Maybe somewhere someone’s making the paintings that I would like to do, in which I would recognize myself more than in my own ones…
It can be terrifying or acceptable; with a sense of humor I guess it is.
I have to acknowledge that maybe I’m painting someone else’s pictures; that my pictures are not the ones that are really me or mine.
Those pictures might be reflecting someone’s visions. Not mine. Someone who can’t paint or has no impulse to do so. Or maybe another painter who’s images I’m doing instead of him…
1988
How can anyone explain a painting when most of the time the artist himself doesn’t know how or why he did it ?
1989
There is no need for a representation of joy and reality in painting anymore. All those are daily TV bread. Images of pain, immateriality, of the within are the only valid subjects it seems-or maybe they’re just a wall of senses and meanings, a dark side leading to a brighter side. Beyond..
1989
You have to reach beauty through distortion, accumulation and unbalanced edgy images.
There’s no appeal in the well organized still prettiness of things. And there are no challenges and novelty for the eye. The photos, the TV screen, supply our daily need for such nice polished imagery. To reach the soul which in itself is an unfathomable mess and a mystery, you have to go through the rumble, the ruins, the unfocused messy amount of images carried by the cells through our underdeveloped brains
1989
Ex-Yugoslav artists will be bound, consciously or not, to reflect upon the break up of “our” country. That crack will sooner or later appear in their work wherever they might come from. Any artist can only feel pain if his “space” is reduced, his belongings shriveled up and vaporized; I guess only the bad ones will glorify and praise whatever will come out of those fateful days. To me it will only be an alienation with all that comes along with it…
1992
Happiness is (maybe) the Release of Pain
1992
In order to escape from the known boundaries and the limits of things predefined, one has to continuously and relentlessly seek for a “beyond”. That beyond might take different forms. The first would be the “galactic” made of distant worlds yet unreachable for our minds and eyes. It will take time and intuition, maybe even luck, before we manage to widen our fields of perception and make the connection with what is still the Big Unknown.
The second, at the other end of the scale, would be the “cellular” one or the complexity of orders and disorders within our bodies; it is probably the greatest challenge yet, since in the midst of it is the brain with all its intellectual and emotional implications and all its enormous unlocked potentials. The fact that we use only a certain percentage of our cerebral capacities should be enough to imply that after this long, mankind should look into those grey and black areas if it wants at least to make one or two steps forward.
By slowly developing those new cerebral areas, we’d probably start a whole reconsideration of ourselves and of our understanding of the world.
Besides, that could lead us to a rejection of several thousands of years of dogmas, corrupt religions, fading ethics and obsolete systems.
The brain being the widest open system, we could through this exploration set new goals and new values for our existence, freeing thus ourselves from religions by becoming gods ( the mind /body balance moving clearly in favor of the first). We could remove those blinkers which in the name of an unlikely salvation have kept taking us on the same tracks for so long.
Somehow Art and its practice appears as a tool for all this, a way to release a mass of instinctive informations and propositions transmitted through one individual to others. For that reason Art should not be a cold, analytical, self assured and controlled thing, thrown to the public with a user’s guide after a market survey. It should be, and is, and wandering or a walkabout, since the artist is merely a half conscious filter of ideas, images and mistakes he tries to materialize the best he can through his work. He should go where no one goes, with all his senses wide open. He doesn’t have to justify his beliefs and work through theories, concepts and methods since all he does ultimately leads back to him. He’s the connector, proposing solutions, visions, sometimes maybe not even his own, but all transiting through him. Materializing them is in itself an act of courage and will be more and more in a world of mechanical reproduction of almost everything (soon of man himself), where the single man-made image is a precious and rare thing. In a complex way we’re returning to the situation where icons and holy books where the only available images in a pictorial desert.
Today the desert is the overload of images we’re fed with on a daily basis. The single image made by the painter and its confrontation with the naked eye is social necessity, even a social survival act. It is also a low-tech act in a high-tech world. The painting, whether it’s an object of desire, of questioning, of disgust or even rejection, must remain a fundamental element of our life experiencing on a personal and global level alike.
One may not fully grasp what he’s doing and why he’s doing it, but then a clear answer would end the search. However obvious and plain all this may sound, it seems to have been forgotten.
