It's 8 o'clock in the morning: I overslept. I'm sitting in my tiny studio in a gigantic house in the middle of a park (which in America we would call a forest) drinking coffee and looking out the window at a buttery syrup sky, unseasonably clear due to the constant warm winds we have been receiving for the last few days. It's warm here, surreally warm, sickeningly warm even, not because it's uncomfortable but rather because it's unnatural. Nature is no longer natural because we have changed it, irreversibly and permanently, and I have often wondered how it is I should feel about this. Some days it's disgusting for all the obvious reasons, yet other days - today I think - it serves as a positive reminder that we are among a generation of humans that is experiencing a velocity and intensity of change that is unprecedented in all of our morbid human history, we are in fact on the cusp of it, and this is a radical freedom which has been uniquely offered to us.

Yes I understand your concerns and I share them. It's good that you are thinking about them and in this manner. I say it's good, in my opinion according to my biases, not objectively that is. I have three different ideas on how to respond to these issues and I will try to give them as succinctly as I can so that a seed can be planted that we can attend to later. A lot bubbled to the surface while reading your thoughts and I just want to respond with a few small morsels with the hope that we can take some care and attention to unfold the origami of these concepts together in real-time, "in-person", wherever and whenever and whatever that is.

One

The most pertinent idea you agitated surrounds the question of whether "body" and "being" are worth pursuing. Well of course the answer is yes, but it's more important and interesting (in my opinion, as an artist on the grandeur scale and for the sake of conversation) to consider how and why. One easy (vague) answer is to admit the realm of being to the territory of philosophy on the subjective scale and science on the objective, so that perhaps the reconciliation of the two can be attributed to the floating island of art and art making. I like this idea because it is a kind of auto-validation, like what your colleague told you: "It's what you do." This seems akin to a Zen method, in the way that it's practiced mindfully without purpose, which is what I think art is best at. However, if we want to sort out the mess in a more intelligible manner we must resort to the mechanics of language, which is a sloppy mechanism indeed. For meditations on the essence of being we could talk about Heidegger, the fucking Nazi, whose attempt to articulate a philosophical clarity just left us in a deeper hole than before. His focus is upon what "is", in locking down our being or being-ness or being-in-ness as some kind of definite article, and I fundamentally disagree with this. To go a few steps further down this path, I have pretty much decided that the entire trajectory of Western/European philosophical "truth" is flawed, neurotic, exclusionary, and simply fucked, which is why all the schizo-post-philosophical stuff is so interesting to me: it's still neurotic and exclusionary and fucked up but at least it knows it is. On the other hand, I do believe there is a real possibility to achieve a clarity in our thinking, a useful revision of our process, and a renewed articulation in our communication, and this is where I think psychedelics come in. DRUGS YES but no not just that, I mean rather a way of thinking that makes connections rather than severs them, a way of being that is not exclusive but inclusive, and a way of speaking that opens doors instead of shutting them. This explains my love for the radical thinkers, for the avant-garde in general, for the psyco-cosmonauts and the outcasts and the degenerates and all the others which are so difficult to fit in to the clean cut white washed history of power, propaganda, and death that most people seem so concerned with. Check out Robert Anton Wilson's use of the language of E-Prime, which is like English 2.0 and excludes the use of words like "is" and "being" for the sake of clarity. I'm also still a big fan of Baudrillard and Bataille for their fearless attention to the taboo, seduction, and desire. I think Brian Massumi is one of the most important ontological philosophers I have read in the last 10 years... he translated Deleuze&Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and some of his books that I would highly recommend include Parables for the Virtual, The Affect Theory Reader (or something like that), and my most recent read What Animals Can Teach Us About Politics. Very important stuff I think. Donna Haraway and N. Kathrine Hayles are also very useful in this vein.

