I realized today on the bus ride to work that the everyday thoughts that cross my mind have become freakishly polarized. I either see everything as shape, negative space, abstraction, in other words devoid of associations and indexicals, or I see everything as an unwieldy metaphor for something bigger. Which sort of leads me to conclude that I am neurotic. At least more neurotic than "before", whenever that was.

Anyways one of these unfortunately heavy things I can't help but to think about at least every couple of days is where people go when they die. I've fabricated many, many theories that are a lot more detailed than the average existential theories that you have when you're a sullen little bitch of a teenager. I wish I could draw a diagram of my thought process over the past year or so but in any case it would look something like this:

the big bang -->
the Blackout-->
Utter confusion-->
Deeper confusion-->
Even deeper confusion-->
New agey shit-->
hybridized Christianity/Buddhist/monist ontology shit-->
A venomous mix of existentialism + materialism-->
Confusion-->

...and anyways it goes something like this constantly and constantly. Enough to drive me completely crazy sometimes. But anyways instead of coming to one, grand conclusion I've started to negotiate the terms of my personal beliefs with all of the above in a strange way. Besides, in the world we live in today, anything short of complicated seems to be false or corrupt by default. The one lucid addition I've been able to make to the whole life-after-death conundrum is that people don't become spirits, become resurrected like Jesus, or hang out with other dead people in the sky eating lots of junk food, looking young, and wearing white clothes all the time. In fact, forget images altogether because the more I think about it the more they are the mind's nostalgic crutches. Rather, people become forces. Imagine that every thought that crosses your mind, dream you have, decision you make, punch of feeling you have all come from somWHERE, a colossal force field in you that distributes energy through unique, subterranean conduits to produce results to different effects at specific moments. Sort of the way that synapses make connections in your brain when you register an experential or neurological moment. So when someone close to you dies (I prefer not to ever use "passes away", it makes me really angry for some reason) your force field becomes imbued, whether you like it or not, with their presence. This can work in both painful and benign ways. It can serve as a source of depressive modes, for example, that can be as abstract as longing and as concrete as chest spasms. Or conversely it can serve as a source of incredible strength that pushes your own convictions and decisions to have a meaning greater than you can imagine..so you do things and make decisions not only for your personal reasons and sake but for that person and also for all the things that that person represented/s. It changes you forever, this sort of redistribution of your force field. Really, it transforms everything you see and do..and I imagine that by the time I have no teeth, saggy muscles, and all the time in the world, and by the time that I will have lost many people in my life..well. I kind of look forward to it.

Remodelling Interpretation after the "Encounter-Event"

"Crystal of Resistance", Thomas Hirschhorn, Biennale 2011

Writing as both an artist and an analyst-theorist, Bracha L. Ettinger declares that it is the destiny of artworks to be interpreted. She formulates the inevitable connection between subjectivity, initially the artist’s, and the Symbolic, the field of meaning, in ways which at first echo Julia Kristeva’s notion of art as the semiotic transgression of the Symbolic order. But Ettinger goes further.

Artists continually introduce into culture all sorts of Trojan horses from the margins of their consciousness; in that way, the limits of the Symbolic are transgressed all the time by art. It is quite possible that many work-products carry subjective traces of their creators, but the specificity of works of art is that their materiality cannot be detached from ideas, perceptions, emotions, consciousness cultural meanings, etc, and that being interpreted and reinterpreted is their cultural destiny. This is one of the reasons why works of art are symbologenic.5

Ettinger presents art as a kind of gift, packaged in its own materialities that are at once spurs to perceptions, feelings and thoughts as well as connections with existing cultural meanings. This gift is also an event, inviting and inciting the receptive culture to work with it. The concept of the event is central to Ettinger’s theoretical shifting of psychoanalysis from a focus on the object to the significance of a shared trans-subjective occurrence. The event initiates the foreseen that has resonance beyond the individual subject. Event in general parlance involves both a gathering and an occasion and the word, used of art, reminds us of both the interaction between different sites and moments of subjectivity and the shared experience, of the gathering of reciprocal responses. Interpretation, then, is not the exhaustive definition of what art is and where it comes from but is instead an engagement to work with it as a gift-event, that in doing something, brings about change in the culture itself: it generates new meaning.

The point of interpretation, therefore, is not a fixing of meanings to artists, forms, iconographies or practices as occurs in the dreadful recurrent phrase ‘this work is about…’. It is a work of analysis that aims to enlarge the text of culture through the co-creation with the working of art of otherness which sustains plurality, and preserves some hope that there are domains yet to be known.

-Griselda Pollock, Tate Papers

Lovely.

Ji-Young Lee, I'll be Back, 2010


I wonder why I lied to myself that I had never been here and was totally ignorant of this place- in fact, it's just like anywhere else here- only the feeling is stronger and incomprehension deeper

I give you a pear that was given me- would that it were a pair, but nature is penurious.

Louise Bourgeois- The Damned, the Posessed and the Beloved (The Steilneset memorial), 2007-2010
"a flaming chair surrounded by a ring of seven oval mirrors-each distorted mirror reflecting the flame differently" in Vardø, Norway

Best departing email ever

Hey Valerie. I'm long gone. Outta here. Vaya con Dios. Arrivederci baby. M.I.A.

I was sorry to have missed you at the party. You can keep the book if you want. Let me know what I owe and I can send you a check. And remember, if faced with a choice to go or not to go, always go. Unless it's a headless horseman offering you the ride. Then think about it.

Take care,
Ben

The brain has over a trillion neurons and every neuron has 10,000 dendrites.