The painting is a field of impulses, emotions and guts. It’s the dark side revealed. It is as useless as it is vital. It’s blood turning into colours, the inner jump of the body inside the body, the image bullet in your head.
Art should knock down doors, if possible rudely, opening valves and making holes in our protected little structures, releasing images of things past and things to come. It should break you down and lift you up.
Like Happiness being the release of Pain…
These are objects of fury and disturbance, of fantastic energy and speed crushing into your skull in 2 dimensions. These are eye pluckers, semi-gods, noises and whispers of exhalations, nerves licking your eyelids, breathing heavily into your ears, stories of what was and what will be, of flesh made possible simply by looking at it…These are paintings and you had forgot what it is all about…
1992
The artist creates a world with his (dis)abilities, defining a territory through the vocabulary he uses. It’s an instinctive process. He’s a channel of form and light. The critic, who is unable to create, defines the work and therefore puts himself “above” it like a judge with a range of referential tools which often have nothing to do with the whole creative process. The new critic, who’s often a product of an educational system, is disconnected from it. The artist creates a world. The critic labels it with its own limitations…
1996
My images are frozen frames and slides from my own personal cinema, slices of me in full color.
1999
Take me as a paradox, a multilayered cake or an artist with a multiple personality disorder…
20/11/03
When it comes to Painting nowadays, the only allowed expressions are realism, photorealism, hyperrealism or ornamental and decorative abstraction.
There is no space left for the imaginary.
No expression of inner worlds, of intuitive wandering, of fantasy.
A world that gets its fantasy from the Hollywood factories is a defeated world.
A humanity that doesn’t allow imagination, is a dying one.
As for painting, if it represents today’s world then again it only means, and reflects that we are more than ever in a period of mediocrity and intellectual sloth.
19/1/04
WALKABOUT Project
The light of glimmering stars that reaches us here on earth is often the last outburst of life from those faraway globes. Their death is a last flash of light crossing the universe for thousands of years. By the time that light reaches us they’re long gone.
Those man made lights in empty cities are read by satellites making a map of flashpoints throughout the world. Just as the dying stars they shed a light of a dying civilization, tired, lost, empty and alone in a world that just doesn’t care.
From Macro to Micro, from Galactica to the 60W lightbulb.
Cold Heat/ Frozen Light. Your feet on the ground, your head in the sky, all the rest dissolving in the middle stretched through eternity.
17/2/04
I’m a filter of emotions and informations; it’s through that alchemical process of transformations that whether I’m touching the aesthetical, the political or the social, I try to achieve something sublime and give a meaning to my life.
Within the transformations of inputs becoming art, I use all the possible tools at my disposal, the old and the new. Only by serving your ideas in the best possible way do you become a relevant being, constantly moving from the outside to the inside through the membranes of the mind, the flesh, the heart and the immaterial.
Trying to make it visible, all at once, in one single moment, every fucking time…
Chicago 10/5/03
About the “fashionization” of Art and how the first contaminated the second.
In its operating modes and attempts to advertise itself or become more accessible, the Art World mimics in many ways the fashion industry processes.
Fashion recycles everything from its own history to global and street culture.
Art has become a “cahier de tendances”, which puts it irrevocably in a position of safety, And that’s a place where Art should never be…
2004
Maybe it’s time to consider the possibility of a hybrid artist constantly drifting between the inside and the outside world.
The personal black boxes and the information overload; doing on top of it all a constant zoom in-zoom out movement.
The mutant artist will move with increasing speed and create and assemble his own language with its feeding sources and aesthetical propositions.
When it all passes away and becomes dull and numb, when you’ll be bored with downloads, digital prints and mp3 art, you’ll realize that it’s all down to what it always was, the straight line between the brain and the hand, and the unique once in a lifetime work it produces.
13/3/04
If you use easily recognizable material in your art, you discard the effort of the viewer who otherwise would take much more time and focus to get into your work. By playing with existing signs you work on the referential baggage of the viewer who already has assimilated and digested the recycled work…
The true artist is the one who can sublimate reality and imagination into an aesthetical and formal proposition.
He’s the one who makes you enter a new territory which might reflect a part of your own self and in which you might recognize a piece of your life or of yourself.
He’s the doorbuster getting you into brand new worlds.
