the stoning of the image of the contralogos and the great harlot

                                                          of BABYLon and on and on...

 

                                                             By

 

                                                             Brandon Heath Tart

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE ETYMOLOGICAL FATE OF MASTER CHEFS AND ARTISTS - chefs-d'œuvre! Alea iacta est!

 

A poem from Brandon Heath Tart

 

Author of our Renaissance - and pristine - painted like a murder scene rose; red glow and sweet Sistine Chapel of Love in the first degree - planned suicide - marvel at our marble over bitter Frescos of Logos scowling down upon sycophants' homicide - A Le Carte - matricidium et patricidium says Orff œ'r Orff œ'r Orff

 

The moon isn't changeable - and Pi - carved are the heavens anew each day; vacuum strata of sweet Silent Choirs of Life in the dying day - planned ecclipse - madness œ'r our mercabre from bitter Fruits of Pathos

spiraling unto forked tongue, genocide - A Le Carte - principio terminatur says Origin over Origin over Origin

 

Author of The Living - and prose - prosaic poetry like a winsome rag red-handed; bring night as sweet sonnet sōliloquium as prayers to Logos in Pathos - planned parenthood - nascence is neglected breathing bitter Forms of Piety spawning unto just deserts, deicide - A Le Carte - dulcis mortem after dining O'er originals O'er Orff O'er 'œuvre

 

IMAGES, IMAGINING, IMAGINATION and MEDIA

 

Every image I encounter (whether it's art, an advertisement, a family photo or the subject of each of these three, but not limited to these three) immediately seals itself off from me.  Image-ward, I fall away.  If there has been a great apostasy in my life, it has been my dissociative relationship to media, which includes my own.  A proper exegesis of my opening to this "statement" entails one's understanding of what apostasy is in its historical sense, its "prophetic" theological sense, and lastly its etymological footing.

 

Beginning with the latter, the etymology of apostasy comes from the Latin, apostasia, meaning to renounce or abandon one's established religion.  Regarding art, and the production thereof, this notion presents a severe state of diametric opposition.  Religion, etymologically, comes from religare, meaning "to bind fast".  Art, in terms of its museum and gallery culture, treats art with this majestic "divinity", by which, those who gather before it do so as if they have all come to see and hear some great oracle speak.  This all depends - who's doing the talking?  In McCluhanian terms, the medium is the message.  However true that may be, art patrons come to behold, bringing with them their independent life experiences to the table, around which, the sovereignty of art must be lost in translation, as the degree of subjectivity in viewing art provides no lasting central tenet around which they can indeed, "bind fast" with one another.  The religious element of modern art culture is an image in itself, to which, I maintain as real and bona fide taboo.  To its frames and framework, I retract my contract, through language, embrace my disillusionment of that culture's supposed capacity to unify people, making art intended to try.  This is, however, not "my" intention.  In truth, its visages are not what bind souls, if there is a lasting unification that follows group viewing at all.  My apostasy is, in effect, a rejection of the establishment medium as the message, as art only comments, and its *intrinsic commentary is an imposition (in a diametrically opposed sense), little more.  This is to suggest that one may say it is this or that, and the designated work and its author imposes his/her will to say - "NO."  The artist, if he has a statement, should only make it with his art, and if he chooses to be honest about his medium, then his message would be - "my body made that, but my mind was far away - at best, I must join the masses in the act of interpreting it - I don't know "my" art" -- I don't even "know" it.

 

*There is no actual intrinsic commentary, rather, all that it is, can only refer Elsewhere.  The imposition must not detract the possibility of its being "Else", else it is puritanical in its own right, serving as its own necessity, by law, in command of the patron, thus beheld.

 

In its prophetic sense, art could only evolve (outside of culture's regulatory involvement) into a relativistic soup too bitter to enjoy its taste unless you "have good taste", which reveals that its perceived cohesion is artifice - much like an artist statement.  My statement must be different from this artist's or that artist's, as should my art, but who made the medium, and who brings the message?  Soup, perhaps more stew than soup -- this bitter brew, over which only the few have a lasting taste for, drives more apart than it does bind.  The unraveling world is the medium's visage, its message no less abstract, that history is repeating itself - no more prophetic than insider trading - moving dandily toward the primordial:  Warhol to AWOL, "just add water art".  Like a soldier of culture, I've left my post-modern, seeing that art can't wage war against the POP paradigm, since art will be discovered via lapdog behavior -- unwilling to bite the hand that feeds it space to oppose the sphere of influence that makes it so:  makes it art by proxy.

