2022-2024
SCULPTURE WORK
COLLECTED OBJECTS
SEEDS AND CITATIONS
DRAWINGS / NOTES
PHOTO WORK
THE SUNSHINE OF PARADISE ALLEY 2024
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Reality, the metaphysical pull of the body economy, of real economy. In this world we don’t float, but grace is a weighty floatingness, a knowing of hell and a seeping up as you give into it, emptiness in faith, a hot air balloon
GROTESQUE, GRACE
Grace, pulseless and horrific, becoming beyond oneself, an object with no eyes and no mirror, giving into all (bow and be simple, bow and be free, pride and bondage all forgetting)
PUPPET BODY, EMPTY BODY
The body transfigured, made empty of itself, hollowed out, become a god, become wood, moved from without, or not at all, inanimation
ECSTATIC BODY
Body in heat of raw sensation, burning body, body made up of flames, brilliant sourcelessness, heat of god, a burning bush
GROTESQUE, GRACE
Grace, pulseless and horrific, becoming beyond oneself, an object with no eyes and no mirror, giving into all (bow and be simple, bow and be free, pride and bondage all forgetting)
PUPPET BODY, EMPTY BODY
The body transfigured, made empty of itself, hollowed out, become a god, become wood, moved from without, or not at all, inanimation
ECSTATIC BODY
Body in heat of raw sensation, burning body, body made up of flames, brilliant sourcelessness, heat of god, a burning bush
THE ABJECT, abjection: horror, nausea, a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between things, waking up to the body as object, another object in a world of objects. In other words, the material world has no hierarchies.
PAIN AND PLEASURE, MASOCHISM AND WAKING UP
God being a sadist. Grotesque world. Making pleasure out of limitation, scarcity, not enough to go around, giving into wounding, letting it calcine, kissing the wounds (they emit light) becoming transfigured. Pain precedes metamorphosis. Good demands material suffering
BODY ECONOMY
Real world scarcity, the first pain is you are a body in a world of superficial value, material value, eating and shitting, drinking and pissing, loving and fucking
LIGHT ECONOMY
A plane of spirit value which is more transcendent and restful, of seek and you shall find, of drink of my water and you shall not thirst, of the lilies do not toil
THE MATERIAL
The physical, the world of physical necessity, impoverished reality
THE TRANSCENDENT
The beyond material, all things from their source
MATERIAL POVERTY
Scarcity, and the metaphorical practice of crafting transcendent value out of common materials through attentive love (embroidery, a meal), a tea stand up in the dusty roads of Turkish mountains. All the wealth of the mediterranean but no money to speak of. A purpose that contains all other purposes
The principle of pain as friendly, as having the power to clear out, become guiding
IMPULSE
Minute sensations of desire that in their diffusion form a static
LITTLE SOLDIERS (COME BACK)
Disordered army, impulses that wander without direction, couple with my thoughts and multiply
DESIRE
The clustering or patterning of impulse which concentrated and removed from its object can become burning, can become ecstacy
HOMING
The return to center, the ability to anchor amidst Ahab’s vast ocean, take breaks, take breaths, return to scale from vast and alienating abstraction
MACHINES OF DESIRE
The physical body of desire, how desire manifests in a world of real things
HORROR, DISORIENTATION
Awakening to the disorder, the worst of reality, god’s betrayal, the martyrdom of christ
THE VERGE OF RETCHING
The sensation of nothing to stand on
CONCRETE (REAL AND HARD)
What you fall on when you don't fall on grace. A flapping of wings. Spirit suicide
HUNGER AND EARNEST LUST
RUSTIC LUSTINESS (NO SELF MOTION, ALL ABOUNDING)
The bounty of desire in stillness
TRANSFIGURATION - STELARC’S PUPPET BODY - MORTIFICATION OF THE FLESH
The body transformed, metamorphosed, made empty and open, sunk into its own pain, hollowed out, become a vessel, become pure
MAGNETIC FLUIDITY
In other words becoming red, channeling and transforming desire, dancing beyond oneself, absolute presence, no barrier between body and objects, law of assumption
DANCE LOGIC, CUTTING OUT THE FRONT BRAIN
