games, grown-up games, community gathering, vin d'honneur et al, when all of a sudden there's the young girl choking on an asthma crisis if not for Moulin friends Agniet and son Tjalle to race back home on the mill's service bike to return to the rescue with T.'s Ventolin.
[13-14 July 2003] night fire
That moon brought out the best of spirits in us.
[13 July 2003] shoot me to the moon
Return here.
Some 4+ years ago I took my first dive at the Moulin. This time Rolf took the shot when I took the plunge. Actually it was plain daytime. Then, back in 1999, the dive was therapeutical — now, and increasingly since: recreational. We've well rubbed the Moulin into ourselves.
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nqpaofu.com 1998-2003 jouke kleerebezem Notes Quotes Provocations and Other Fair Use