Who cares if this is any good? Robin is following, and that is enough. That will probably only ever be enough. Who wants to read about my depressions? Or is that singular? I came up with so many titles for today, I should just list them in sentence forms. My hair is falling out (on top of my head).
No one is writing me and I have no money and I cannot exercise yet and stop smoking and stop smoking marijuana (I could write a whole book on the positive effects of marijuana--but it is now getting in my way) and so forth. Blogging is like writing a letter to a fictitious person. That makes it easier, than just writing in a way like "Dear Diary" or Dear Daybook or so. Courage is one of my problems, and low self esteem or low ego strength. How we call these things has filtered down from psychology over the last century: superego, ego, id and the unconscious and the death drive and sexuality and genitality etc. etc. Gelatin. Gelitin. No. Nein. Elke. Lisa. Uli. What is the purpose of doing this? To keep from virtually "slashing my wrists". I cannot believe how ugly I am when I wake up in the morning these days. I can't be fucked properly because I always need to shit first.
Panic. Or not. Peter. Line. Frederikke. PH. Cerith Wyn Evans. Him I forgot in my list of what to say about all the men who I do not fit with in the art world. Homosexuality and homosociality. And various forms of this. And Avital Ronell: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/86mrf7gq9780252071270.html
I'm a bit hungry so I have to go see if I can eat something. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Supporting depression or fighting it or embracing it or why is this happening to me or is it my fault or is it your fault or society's fault or genetics or my parents or my background or schizophrenia or or is it nobody's fault?
"Capture Totale", "Leaving Art",
http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=14729
I am stopping therapy soon. Psychotherapy. Let's hope that this is withdrawal I'm feeling. Suzi Gablik. Kidney Stones. Kathy Acker. Titles of books. Let's see there is always something to write about. Robin is right that in general the public, even the collecting art public, buys and supports and promotes for aesthetic reasons and not the reasons of one's thoughts and opinions. I have so reduced or condensed or spotlighted my thought processes and behaviours and communications that there has been very little for "them" to hold onto, promote, admire...
Terre Thaemlitz. Fragmentation. Internet as archive. Writing to dig myself out of something. Writing for survival. Unravelling my thoughts and feelings and emotions in LANGUAGE. A very particular language. Maybe a radical change in my work needs to happen. Maybe I need to start proving that I can draw and paint realistically, because I can of course. The less you do it the more interesting it is when you do do it. Hospitals. Children's bedrooms. I am just so glad to be shod of childhood in all its forms that I have no wish to explore what happened in my own childhood, as traumatic as that was. I was born somehow sophisticated into a less than sophisticated environment. Not my parents per se, or my sister etc., but my surroundings and the pressures that came from them. Maybe it is time to start blaming again, so that I am not sitting here sedentarily blaming myself, my brain, etc. Sophistication. How do you know if you have it? Most people just gloss over these fundamental questions and take things for granted. I want someone to actually care about my answer when I respond to the killing of Osama Bin Laden (you can't fight violence with violence, or should not, you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools)...what a mess! And the most important point of the day, the place where things are really going wrong is Marina Abramovic. Why doesn't anybody stand up and call out the emperor's new clothes??? I suppose people have done this in ways, like in some reviews I've seen of her presentation in Manchester England I think in 2007 called "Marina Abramovic Presents" including Yingmei Duan whom I do like the work of. She is even a former student of Marina's. Anyway my problem with Marina stems mainly from something she said once regarding a workshop retreat she did probably more than 10 years ago (I am not completely sure when it took place). She stated that anyone with mental instability / problems / challenges and anyone who took medicines could not come on the retreat. Part of the retreat as I remember was a fasting ritual, eating only very little specific things (such as a grain of black pepper). I find the implication, no matter how practical her advice was, preposterous and not worthy of someone deemed to have such an importance for the understanding of performance art. To be a bit catty, I found my two personal meetings with Marina frought with difficulty, superficial, uninspiring, and I just cannot understand why I seem to be a lone voice in this appraisal. The cherry on the cake was and is the production of the book with title, "Marina Abramovic and the Future of Performance Art". The only solace I can take in a title like this is something Marina said to me personally (after concluding that my work was about "identity")--when I told Marina that Carolee Schneemann was my teacher in the past and was now a good friend, she said, "Carolee is really the mother of us all." I am not sure if I could wholeheartedly back such a statement without saying "in the West" or "in the USA" or "in Euro-America" or "North America" for these statements of generalization are always frought with difficulty. Also because the privileges afforded Western female white artists of Carolee's generation gave those artists a head start on the rest of the world when it came and comes to artistic self expression. Marina has never (or up until recently never) identified as a feminist artist and this is not my beef with her and her work. My beef is that even though she is sufficiently 'exotic' to the West as an Eastern European artist of privileged descent, she remains oblivious in public and in her statements regarding privilege--she acts like any woman of her generation could have done what she did.
