Objects allow us to apply the work of mourning to ourselves right now, in everyday life, and this in turn allows us to live - to live regressively, no doubt, but at least to live. A person who collects is dead, but he literally survives himself through his collection, which (even while he lives) duplicates him infinitely, beyond death, by integrating death itself into the series, into the cycle.
The MCR that exists inside the minds of obsessives (me) is kind of like the holy mother (Mary) -- it's not the thing or even a representation of that thing anymore. It's not even a simulacra (? I might be pushing it with this - because upon reflection I think I might be describing a simulacra quite accurately actually - haha)
it no longer bears a likeness, really at all. An idol is what the k-pop darlings call it, and that makes sense to me. I feel it's closest to an effigy. An item that has had so much projected upon it, it becomes holy*.
Wholly unrecognisable
GIMME ALL THAT PAIN
That Gucci Scent - The Last Day of Summer
*Holy - to the holder, and item of ultimate projection. Like close reading. Like for what you really collect is always yourself**. Like all fan art, is just art, is just a reflection of self and now. A light bent through the body.
**Baudrillard, The System of Objects
I also saw this 30 day song challenge, the other day and I'm thinking I might do it.
God help me, do I have an artists' practice at all? Or is my artists practice just hanging out and participating in the goofy little teenage challenges and what-not. Is my artist practice just being a very online teenager for ever?!
I SAID -
IS MY ARTISTIC PRACTICE JUST BEING A VERY ONLINE TEENAGER FOREVER!?
There is a moral to be drawn from the following little tale. We are in the eighteenth century. An illusionist well versed in clockwork has devised an automaton. An automaton so perfect, with movements so fluid and natural, that when the illusionist and his creation appear on the stage together, the audience cannot tell which is which. The illusionist then finds himself obliged to make his own gestures mechanical, and – in what is really the pinnacle of his art – to alter his own appearance slightly so as to give his show its full meaning; the spectators would eventually chafe if they were left in doubt as to which of the two figures was “real”, and the neatest solution is that they should take the man for the machine, and vice versa.
The systematic and limitless process of consumption arises from the disappointed demand for totality that underlies the project of life [...] Consumption is irrepressible, in the last reckoning, because it is founded upon a lack.