::

[likeafieldmouse-deactivated2015]

Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting [threepanel], 1951. Oil and latex on canvas

"Each of the five works in Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings consists of a different number of modular panels—there are one-, two-, three-, four- and seven-panel iterations—that have been painted completely white.

In each case, Rauschenberg’s primary aim was to create a painting that looked untouched by human hands, as though it had simply arrived in the world fully formed and absolutely pure. Considered shocking and even characterized as a cheap swindle when they were first exhibited publicly in 1953, the White Paintings have gradually secured a place in art history as important precursors of Minimalism and Conceptualism.

Among the most radical aspects of the series is that these works were conceived as remakeable: Rauschenberg viewed them primarily as a concept and allowed for the physical artworks to be repainted and even refabricated from scratch without his direct involvement.”

[rauschenbergfoundation-deactiva]

Source: SFMOMA Rauschenberg Research Project

[miraging-blog]

the most fundamental philosophical gesture is: not to close the gap, but, on the contrary, to open up a radical gap in the very edifice of the universe, the 'ontological difference,' the gap between the empirical and the transcendental, in which neither of the two levels can be reduced to the other"

  —  Žižek, Organs Without Bodies

[miraging-blog]

Rae Armantrout, "Unbidden"

The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each loves you. Each has left something undone.

 *

Did the palo verde blush yellow all at once?

Today's edges are so sharp

they might cut anything that moved.

 *

The way a lost word

will come back unbidden.

You're not interested in it now,

only in knowing where it's been.

[miraging-blog]

By creating a language that consists entirely in repetition and recombination, poke-speak takes on the characteristics of the musical refrain, described in A Thousand Plateaus as follows:

“Instead, what needs to be shown is that a musician requires a first type of refrain, a territorial assemblage refrain, in order to transform it from within, deterritorialize it, producing a refrain of a second type as the final end of music: the cosmic refrain of a sound machine” (349).

By establishing poke-speak as a language of eternal (or only) refrain, each new iteration of the same old thing recontextualizes it, thereby engaging in a process of perpetual deterritorialization. To clarify, poke-speak is untranslatable in the sense that there is really only one word (the creature’s own name), but this untranslatability, through use, becomes only-translatability as the entire lexicon is bound within the language system of the single word. One word means all things and meaning can only be derived from context; meaning is constructed through refrain. “Thus the sign has already attained a high degree of relative deterritorialization; it is thought of as a symbol in constant referral from sign to sign” (D+G 112). It is a language that is always new and always old. It is a language that can only be understood through a constant strategy of translation, or movement from signifying sign to signifier. The language of the pokémon thus commands, but not in the ordinary sense. The language itself compels obedience to its logic of constant deterritorialization. 

[5]

[andrewmaxedon]

Blake Fall-Conroy, “Minimum Wage Machine,” 2008-2010

This machine allows anyone to work for minimum wage for as long as they like.  Turning the crank on the side releases one penny every 4.97 seconds, for a total of $7.25 per hour.  This corresponds to minimum wage for a person in New York.  

[seabois]

“But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, we’re essentially identical to trees.”

Carl Sagan

(via ghostwood)

[miraging-blog]

if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facialisations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

[miraging-blog]

Symptoms of Island

Sometimes in the morning your hand finds the dip in my side.  For the moment

we’ll call it happiness.  This does not account for weeks spent cursing

the apple trees, their sticky bloom. The man on the bus gaping

at my slack lip knew.  Plump dumb stone in my mouth.  I’m sure of it.

That afternoon you were a brisk, starched thing.  We slipped out

the back way, screen door banging cruel on my slim-boned grim.  Today,

like most days, my mind arrives an island, tongue-numb, child wishes

ivied onto me.  God takes away, it’s said.  Call it what you will.

[ronulicny]

A DIY “Target” from 1970….pre-signed by JASPER JOHNS complete with brush and primary colored paints for you to do your own work….a collaboration of sorts if you will….I would so LOVE to own one of these….such a cool idea…. :)

[cavetocanvas]

Michael Kidner, Chessmen, 1967

[miraging-blog]

Schoenberg said, “In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.” I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, “In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.”

John Cage, Indeterminacy

[visual-poetry]

by ryuta iida

[miraging-blog]

A Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made; Imitations are often a sort of manufacture, wrought up by those mechanics, art, and labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759); original emphases

[miraging-blog]

Any girl who reads is already a lost girl.

Lisa Robertson, R's Boat

[miraging-blog]

[...] you couldn't really hear what he was saying because everything he said became something she was never going to say and so she could never really be interrupted at all.

on Mia Farrow being interviewed by Conan O'Brien; from Tan Lin, Insomnia and the Aunt

[miraging-blog]

[...] often I have asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body.

Friedrich Nietzche, The Gay Science; original emphasis

[miraging-blog]

Being with him was like being alone underwater--everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced. [...] as his body blurred around me, I worried I might forget it all and have to be myself again, without ever having seen him. There was nothing for me to do but notice him as hard as I could, to notice him, to notice him, to notice him until I did not know what it was to even try to look at somebody without collapsing with exhaustion.

Ben Marcus, Notable American Women