Intrinsic motion, riding waves, suave mindlessness, a lack of hesitation, keeping the brain box at a moderate capacity (letting go of thoughts unbound to will, redirecting them gently, without tension, tai chi)
BISEXUAL SEDUCTION
Propagation without boundaries, to fuck and be fucked, lust without principle, a reason to dance, James Dean
NERVOUS HORSE, NERVOUS WHORE
The principle of anxiety. A freezing up, a flightiness, tension, fright from the body real, denial of exchange and retribution, matters of economy
AFRAID OF LOOKING
Downcast eyes, an agitated loss of libido, fear of confrontation, fear of politics, fear of being alive, the plague of women, unadornment of oneself and one’s right to exist
THINGS THAT CAN’T BE TAKEN AWAY
Jane Eyre’s inward treasure, patience, dignity, love, grace. The stoic center, the soul’s courtyard
Engaging with other machine bodies, activating latent potential, play, god’s delight
INFINITE POTENTIAL
The transcendent possibility of all latent becomings, the reality of their existence
CALCINATION, SPIRIT ALCHEMY
The spirit tortured and transfigured, what remains after burning, and here I am moving the stars that are me
THE BODY ALOFT
The body between states, transfigured, heart falling
RAW SENSATION
Schizoid sensation, the giving into impulse of gamblers, and addicts, raw impulse with no filters
MY PHALLIC EYES FIGHT AND FUCK
Danger in asserting you exist, and dignity. Appropriation of male gaze, assertion of spirit, the willingness to fight and to fuck, an independent being, willingness to stand apart, first ingredient of love, and to seduction
CONCENTRATION, ATTENTION AND PRAYER
Meditation as a practice of attention. Concentration as the key to prayer, attention and care, attention and love, attentive love
THE DEW
The release, a return to empty after everything is burnt in its own violence, in other words, your desire for it, your desire to become it, it's becoming of a desiring machine, back to stasis. Post-nut clarity on the level of spirit
BECOMING EYES/BECOMING ANGEL
Becoming eyes, a photographer knows you are your camera, becoming consciousness, disembodied (you are your eyes, they are their eyes)
BLISS
Heroine. Brushes with paradise: a delicate dependent ecstasy. Comes in small doses, when it happens it comes from something, a needle, a cock, and overwhelms everything. Nothing escapes it. Leaves you feeling emptier when it dissipates, a lonely drug, and the only true solace is the beginning of the feeling, the expectation of its coming on, in other words, a mirage. Small compensation. In the middle of it there is no will. Maybe a way to salvation, if you can touch absolute love, or the will to nothingness, the will to no will, and remember it, but for now it remains painful and nothing else. Perfect quietude, followed by a vast, nearly incomprehensible yearning for the next dose. Something to make everything else bearable.
SEDUCTION GAMES
Personal opacity, push and pull, tango, the pleasure of absence, the necessity of space to presence
ADDLED HAZE
Physiological effects of rat brain. Too long spent in the freezing desert with nothing but crumbs, nightlife, the dead of Ludlow
GRACIOUS ARCHITECTURE
Slow measured spaces forgiving of human frailty, compassionate spaces, or courtyard or a monastery, an old world concern
The horror of the body (Kristeva, Klossowski, Sade). Material reality and its limitations. Pastoralist denial of materiality (of horror and pain) in favor of an anti-pain, anti-gravity reality, an ideology of purity, perfection, the deadness of pleasantry. Sensuality and transfiguration. The possibilities of a crucifix, ways to be drawn up from oneself.
My city. New york. Times Square. Hell's Kitchen. Getting back in touch with a world I couldn’t stomach as a child. Maybe I still can’t stomach it, but now that means something to me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about art as a kind of note taking. Collection-making. Something that presents itself as a reason. A philosophical unfolding that occurs first experientially, then materially and conceptually.
Weight. Weight and spirit. Economy of spirit: the allocation of attention, the restrictions of time. Concentration and prayer.
