étant donnée // l'origine du monde

hot original

Laughing at the spirits

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61261/laughing-at-the-spirits-in-north-siberia-is-animism-being-taken-too-seriously/

Joking and other types of ridiculing discourses about spirits play a prominent role in the everyday life of hunters, but not because they entail resistance to or subversion of the dominant cosmological values of the sharing economy. Virtually all Yukaghirs ascribe to the spirit world and the demand sharing principle, and they regard both as immutable and morally just. However—and this is the key point—they are well aware that this system must never become total. For the Yukaghirs, this would stand for “death,” as it would give the spirits the moral right to consume them in a series of divine predatory attacks. To avoid this, hunters must constantly steer a difficult course between two moral realities, transcending the official animist rhetoric of respect and sharing through equally animistic forms of theft, seduction, and deception.

it happened again, bring the mops, bring all of the mops

The work is the death mask of its conception.

ghosting

Explaining pictures to a dead hare / hair

 Dead Original // Five Years // 2012

Image: Lanis Levy
(thanks Lanis!)

death assemblage

An assemblage of fossils of organisms that were not associated with one another during their lives. The remains were brought together after death, often by the action of currents.

Boris Groys ///Art Workers: Between Utopia and the Archive

However, the internet has become not a place for the realization of postmodern utopias, but their graveyard—as the museum became a graveyard for modern utopias. Indeed, the most important aspect of the internet is that it fundamentally changes the relationship between original and copy, as described by Benjamin—and thus makes the anonymous process of reproduction calculable and personalized. On the internet, every free-floating signifier has an address. The deterritorializing data flows become reterritorialized.

_{Google data servers}

Walter Benjamin famously distinguished between the original, which is defined through its “here and now,” and the copy, which is siteless, topologically indeterminable, lacking a “here and now.” Contemporary digital reproduction is by no means siteless, its circulation is not topologically undetermined, and it does not present itself in the form of a multiplicity as Benjamin described it. Every data file’s address on the internet accords it a place. The same data file with a different address is a different data file. Here the aura of originality is not lost, but instead substituted by a different aura. On the internet, the circulation of digital data produces not copies, but new originals. And this circulation is perfectly traceable. Individual pieces of data are never deterritorialized. Moreover, every internet image or text has not only its specific unique place, but also its unique time of appearance. The internet registers every moment when a certain piece of data is clicked, liked, un-liked, transferred, or transformed. Accordingly, a digital image cannot be merely copied (as an analogue, mechanically reproducible image can) but always only newly staged or performed. And every performance of a data file is dated and archived.

Boris Groys ///Art Workers: Between Utopia and the Archive

“nonsensuous” similarity

“We must assume,” writes Walter

Benjamin, “that in the remote past

the processes considered imitable includ

ed those in the sky.” 

http://www.brianmassumi.com/textes/Archive%20of%20Experience.pdf

citation

In 1980, a full eight years after his first use of the crosshatch motif, Johns received a postcard reproduction of Edvard Munch's Between the Clock and the Bed (1940–42; Munch Museum, Oslo). In this late self-portrait, Munch, near death, depicted himself in his bedroom, standing in front of the open door to his studio; the bright red and dark blue pattern of the bedspread is rendered in a fashion markedly similar to Johns's crosshatches. Between 1980 and 1982, Johns, inspired by the Munch work, made several drawings and two large paintings based on the crosshatch motif. These works culminate in Johns's monumental grisaille encaustic painting Between the Clock and the Bed. This picture is the last major independent articulation of the crosshatch (as of this writing). Johns incorporated touches of red, blue, yellow, green, ocher, pink, and purple, but the painting is predominantly gray. For whatever reasons, Johns chose to end his extended treatment of the crosshatch motif with this distillation in gray.

Jasper Johns / Gray

i-borg / e-borg/ we-borg ...explaining pictures...

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'wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4ZkR1X6s7E

Meyer, Ursula. “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare,” Art News, January, 1970. Based on conversations with Joseph Beuys:

In How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, Beuys covered his head with honey and gold-leaf, transforming himself into a sculpture. He cradled the dead hare in his arms and took it “to the pictures and I explained to him everything that was to be seen. I let him touch the pictures with his paws and meanwhile talked to him about them… I explained them to him because I do not really like explaining them to people. Of course there is a shadow of truth in this. A hare comprehends more than many human beings with their stubborn rationalism… I told him that he needed only to scan the picture to understand what is really important about it. The hare probably knows better than man that directions are important. You know the hare can turn on a dime. And actually nothing else is involved.”

At the beginning of the performance Beuys locked the gallery doors from the inside, leaving the gallery-goers outside. They could observe the scene within only through the windows. With his head entirely coated in honey and gold leaf, he began to explain pictures to a dead hare. Whispering to the dead animal on his arm in an apparent dialog, he processed through the exhibit from artwork to artwork. Occasionally he would stop and return to the center of the gallery, where he stepped over a dead fir tree that lay on the floor.^[2] After three hours the public was let into the room. Beuys sat upon a stool in the entrance area with the hare on his arm and his back to the onlookers.

“For me the Hare is a symbol of incarnation, which the hare really enacts- something a human can only do in imagination. It burrows, building itself a home in the earth. Thus it incarnates itself in the earth: that alone is important. So it seems to me. Honey on my head of course has to do with thought. While humans do not have the ability to produce honey, they do have the ability to think, to produce ideas. Therefore the stale and morbid nature of thought is once again made living. Honey is an undoubtedly living substance- human thoughts can also become alive. On the other hand intellectualizing can be deadly to thought: one can talk one's mind to death in politics or in academia.”

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