There is no sympathy, no weirdness, no softness, no humility. Or very little at least. I think she underestimates and takes for granted that all artists have the same mental stability, and as she is working in the mainstream heavily for years I suppose this is the general position taken, but nevertheless...I am unimpressed with her students except for Yingmei Duan and Melati Suryodarmo (perhaps I have overlooked some and in that case I am sorry, and will "right my wrongs" at a future date). The idea of performance as a tableaux vivant is not exciting or wholesome to me. The idea of performance is not the empty body as an empty sign or signifier but the body as an entanglement of lived life and art. I realize fully that Marina spent time all over the world studying energy transfer and cosmic connection, together with Ulay. But I am somehow unimpressed with the result, and feel that someone who spent their life in an armchair looking deep inside themselves could come up with a more interesting and meaningful result.
This is only an opinion of taste, of course. And perspective. Being manic depressive has forced me to look at the way the mind states of people in our society are policed on the one hand and taken for granted on the other. Many people in the art world and without seem to be reluctant to look inside themselves and confront their own behaviours and communication patterns.
Taking personal responsibility is something Marina has not done. In my estimation. I even read an interview with her where she was talking about the interviewer's lipstick, that it should be a lighter shade, and somehow even this was not fun or interesting or even glamorous, it was just boring and strict and constraining and judgemental. The person Marina Abramovic and her almost universal ubiquitous presence when it comes to performance annoys me in the extreme, to reiterate. Perhaps I am moving into a discussion forum example with this, throwing out my preconceptions to see if someone can teach me something I don't yet know or see. I am not even going to start on her taste and the personal choices I know she makes regarding other artists and friends of hers. There will be several or more people annoyed with me or even angry at the attack on their monument Marina. But I cannot hold my tongue. Even through depression it is impossible for me not to address this situation, of an artist who in my opinion has little to offer in the forms that she is presently using (even the early story of her first painting lesson left me cold, why is this??) -- I feel little aura and it is perhaps me who is wrong. Could it be that one of us has to be right and the other to be wrong? Her work is more general than mine, less narcissistic in ways, more egocentric actually (her work) -- is this the attraction?? The egocentricity? I don't want to end up a bitter old male artist, who has drawn incredible inspiration from women artists from my earliest years. There is so much about this to my biography and past that I will never manage to disseminate all that information. Norma Isaacs etc. Is it a cultural mistunderstanding I have? Because I am born in the USA but live nearly 16 years in The Netherlands / Amsterdam the place where Marina lived for so long...and where we met twice...
I am not sure. I just don't "get it", I don't "feel it", and I have left video retrospectives of her work feeling empty and cold. This is surely not what she intends. I could envy people who get something out of the work, because to me it is like a place-holder for something which could and is frequently expressed better by other artists (VALIE EXPORT, Kirsten Justesen, Adrian Piper, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O'Grady, Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama)...artists who give of themselves and are not afraid to appear foolish and who are averse to the spectacle that Marina seems to be so fond of, grand spectacle. She fits right into the capitalist windmill and to this I think her success can be attributed. But I am not buying it (and have tried, bought many books, read essays, listened to interviews, etc. etc. trying to figure out what it is that I am not seeing). I see no personal investment, no institutional critique, and have been avoiding for this whole text writing that actually there is something mannish and masculine about Marina which almost smacks of patriarchy...
There is nothing binary-splitting about this work, it seems to me to hold up everything in the world just as it is. Maybe this proves that travel does not provide insight in a brain incapable of incorporating an alternate position. I miss playfulness and a humble approach -- the work seems to me to be way too serious and on the other hand not serious and engaged enough...Aha! It's the sense of existential humor that's missing, the survival life force! Real queer and feminist work is beyond a studied, academic approach. Real art does not make sense.
