Being Intellectual without Reading

The Swiss based European Graduate School, which has English instruction, has a youtube channel with a shitload of contemporary philosophy videos, including the exciting luminaries: Manuel De Landa, Slavoj Zizek, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Houellebecq.

If you don't like to read, but are interested in philosophy, this is as good as you'll get.

Born Under a Bad Sign; The Mentalists: Darger, Wolfli and Ramirez

Three patron saints of sensitivity: Henry Darger, Martin Ramirez and Adolf Wolfli have become hugely influential; and except for Darger, paradoxically unknown. All three were questionably schizophrenic, each psyche crushed under the weight of change as their 19th century childhoods were ground to dust in the cogs of the industrial age. They all escaped a normal life, probably as a result of manipulation as much as mental illness, and spent their days toiling in bizarre expressions of self, what did it amount to? Why are they more popular then ever? Is their alienation and fantasy OUR alienation and fantasy?

We're now making 3rd or 4th generation mental illness art, it's taught in college. Previously I floated the idea that intentionally producing "crazy" art is a way to slip the system, or at least be functionally irrational in a world that increasingly demands more rational productivity. Pretending to be crazy is one of the best strategies to let other people know you wish to continue acting on your impulses, even if you are completely sane.

Rational productivity is no fun, and not really a good reason for a society to exist either; it only makes sense if there is something we all agree on apriori, which we do not. Rational productivity should be the means, not the end, but we're in a bad spot because for us its the ends, and the means is a sort of high pressure grind that feels like a nightmare version of Monopoly. No g'damned wonder we're all feverishly fantasizing about the apocalypse in the form of allegorical xombies, aka an object taking the place of our hyper-alienation and aggression.

Adolf Wolfli

Wolfli and Ramirez spent most of their adult lives in mental asylums. Bartering for colored pencils and scraps of paper, their compositions have a peculiar presence that borders on numinous as though they saw through reality right past the normal world and into some magical other place. After examining their work it's obvious they had more powerful inner lives then outer lives. Al Columbia did a wonderful satire of a guy wanting to live in a mental hospital in his comic books Pogo1 and 2.)

Martin Ramirez

Henry Darger was institutionalized on several occasions in Illinois. As an adult he worked as a janitor and dishwasher in Catholic hospitals in Chicago. Darger matches Wolfli and Ramirez in weirdness, but being on the outside he had much more access to art supplies, and employed sophisticated artistic techniques by using carbon paper to trace newspaper photos, photo enlargements to create scale shifts, and wonderfully sensitive watercolor. He created complicated, fantastical masterpieces that recall the intricacy of a Poussin frieze.

Henry Darger

The contemporary artists picking up on the spaces, formal choices, and themes of the Mentalists aren't the bottom of the barrel either, many are at the top of the heap. Abject perversity is sometimes confused as more relevant than normalcy, real normalcy is intricate and hard to pin down, is it just easier to be stupid and disgusting? What would Abraham Maslow say? Or Fritz Perls? We need a new crop of 60's style psychological leaders to emerge, and the closest thing we've got, Slavoj Zizek, is funny and interesting but he isn't doing any heavy lifting of our collective psyche. However, Slavoj Zizek has written some extremely interesting books, and gives one hell of an interview, talk about showmanship: (if you're reading this in a RSS feed and can't see the video, here's the link)

How aware are we, that by using Darger, Ramirez and Wolfli as models, we're picking up on the most articulate of the people who failed to adapt to a new world? How alienated are we? Without any believable myths what's the point of anything? There's no reason or context, there is only persistence.

Maybe we identify with Darger, Wolfli and Ramirez because they had the integrity to achieve a literally alienated life.

Where's the silver lining in this? More artists are making more work, and more interesting work then ever before in the history of humanity. More people are dealing with self-actualization, the highest set of values on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. As the information age dawns maybe we just have to be ready to change rapidly. I hope Nietzsche was wrong about the abyss staring back, that is sort of a glass is half-empty sort of thing to say, he was probably a dick.

Big Picture

People milling around at the opening. From the left to right the paintings are by Michael Williams, (part of) Eddie Martinez, and Liz Markus's painting of Picasso.

Wes Lang's triptych

Tom Sanford, one of the artists behind this amazing show.

There's a post about Big Picture on Beautiful/Decay.

Dan Attoe Interview on Beautiful/Decay

Dan Attoe's interview on Beautiful/Decay, fresh off the presses. He's one of the most articulate artists of our generation. Here's the link: Dan Attoe on Beautiful/Decay!

When Allen Ginsberg's wrote in his long poem, Howl, that "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." He reminds us that in the sixties the smartest creative people became self-destructive. Why would they do that? It must have been a hard time to maintain integrity between thinking, speaking and action.

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. ~ Ghandi

It makes me aware that we've come a long way, because things are changing so quickly now. We probably have more societal and technological change in one year than than the sixties changed in the entire decade. Maybe we're used to changing, and they were shaken by the sudden splitting. We're solid. I've seen the best minds of my generation, and they're put together out of the stable molecules. They're carbon, they're cut diamonds, they're unusual philosophers,* and that takes integrity.

While I was posting this a couple of quotes were rolling around, one from H.P. Lovecraft, and one from Martin Heidegger.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live in a placid island of ignorance in a sea of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. ~ H. P. Lovecraft

We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time. ~ Heidegger

Bill's other posts on Beautiful/Decay.

* lovers of wisdom

The Brain is Not the Mind, and the Mind is not the Brain

Just received a transmission from the galactic god-head while eating lunch. You know, he's impersonal, but at least he bothers to call once in a while.

Anyways - this is the big idea: Philosophy, spirituality, and art have all been vehicles to learn how to recreate the super-intense Jim Hensonish petri dish imagination I've been ~~cursed~~ blessed with. I wonder, as a teacher/writer, how applicable this thought is to others...?

I'm trying to teach my mind to do to other people what it has always known how to do to me.

I think, as a corollary, that the common dictum of "being systematic is bad for art," is totally dumb. Because how can someone establish a language, or build a world for other people to enter if it doesn't have some rules - i.e. a system.