Two

Concerning the world and the political, I offer you this excerpt for a conversation I was having with a young American photographer who was in residence with me in Iceland this summer. I still find it to be very relevant to my position:

ay ay! yes i felt a bit weird with how i left the conversation last night. i went upstairs and stood there in the dark for a minute suspended in hesitation because i felt like i needed to run back downstairs and justify my blatant disregard for human life in this very specific context and also explain a great many other things but ultimately i forced myself to bed because i remembered that yes indeed the conversation could go on for quite some time since we were all already drawing such distinct lines in the sand so in order for each of us to be heard in our own voices with our own space we would have to build a democratic conference of united cooperative nation-selves and that means quitting our jobs and writing grant proposals and swearing oaths that our faculties are adept and our intentions are sincere and that we believe in something greater than ourselves even if we all call the god by a different name and in the end i have to stick to my guns and admit that i still believe and will probably always believe that this entire task is a complete waste of all of our fucking time. politics is tricky - that is to say it's all tricks, deceptions, illusions, confabulations, images flickering with no signified authenticity - and i don't believe in it for a goddamn new york minute, and i can tell you why but honestly i would rather live it and be it and put my philosophy into action to see how it holds up as a group, and sometimes that means removing myself from it because it's no longer worth the effort. don't get me wrong! i think YOU are worth the effort, and ___ and ___ and ___ and ___ and anyone else that wants to talk about the dynamics of the self in relation to the social - which is the point of concentration that i am personally extremely invested in because it is the root of the whole thing. yes, i think that there are certain things that need to be said in order to orient ourselves to each other, to define ourselves to each other, even if that means declaring a refusal to be outlined. we must invest in each other first before any conversation about the horrors of the world might take place.

i am an american in the "truest" sense of the word. i am defiant towards the colonial mechanisms and i strive for autonomy, independence, freedom of all peoples, under god even if he's dead then all the better because we should stop anthropomorphizing our spiritual lives anyways, and not indivisible either because it's all infinitely divisible down to the molecular which is why the name of the conversation should be maintained as a continuous negotiation, and DEFINITELY NOT for liberty and justice for all because that is a politics of EVIL - there can only be liberty and justice through relation which means for one group and not another. fuck the government, i believe in anarchy not anarchism. i know for a fact that all the troubles of the world - ALL OF THEM - can be easily solved over night, right now, today, if we would prioritize them, if we would choose to save ourselves from ourselves rather than maintain business as usual, but we won't because the freedom that is being described by the talking heads on the screen is not true freedom, not independence from the tyrannical mechanism, but a concoction of illusory serfdom that keeps people buying and dying and defying and denying, throwing their bodies blindly over the mechanism of war, so it's really no surprise to me at all that all of them are being killed by the heaps every day. fuck em.

these people, all these people, on both sides and in all places, these people made a choice to believe in a construct which i know is beyond-flawed, a death machine lubricating itself with their bodies, a sacrifice of their humanity for lower cost petroleum and discount mega-stores. they made the choice and they fuel their own propaganda and they all do it WILLINGLY, CONSCIOUSLY, INTENTIONALLY, and you have to remember that! you cannot declare that people don't think for themselves! that they are zombies walking around unconscious! there is no greater dehumanizing tendency than that tyrannical ideology, don't fall prey to it. no, you have to remember that all these people are free to do as they will and so they spend their lives trying to figure it all out just like we are - we are the same, made of the same stuff, we are them - and so when a teenager goes in to the parents bedroom and goes to that place under the bed where they know the walmart special is hidden and lubricates it ever so gently and slides in just the right number of bullets to take out the whole family and all the teachers and all the peers reveling in their own stupidity and then of course making sure to leave one extra in there to finish the job at the end.... this is a choice, a choice made for righteousness at the brink of oblivion, a desperate choice which i relate to because i also feel fucking desperate - NOW IS THE TIME FOR DESPERATION - and it's the fucking war machine that takes this story and spins it back at you as a disaster against progress, as a mournful event that needs to be recorded and rebroadcast every hour to remind ourselves of how precious our lives are so go out there and buy as much as you can because tomorrow someone might blow it all up. it's all a fucking scam, and we are contributing to it by thinking about it, and i believe the best way and maybe the only way to surpass the stagnation is to remove yourself from it, not to respond with quivers before the terror and fall prey to the nightmarish fabrications but to REMEMBER TO REMEMBER THE EARTH IS A GRAPE TURNED RAISIN and let out a loud fart and get on with it. you are an artist, and so am i, which means we are working from a place of privilege - that's not in question - which means that you have a fucking responsibility to be there, be present, be active, but also to be invisible, to work covertly on the important issues, which i believe is the self-as-the-fulcrum-point-of-the-all and for you could be anything you want it to be but it better be fucking good if it's gonna be anything at all. you have a great responsibility and i hope that you find the voice to articulate it and the courage to describe it to those that need to hear it and the wisdom to live by it even if it means saying really fucked up things late at night around the kitchen table while intoxicated on your own privilege to people that may not understand it at the time but will rhyme and chime over and over again to remind them to remember to recognize the world as it really is, which is to say how you see it, because you have the vision and most of us are blind. if you want to do something, do anything at all, then find eyes for those that don't see for themselves.

