Re: Road to the Oscars
On the subject of nausea and resurrection, as somebody who published with Gus in his Pink when it was criticized as being a thinly veiled return to all things Phoenix, we've already heard the dismay and denials. Artists have proclivities. Just look at any artist. Look at Verlaine for example, Rimbaud's Gus Van Sant in a sense. And as for the connection between Hollywood and Art, at least Art has the cajones to transparently accept that human civilisation itself is, at this point, nothing other than 'some kind' of very elaborate
"interred-taint-which-meant". [or tint, or tent, if you wish, if you don't want the tope chicken skin on your plate.]
Verlaine had nauseas. He once smashed the jars his neurotic mother kept in her house containing his aborted brothers and sisters. Why hasn't any Postmodern history painter painted that?
and as for Ruscha's paintings and their "trash".. Are you people utterly daft? look carefully at the word trash in reverse, to wit: sh[hh]-art.. The main thing that's good is that at least "Stoner-Irony" is even on the menu.
I'm thinking stoner irony, and slightly dim skanky-glam in horrid old cities is at least fun. When there's 9 billion people on the planet, the cult of morality has done its job, monkey at top of food chain, some monkey, whoever it is.
Let's party.
Or better yet, let high thee o gits to the hand gesture library for some herman-nudics.
look at the Neapolitanisms in this pic:
Do we read it right to left or left to right.
Ruscha seems to be doing some version of the almighty hunchback. I'd call it
Hunchback with a transparent shell.
and this is a complex image of alchemical androgeny:
A snail with a transparent shell, as in the human is like a snail whose culture, and or dwelling is grown from its own self, but this shell is transparent, non-living, a tusk. Enlightenment is the ability to see through words.
As in Norman O. Brown's entreaty to "Get the nothingness back into words.."
Gus has seemingly presented the index extended by itself. The other fingers are generally bent inwards and pressed down by the thumb, as mentioned by Quintilian, but that is not necessary to the gesture if the forefinger is distinctly separated from the rest. It is most commonly used for indication, pointing out, as it is over all the world, from which comes the name index, applied by the Romans as also by us, to the forefinger. In different relations to the several parts of the body and arm positions it has many significations, e.g., attention, meditation, derision, silence, number, and demonstration in general.
and James is doing the drink wine sign.
So I will assert that we should read this according to age which means
right to left.
James: Let us be wise, and drunken.
Gus: Let us choose the paths we travel.
Ed: We are the univocal multiplicity of nature.
Gagosian: I'd rather have blue skin.
The sinister bit, is James' crossed lower right hand which I can't quite decode because I'm too invested in these historical codes. two knuckles might read as double and the arms being crossed might
signify
a doublecross.
This makes me think of Burroughs line: "Never trust a Religious son of a bitch, not with God telling him how to fuck ya one.."
This is like the doubleness at the root of things, and prepares the way for Ruscha's penultimate
Hunchback of the Mater Domea
meaning
an ambiguity-agency is housed in matter
which makes me come to think of Hugo's Hunchback
as a reflexive mediation on this complex sign, its depth.
The transparent shell actually reiterates an indexical portion of the meaning of the hunchback sign.
Actually an aspect.
transparency = invented value = worthlessness
not that things have no value, but they have no intrinsic value
that is nature.
And Nature is translated so to speak in the same way.
Art is Trash until someone buys it. The materials last, but are essentially worthless,
until the value is discovered.
I think I would like to do a canvas print of this picture!
very subtle!
Is James' nameless gesture
the rabbit head peeking from the hat?
perversity or fecundity as grund?
A singularity is precisely the union
of perversity and fecundity, as well as the culturality
of perversion as fecundity, and of
fecundity as perversion
perversion of what?
isn't fecundity our sacred Mater?
fecundity is a 'perversion'
of emptiness.
Most of the universe is empty.
Therefore our little fullness is always already a 'perversion'
of that.
