bruegel, bocsh, hell and all that

images of hell dominated by the egg, the orb, the embryo; interiority: the mouth (belly of the beast). Re: foucault- madness: hell as a paradigmatic space, headless forms: hell as proxy consciousness, a shared consciousness a construct subjective, relative and omnipotent: universal hell: its signifiers instantly recognizable: flames, fever, delerium.
hell as the feminine: pit, gap, gape, hole, womb, eve, original sin. again: the egg, birth, re-birth, re-incarnation, cycle, the circle, Dante?
birth as the first step toward damnation; the inevitability of the fall and the inherant evil of the flesh.
the horror of these images is their equating of fertility and hell; far from being barren and devoid of life this is a place of growth and mutation: a self perpetuating wilderness the compost of which is our present world; hades is not merley a receptical for the fallen, it is a rhizomic continuum inseperable from creation; both breugal and bosch confuse the cronology of existence both heaven and hell are engines of our reality; why do we see hell as subterrainian- hell is the soil in which we grow and though we may temporarily appear to escape its hold, we remain rooted in it and we will certainly return to it.

bertie russel

my grandfather followed bertrand russel to north wales in the aftermath of the war, clough ellis provided a number of his old Cambridge acquaintances with freehold tenancies: my mother has told me that BR's childeren were strcken with problems throughout their lives; given that they may well have been as close to something approaching philosophical truth as any member of society the question must arise: how much comfort can the truth provide? does philosophy offer any assistance at all in our lives? does living matter? 
PS: pandas may constitute the only species living what could be termed an authentic existence, given the choice between compromising their ascetic lifestyle (eating nutritionally dubious and physically joyless bamboo whilst abstaining from gratuitous sexual activity) or simply lying down and dying: the panda will often choose the latter. human interference in the lives of these creatures is not an honest endeavor to prevent the demise of a hapless teddy bear, but a vicious intervention the consequence of which is the undermining of millions of years of evolution and the sabotaging  of the pandas attempts to find a final, true species wide transcendence. we should view captive breeding programs as forced rape camps and see our interventions in the panda world as aggressive imposition of our flawed ideals on a far nobler breed than our own. why? the reason for these atrocities is simple enough: the panda offers a window into our own ultimate evolution, we must cease proliferation and attempt perfection now within this generation, having children is spiritual death and existential denial of any possibility of transcendence and perfection. KILL ALL THE KITTENS AND BUDGERIGARS!

WHAT THE MANIFESTO?

Having found the market driven critical discourse of contemporary art to be at times both distorting and arbitrary (though at times it does seem to provide a certain symmetry: with openings feeling something like an illegal dog fight: bloody lino and hand licking.) and having seen the opportunities that art may provide for paradigmatic transcendence confounded at the point of its proliferation; I must now attempt an autonomous dissemination of my own work.


As the amount of information increases beyond the capacity of individuals to comprehend it, any single part of the data available can be accessed and analyzed instantly; the problem we now face is that we have reached such a saturation of information that specific information is subject to so many possible relations within the data stream that it immediately losses any autonomy of meaning (google etc) and so we find ourselves forced to integrate artificial or spurious peripheral relationships when considering any single area of data. Rather than triggering a reductive process whereby we mine the pool of data for comprehensible specifics whole areas are taken together and summarized by engines powerful enough to link these abstract families of disparate information. Any specialization losses the possibility of a dialectical opposite as huge tracts of knowledge are integrated into larger and larger webs of information, the mechanisms whereby these fields might be made useful move further away from the skill set of the human mind. As the amount of accessible data grows we approach a state of binary dependence, but one in which the code is lost, we may comprehend the referent but we can no longer conceive of that which it signifies. Knowledge must be made palatable for an increasingly plural and superficial cultural paradigm.

Ideas lose currency in a society obsessed with production. The longevity of concepts is inextricably linked to the time given to their consideration, not to their production. It is the duty of the artist to create the idea; it is the duty of the society to preserve it. Galleries should act as repositories for artistic truth. The market should function as a tax system levied on the willing for the maintenance of a shared cultural legacy. The artists’ only consideration should be the proliferation of their truth. It is the artists’ position in society that provides the paradigmatic base for the work: at times detested, adored, but always at odds with the governing ethos of wider society. The critical establishment should exist to catch the windfall of those who create.