100% Magenta
Hear that crocus? A ripe alcove chock full of crooked Theremins. Inside is a Jekyll, your personal rejoinder to alkali: the bright and beautiful mother of a brutal shade. Because this breakthrough is not malignant the resultant effervescence is only 18% frenetic. It is a real live sports car. It is a thoroughly enjoyable smoke. It will keep bottle-fed babies strong and virile.
There’s a heaping crust of manganese here – enough for one or two backbones of amaranth. And as it ogles onwards a fuller sense of violence precipitates. Is it alive? Perhaps a thousand butchers suggest so. There is no need to snuff it when you’ve got sheer energy. Translucent yet lively too, in Nude, Herring, Vertical, Possom: they’re utter soft.
This antique panache does little for your décor. You deserve some make time – and live it! If you really want a young-minded experience, look at a tree, particularly in the evening. But don’t do it for long – it’s double-rich!
Brains or chrysalid? – but why choose? Combine turgid with cynicism – that’s what the thousand girls do. By removing pore accumulation your wrinkles do it for the face. Features, more, now, what? It’s a cream above the lavender spectacle. Obtain a cake today.
You wouldn’t spoil that stain with satin, would you? Just rinse and pat dry. Just dot it on.
More stronger than powerful. Perhaps.
Or like it breath-taking fresh? Wouldn’t you look pretty strange to me? The perfect woollen primate?
You feel a viscous film. Do not use. That film is clinging. Don’t even think it.
Your body responds. The results are up to 60% – the chief cause of pyorrhea.
Thus, in a simply manner, millions.
The Unveiled Divide
The object holds within itself a series of meanings and values, both imminent and latent. The Berlin Wall, long standing as a symbol of closure, restriction and confinement, came down as a symbol of movement, release and freedom. The Berlin Wall embodies each and every one of these meanings, whilst latent within it stir the possibility of yet more, as now, unseen symbolic possibilities.
In Roman law objects belonging to the Gods were ascribed as sacred. Sacred objects exist removed from the world of humans, being neither able to move amongst us through trade nor to be offered to us as security or pleasure. To move an object beyond the sphere of human law one must consecrate it. Inversely, those objects that were restored to human use must be profaned. The profane act diminishes the object in the eyes of the Gods.
Sacrifice stands as the apparatus of this separation between sacred and profane objects. To sacrifice an object is to push it onward to a holy realm. To mediate its movement into the hands of the Gods.
The Berlin Wall is every object that represents closure, it is also every object that represents release. The Berlin Wall has the capacity to represent both these meanings as they are contained within other objects. This capacity of transcendent symbolism holds true for all objects which share a meaning in common with The Berlin Wall: whether this meaning is latent or imminent.
The act of sacrifice breaches the possible space between the imminent and the latent, between that which is profane and that which is sacred. Through sacrifice The Berlin Wall was inverted as a political symbol. Yet for it to move through the stages of profane and sacred, it must always have held within itself symbolic truths from both profane and sacred realms.
All objects capable of becoming sacred hold within themselves a latent meaning from across the grand divide.
Sacrifice is the unveiling of that which is latent.
Simulating Kim Jong Il
There is a reality inside North Korea, and there is another outside. Which is the most stable?
For the past half decade an excess of images, simulations and caricatures of the North Korean leader have bombarded us. The idea of Kim Jong Il has become commodity. Our media of excess has repeated the mantra of simulation in bold headlines, in news-print and digital text : “Is Kim Jong Il really dead?”
Would we wish it so?
But our mistrust of the image keeps us deluded. Without a modern mythos through which to (un)interpret the iconographics of mass-media we allow excess to determine our narratives. Out trickle accusations of copies, clones, misidentities. Did Clinton meet a doppleganger?
The authority of the image is broken.
The digital transfiguration of the photograph has long since shifted the locus of the human body from ‘real’, fleshy space onto the shallow glare of the billboard, centre-spread and computer screen. The pixel becoming the absolute limit at which reality breaks down.
How will the next image of Kim Jong Il appear to us? And how will we overcome our mistrust? Where does the pixel end and reality begin?
Profane Prisms
“It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”
Jacques Rancière, The Distribution of the Sensible
The precision of the prism. Flat, grey surfaces observed in isometric space. Before the tower or skyscraper these shapes perhaps signified workmanship or construction. The plank of wood and the blacksmith’s chisel. Light leaking over perfect edges of wood or iron. Skyscrapers are fucking big. They dwarf the scaffold, the workman’s elbow. The bumpy curve of the human form has no place here. The human is dust to the skyscraper.
In 2001 two towers tumbled. A sacrifice that seemed to bring the edifice of capitalism down. Sacred realm was recapitulated as skeletal absence, as a fragile shell of flat, grey surfaces observed from the perspective of an ant. A grain of dust watching as the imitation of capitalism imploded. As representation came back to dust. A negation of the creation myth.
How profane these figures seem now. Banal empty towers in an imaginary space. We ants look back at the twin prisms, seared into memory by film, cinema, media. They are pornographic, these bodies. Images of their cold flat grey exteriors reserves for us the promise of imitation, yet they are impossible to imitate in print and celluloid. Mimesis has broken.
These flat grey bodies help hide our profanities.
Mapping The Cracks: Thinking Subjects as Book Objects
In Part One of this article I wrote about the instability of the art-object. How its meaning moves, and inevitably cracks. In this follow-up I ponder text, the book, page and computer screen. Are they as stable as they appear? And how can we set them in motion?
Part Two
“There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about… writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it’s very unified, and… I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for…