 

Historically, the medium came more apparently from narratives - moral, religious, philosophical - but has escaped the foundation for the firmament to enter into what is best described as an a-nooshpere.  Contemplative artworks predicated upon pre-existing narratives now find themselves relegated to domains of the passe' - such is thought - the new religion's closest evolutionary relative:  relativism.  Once we beheld truth to be collectively axiomatic, though now it appears that art is self-referential: to each his own.  Problematic only where the artist is the source of the message in the medium, and is thus, is as much an impossibility as it is an (controlling)  imposition.  Communities of patons are now, by and large, offered an art that they must drink and be full.  Sovereignty in aesthetic elegance has entered the cultural paradigm belonging to influential minds who express no less in what they present to the hoi polloi than "let them eat cake."

 

BUT WHAT IS TRUTH?

 

We see this mindset most aptly expressed by charting (sharting) the successes of Warhols and Koonses.  No more truth is expressed in celebrated haute art than where those who have a taste for "brioche" (cake) spend their dollars.  Reckoning truth to be the only contingency over which souls might bind together, including me, I see the family portrait altered by POP culture, and prophetically, I see this Ideological State Apparatus being unbound for its having developed a sweet tooth for POP, when Water would do it greater civic justice, along with some actual Bread.  And what is truth?  "Not I," said noone, "but it should always be pretty, POPular, and p-p-p-phenomenal."

 

The family (phony) portrait is also riddled with advertisement.  The sons and daughters seated with the mother and fathers in them are no longer biologically tied to the male and female cohesion, but to the binding ingredients of mass media iconography.  As I look on from the new historicism at the modern family, I see little men in cover-alls dipping brushes into buckets of glue to paste up offspring-billboards to Abercrombie, Lil' Wayne or worse:  toddlers wearing pre-conditioning apparel that reads "future shop-a-holic".  The shirt is pink, the shirt is POP...isn't that sweet?  On an "ass", pink now makes its entry before its paternal imitation (Cleopatra waved with touching palm branches of objectvisation as a consequential form of objectivity) to see its offspring as a reference to what rides behind the pink --- "shhh - it's a secret".  Materialism...

 

The cohesion of the modern family portrait is eroded with the thinner of the modern medium's fetish enforcing "familiars".  The stew now closer to primordial, modern art's conveniences (just add water) shoving the world to its own "great apostasy", as humanity grows too sluggish to outpace its close proximity to its "creative" origins.  I'd only say art is dead if in so doing, it was exegeted properly.

 

With Plato, if I have control over what I create then it stems from a real sense of the danger that art comes with.  The cohesion of the World Republic is in jeopardy.  The unmitigated license of self-referrential "art" making has made of humanity a mob State of many gods.  If art is, as Plato put forth, an imitation of reality, then we have come only to represent ourselves imitating ourselves; less B=auty, less a=sth=tics - religion, philosophy even science - giving rise to a mimicry of humanity as its own truth, the universe as castrado: neither male nor female hold power in a universe of equations, they now cancel one another out.  Gender Neutral...modern art.  Over this, female artists should wage war.  For long they had to fight for their place in its culture, now gender has no value, and is what? --- A-facsimile of our best raten?.

 

As human knowledge outpaces its understanding, trading magic for fact approaches break-neck speeds that the artist must keep up with.  Dangerously close to a terminal velocity, creativity's mass becomes infinite, and imitates its true origin once and for all.  In a black hole where all the information of space and historical time began, art can no longer emit the light of the past, since it is a religion of collective self-referential expression, its future is a black hole. Whether one has a taste for Originality or not, art's destination is singular:  beginning first with the notion that it is "self" expression, second at the cellular level, and its grand finale' singularity.

 

Both the theological End and Beginning, and the purported Big Bang and Big Crunch have me preaching to anything but the choir.  The medium is the message, and I am not the messenger...just an interpreter, even of my own work, which I also put little stock in from taking stock of it often.  Primordial man that I am, I've no taste for it.  I've come to develop an appetite for information...tree of knowledge and requests for understanding.

 

PHARMAKIA, PHARMAKON -- one to heal, one to kill -- The Designer Drug Culture of Commerce and Abuse of the Shaman's Speech

 

The art my body yields deals with that, and I interpret it later.  As for the familiars, yes, I have seen them, and they're up to no good.