It’s about the human, (body, soul, figure), being entangled into something whether it’s chaos, despair, war, love or the loss of it all or into the meanders of the mind and trying to find a way out by any means possible.
The painting process like alchemy is about making something out of something else. The object itself is just the start; what matters is the impact and imprint it has on the viewer. All the rest is semantics, rhetorics and taste…
The studio is a processing room, an experimental kitchen, a grey area where all things enter clean and pristine but come out stained, corrupted, messed up and beautiful.
The hybrid artist is stretched between two anchor points, each in a different dimension; one foot in icy water, the other in burning hot sand.
In our youth we only had 2 or 3 TV channels to watch; today we all have about 500 to choose from or even watch simultaneously. Our mind has become the receptacle of this fragmented world and seems to function like a hard disc with multiple partitions. As an artist it is only natural to function in a similar mode, going from one thing to the next, working through series, files, sections and willingly getting lost in it
12/3/05 London
The prism through which the French consider Art is the WORD. A painting, a film, a photograph is analyzed, evaluated and appreciated only by its aptitude to provoke, be sustained and function through words.
A painting must be wordy, trigger a flow of literature and fit intellectual and theoretical frames. It cannot be considered as a free standing individual expression or object. It needs phrases. The same goes for movies, theatre or any other art form…
A poor work of art can be put to heights if a solid set of words and phrases, packed into theories and concepts supports it. Many “major” artists in France typically produce works which wouldn’t stand up by themselves if they didn’t have elaborate justifications to hold them up. (The opposite is often true as not everyone can handle words with ease).
For that very reason many of these artists don’t exist beyond their geographical borders. In effect the “smoke screen” that envelops their work often works as an iron curtain keeping them away from the international eye. Unless that eye is also tempted by the wonders of the Word and gets infected by it.
I believe making art is a statement and as such it has to convey ideas, images to the viewer and trigger his mind in any way possible and to do so it has to be clear, sharp and be able to provoke even the untrained mind and the virgin eye. It has to exist by Itself.
The artist is just a carrier, a connector and a vehicle.
10/5/06
As human beings, most of us are just trash. Riddled with weaknesses, crumpled by inconstancy, defeated by confusion, paradoxes, lost in a mechanical world once hailed and praised to be Man’s future utopian heaven, then gone wrong in cacophony, all screws popping loose, all blast like mechanical ducks shooting each other in a blind frenzy.
Harmony distorted and atomically exploded, beauty made superficial, order disentangled and fractured, chaos sublimed.
Man/Machine was nice on paper, like most things, now the machines are full of ghosts and we’re scared and stoned by how powerful they’ve become. So yes, maybe we’re just here to provoke our own extinction and cannot grasp the vastness of the damage done.
Defeated by our own machines and without one to make us really dream.
Of the visions of a future past, of bygone revelations of a humanity prevailing in glorious technological rainbows, perpetual bliss where science left fiction behind…The trash keeps pilling up in our footsteps with binary speed pushing us faster into the void, black holes, Earth’s end, soul’s end, mind’s end, Man’s end…
So what to do but scrape from the surface and make more trash with what you can?
Add your weakness, your confusion, your paradoxes onto the world, making the pile a bit messier with your own little mess made by the meanders of your nervous system, channelled by blood vessels waiting to pop and vanish in the ever welcoming and tender void..
17/9/06 Belgrade (>The Mass You Leave)
It would be uncanny to live in times of accelerating technological progress and speeding mechanization and not use it in the art works. But it doesn’t mean I won’t give it all up at some point and go back in the old arena, just me and the canvas or the paper and whatever happens in between…
2006
Who’s afraid of Red, Blue & White?
(Serbia Remix)
2001
Each era has its own particular medium which reflects the best the times we live in, or how things are, or were, since we tend to do it in retrospect. In the beginning was the Word. It was convenient, easy to twist and turn, and very democratic since everyone could describe a same event with an infinite possibility of alteration, changes and distortions. We’re still deciphering the Bible in a 1000 ways aren’t we? It also tells us that from the very beginning we have made the truth be what we needed it to be for a given purpose. The purpose has always been Power. A million downloads and gigabytes later, our leaders still claim that “those who hold (read:”control, produce,filter…”) the information control the world”.
Thank you…honestly.