i could keep going but i won't, or maybe we will in person, when we see each other back in the kitchen - back at the conference table - over our colonially conquered coffee and third world bananas and partially hydrogenated palm oil butter-flavor spreads. i am willing and able to have this conversation and yes i believe it's a very important one to have, but i refuse to be a martyr to anything or anyone or any ideology, i refuse to participate in a dialogue of morality - the immanence of evil, and i refuse to mourn the lives of those instigating the terror in the world. in fact i refuse to mourn anyone at all, because mourning signifies an end, an ending, a perpetual and totally uncathartic slowing but never stopping, and i would rather invest my energy in motion and action and presence and ponderance. maybe i'll see you there....

Three

I think the last part is about responsibility then: concerning what we could do, what we should do, and what we are doing. I've told you before and I will tell you again that I think that artists are very important, they are essential, because they live both in the world and apart from it. We could and should talk about privilege here, but I'm more concerned at the moment with the responsibility of our positions. My belief is that artists have a responsibility which is very clear for me and I can state it simply as thus: artists must be visionaries. We are the people that float through every plateau of the social hierarchy. We can sit rather comfortably at a table of rich or poor or philosophes or physicists. We can be legitimate or self-imposed outcasts, popular or unpopular, famous or nameless, but for me it's always the same. I hold artists to a golden standard that is beyond the limitations of morality, ethics, politics, and economics. We must dedicate ourselves to the task of having the most radical ideas, the most transcendental visions, the most psychedelic epiphanies, the greatest leaps in faith, the most intentional use of words and of every movement for that matter. We must be so in touch with ourselves that we can shift the perspective of ourselves-in-relation, and it is through these currents of relation that we will effect change in the world. Forget about political art, it's just more propaganda. Focus on yourself and focus on the cosmos and focus on the difference between the two: focus on focus. Remember to remember! is what Henry Miller always says. Designers and architects and philosophers and political radicals also have a responsibility of course, but it's not to be visionaries, rather it's to listen to the visionaries and manifest the ideas in their own medium. A shoe designer must make shoes that support the foot or else they have failed. An architect must construct a building that supports life, not attempts to transcend its function for an aesthetic principle. Philosophers must attend to the asking of "why" on each of those topics which we disregard in our daily routines, in order to recall our attention to them, with a clarity of semiotics that only they are attuned to wielding. Let the politicians deal with the failures of politics, a system which had never seemed so efficient nor essential to me and therefore has never seemed very important for me to pay any attention to. We live in a society.... or do we? What is this civilization that we have inherited and why do we feel a greater responsibility towards maintaining a tower of terror rather than letting it fall and concentrating on the revitalization of the human spirit? Let it fall I say, but don't get too caught up in tearing it down. Utility is about economics, it's about globalized consumerism, and this is the epitome of all our current terror. The world must stop buying all these things and all these ideas. It must become much more simple. I am convinced of this, and therefore I have a conviction of what I must make even if it is not always clear about how it must be made or how I will achieve it. It is your responsibility as an artist to find your own conviction and to live by it. In my humble opinion of course....

Ok ok well I just got really sidetracked with all these ideas, but this was not a waste of time. I think it's very important to continue to challenge and be challenged by each other, as friends and lovers and colleagues and artists and citizens of the world. I hope this returned rant helps you sort it out a bit, and I very much look forward to discussing all this more with you in a few weeks.

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