eulogy

                                                                                 by bhtART

                                                     

                                                                            

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

friends, artists, not-just-men - lend me your eyes!  the ineffable is oft overlooked for its arrival before our eyes, but faith in the conception that seeing is believing has blinded our eyes to what it means to believe.  from the caves in which art began, we look to the past to see that its creators must have been:  for the mountains in which the caves bear their marks did indeed make the primordial man, as even the mountains sprung up and out of soup by the same name - primordial.  and warhol once spoke to our eyes, saying - "campbell's soup," but he never said it was "mmm, mmm, good," as that is subjective - relative to the self.  and like the cave art of the past whose mountains made the man, those early living inscriptions in the feminine mother (whose after-birth was, too, mmm, mmm good and oh so primordial), may or may not have arrived with a bang, but we can be certain that it arrived with a pop - art thou not, art?  no, thou art pop!  we now look into the past where the caves marked our sense that our progenitors were also, like us, consumed with the burden to paint their food, just as warhol:  for what is more popular in any culture than sustenance, than flesh, than the fetish --- even art?

 

friends, lend me your eyes!  for the dwellings in which our earliest evidence of warhol's existence have become our greatest maternal provision of truth - for the dwellings have become the tombs in which both art and man have been interred.  this is, too, our greatest evidence that art is not merely dead, but that its beginning has been intended to remain so tragically buried where it began - intombed and in tombs - and food becomes dung.  art has not died, friends, but has been dead from its earliest conception - yet it lives!  therefore, let us neither be consumed by our lamenting, nor made infirm by patrons' lamentations as they cry:

 

"whatever happened to art, where did it go, what has it become - i could do that, a child could do that - that is not art - i have seen art and the italians got it right - where's a pope when you need an orange julius to commission art that serves us food - the bread of life - living water - something mmm, mmm good - something that rose up and out of its tomb - the rose of sharon - something with a narrative - something that tells us that it loves us and considers patrons' needs - something that tells us to love one another - that which only an artist can do - something we do not need to see to believe - something logocentric?   just a trace of the messiah."

 

artists, lend me your eyes!  for the stone has been rolled away, and with it, art has been resurrected - for none can see it, as it has transformed.  for the patrons have said in their hearts:

 

"art has transmogrified, therefore give us a s(ign)tatement that we may come to see and believe - for we can think of no greater legacy than that of paul de mann, who hath taught us that  seeing and reading are kissing cousins, who hath produced an imbicile - whose offspring is transcendental - a typewriter ribbon of unlimited ink with the primordial man expressing himself before the dawning of totemic culture's with any sense of taboo - or of the father as an institution that takes its daughters to wedlock - mmm, mmm good - a peculiar soup - a seminal inscription in an egg-white art world that is "tempera-l" - whose patrons haven't the lexicon to bear its yolk, and who are incessantly screaming:  "incestuous imagery - art imitating life, imitating art - abstractions of others' abstractions -  children of familial orgies that cannot themselves read - illiterate and "cabal-istic" tribe of the self-discerned, and that which is indiscernable from the ineffable derivative of a dead language's cabal and its excuses for its need of high praises."  

 

it is not the critic who hath decreed that art is dead, but the king within the queen withing the king that has declared that art is dead.  For democracy has made literate those who historically did not have the privilege to read, or see, who have now become the all-seeing, all-reading majority who, by law, does not touch what is dead - and neurotically - won't go near it.  Rather they say - "art is dead, and what do the living have to do with the dead - with that which does not speak?"

 

not-just-men, lend me your eyes!  for the privileged class has made a class of men who are literate, and of women who can vote, and we must see and read their criticism, which is their avoidance of the dead.  lend me your eyes!  a philosophy of aesthetics has replaced the material with the linguistic, and the number of readers has grown exponentially to be wary of the incestuous texts institutions pen.  not-just-men, the beautiful is ab ovo, and the revered image is truth - invisible, intangible - the ugly, ugly truth.  their men have rowed past our sirens' songs with wax in their eyes to be blinded by what our works have spoken, while the main mast constrained in the hull did constrain Polyaretos to see and read what we have written - this - our aesthetic:  relative to its own - relative - a seminal inscription in fathers' caves where they name its object-shadows and listen to ever-changing images not etched, but cast on the cave walls .  the institutions' sons are now with its daugthers, as its oral history has played gossip, an ever-changing narrative --- a narrative that will become the child of tomorrow:  naive.  and for that child - "genetic fallacy." a stillborn narrative - still, born. it feeds on a cancerous "good breast," in love with the self, but against the object which intombs it to form its every expression: only shadow:  art is dead.

 

friends, artists, not-just-men!!!! lend me your eyes!!!  as the critic i have become blind by this newspeak, and with the patron i must declare that the image requires the artist's every footnote that we may see and believe.  and now, friends, artists, not-just-men, we must scribe this 11th commandment that "thou shalt not make art for thy neighbor without first explaining why it is not a graven image through artist statements, so that we may go and tell the disciples that art is alive."  for this is the "mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present "self" - a trace of a trace - a wholly wholly ghost - a simulacrum that is the subject, now replaced by its own relative orgin as the subject  ---- self-referential ---- but without the need of the subject it reports to speak for, because to speak for the dead, we have to have known it, understood it, and traced it back to its conception.  Brother with sister or mother, replacing the father, bringing with him his interpretations of the fathers' interpretations of the vanishing digestible narratives, which began within the earliest homes, galleries, museums - within the primordial family mausoleum - it was there where homage was given to those yet to be demystified images of elk, buffalo, and other o(edible)dipal animals.  But now we see how far we have come in all of our reading:  not-just-men - for she does, too, lie down at the tomb with aggamemnon!  for the new privilege is broad and undeniable, and traced back to the absence of illiteracy by the arrival of democracy - it is not the critic that has said so, but the flatscreens in the mancaves of our era who report - even now in this text - that art is mute and muted by their remote will to choose to read what reflects their values [cable-ready-made-jo(urinal)ism], and even record it verbatim (every word and image and song and score), every "piss-christ," to turn its back on what we once gave birth to that lived!  no self-in-the-Other, no desire for the Other, no gravestone o'kieffes, but brother with brother.   for art was never born, yet it is dead and alive!  

 

And as the patrons of the mighty one sailed by the siren's image, they rowed in unison with no sense of its meaning as their leader -- Polyaretos -- cried out in agony!!

 

"My unbelieving eyes are darkened by this Relativity of relativities - for all is only relative - and the gravity of its ego is a deadstar eliciting light from mine eyes!  O' daughters, tribulate in your tribualtions; O' sons of men, stem the rose! "a blessing and a curse on all your mausoleums, for haven't you heard that the great famine hath arrived?  Have ye not heard?   ART IS DEAD!"