The horror of the body (Kristeva, Klossowski, Sade). Material reality and its limitations. Pastoralist denial of materiality (of horror and pain) in favor of an anti-pain, anti-gravity reality, an ideology of purity, perfection, the deadness of pleasantry. Sensuality and transfiguration. The possibilities of a crucifix, ways to be drawn up from oneself.
My city. New york. Times Square. Hell's Kitchen. Getting back in touch with a world I couldn’t stomach as a child. Maybe I still can’t stomach it, but now that means something to me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about art as a kind of note taking. Collection-making. Something that presents itself as a reason. A philosophical unfolding that occurs first experientially, then materially and conceptually.
Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace.
A book I read last summer that framed a lot of my current thinking. A very poetic and introspective take on the movements of spirit.
Porete, Marguerite. A Mirror of Simple Souls.
Another spiritualist text. Written by a woman burned at the stake for being a witch, basically. Unattributed until the 50s. Another text on transfiguration. Focus on love.
Very disturbing books by a very disturbed author. A kind of note taking about dangerous attempts at oblivion. Addled. Horrific. And somehow beautiful. About transcendence, and human failure in the face of the sublime.
Shaker Songs.
Rich lyrical language on spirit and its calcination. Outdated, but somehow relevant in its simplicity and urgency, and in being American.
Jeffers, Robinson. Apology for Bad Dreams.
A fantastic poem I came across totally by accident. About torture, and horror, and sublime beauty, and a soul moved beyond itself, not by love, but by lust first.
Von Kleist, Heinrich. On Marionette Theater.
Ideas related to those of Simone Weil. A strange and somewhat awkward or at the very least unusual essay on how grace is related to absence. Becoming object. Becoming god.
Rumi. Trans. Coleman Barks. Collected Rumi.
Very vivid spiritual poetry that really you’d think could have been written yesterday. Very sensual. Deals realistically with the innate violence of life, but not at all pessimistic. Physical in a way that most Christian mystics aren’t. Originally written in Persian in the 13th century. Started reading after visiting Rumi’s tomb in Turkey.
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights.
Reread this through my mom’s cancer treatment. Something about souls bumping in an abstract, barren landscape. Movement, heat, entropy and death, and each life totally haphazard and unfulfilled, and that being okay, or at the very least just being the state of things, and the state of things still being sublime.
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Very much about a soul’s movement. Empty and abstract, and lovely for being so. An open architecture. The barest bones of a structure. Words that are barely there.
SUNDERED CITY, BAD DREAMS REVISED
Stelarc became famous for endurance works deemed SUSPENSION ACTS in which he would hang himself from meathooks in iterations. In the following passage he is, he morphs, and then he is not. A meditation on grace and artist become puppet become leader of cult esteem become god but in the end who is not but maybe a reflection.
So a man’s mutilated flesh is tearing and threatening a concrete plunge as he’s floated out above a crowd on East 11th street. In this moment, he is an angel, a multitudinous seraphin, a body without thought – mere fluid impulse and light of will, kaleidoscopically ensconced in nothing but this present ascension. Projected out of time, out of space, he is a lightning flash in the wooden iridescence of the here here here.
This light, concealed and revealed by the thickness of his body, is the twinkling light of a seducer / taunting / ecstasy. Pretty but not pristine. Rather, DIRTY. Gorged, stuffed wretched with cash like feathers makes up a weighty, dogged absence at the center of his being, a strained consciousness, a straddled void … the gap, yawning and uncontrolled, is threatening amnesia, threatening death.
Threat of death, hot death, a facsimile rogue. You will know him by his slender waist, city shoulders, and careless coin flip pleasure … A restless divinity baits reality, but nausea is not sustained. Only briefly, are we disintegrated, discontained. Or, as I’ve said, never more crucified than on a saturday night.
In me, and underground, I find bloodlust and agitated anarchy that's been painted over haphazardly like a crack in the wall.
IN ME, THIS NARCISSISTIC CITY
CONVULSES
NEW YORK IS CRYING OUT FOR TRAGEDY LIKE ALL BEAUTIFUL PLACES
To be spared, I think, I must be flamelike, “I AM TAMAR CAULDWELL AND I HAVE MY DESIRE.” Burns without burning up as the infinity of any single body.
BLESSED BE THE HOLLOWED.