Nothing changes but the Medium.
Power needs representation to exist, like Coke needs Publicis, L’Oréal needs Mc Cann Ericsonn or François 1er needed Leonardo da Vinci. That representation again is manipulated in order to make it smooth and easy. We rape you, but we provide you with a nice lubricated coconut flavoured condom, and we even let you put it on our nice piece of machinery…We make you want and buy things you don’t need. We impose models and patterns we want you to follow. We brand the world and its wonders. “Freedom”, “Democracy”, “Peace” , are marketing tools to make you feel comfortable and secure, so you can consume, spend and share our vision of the world and its marvels at a discount price. While you shop, we’ll go somewhere far and bomb somebody else’s shopping malls. They don’t sell our products anyway… All this you know. We are more than ever sailing in a sea of hypocrisy. And this is a tide of clichés.
The good thing is that we can see it all live, in real time, so that the reaction is faster and that we can experience in our lifetime how each idea tends to become perverted in the end and turned into its own tragic caricature. It’ s all here, digital and clear; the problem is: do you really want to be bothered? It seems that the World holds on a strange equilibrium between those who want to know by all means available and those who are satisfied with what is given. Pure light can become total darkness, if the balance is broken. And there is always that good old everlasting duality in all things and beings. And always something to fuel it.
Nothing changes but the Medium.
So imagine you’re an artist , the last element of the economic chain , the joker in the production line to whom is sometimes awarded a glimpse of importance and a drop of social recognition as a disposable key member of society. Your job is to represent: the Time, the Place, the People, the Events, Whatever… Somewhere along the way, you may be expected to be subversive, deranged, dark and controversial…These too are promotional items. Sometimes death is a good career move. You are even expected to look a certain way, have a certain lifestyle and a behavior, and like our Slovak friend from Pittsburgh said, be a Product. Ever since the defeat of Europe and the introduction of the Marshall Plan, these rules have taken over the Arts, and turned them into the “Art World” or “Industry”. You can easily see how Power through its representation dictated the moves in the Arts. There would be no Renaissance without the Holy Church’s hunger for power and dominion or the Monarchy’s vanity and narcissism. One could inquire why Orthodoxy stopped at the Icons and therefore stagnated artistically, but strangely enough, out of orthodox soil came the “White Square”, the cleaning up. Ever since Protestants took over Power, we witnessed Abstraction, the Rise of the Concept, and the ever ruling dominion of the Idea over the Emotion. The rule of Branding. As an artist your purpose is to produce new imagery and brand it. Gimmicks help: You only paint in blue, or just do triangles or roam through the parking lots of universal suburbia and fornicate with luxury cars’ exhaust pipes in a cycle of performances called “Man/Machine”.
Easy isn’t it?
So you sit in your room and contemplate all the elements of this game and how they all click together. And try to make sense of it. When you give up, you try to make Art. So, imagine you’re in the last interesting place in Europe: Serbia. All rules have collapsed, you are at the old borderline, the fringe, where ethics meets ethnics in a dialectic battle. The last of the Century and the last in the World as we knew it. The Illuminatii against the Barbarians. The Corporate Universe against the Rogue State. You walk on the thin line, watch it unfold under your feet forming knots after knots an unstoppable suite of events, all foreseeable, and gaining in absurdity and destructive range. The Wars Of Yugoslavia are like a string of dirty pearls flushed down the toilet by that old bitch Europe while her pimp, Uncle Sam, is counting the money and checking the new spots where he could station his Girls. All the pretty phrases, the heartbreaking images, the media ballet of obscenity, the moral abuse imposed on any potential TV viewer and the constant trampling of all values was so obvious, so open, so unavoidable.The fireworks in the Belgrade sky where the apotheosis in a long series of setups and framed situations in which the only, the unique raison-d’être was Dominion and Power. “Democracy” is a word that meant something; today it’s a shield for any dirty job on the planet. A flag. Behind flags you find legions of crooks and moral cowards.Today the biggest US Army Base outside of the USA is in Kosovo.
Good luck, girls. It has become clear that all this is Strategy: People like Zbigniew Brzezinski, the White House long lasting grey eminence (and the real villain) have theorized all these events, way before they took place. Theorized hatred and gave it respectability (“we are the biggest democracy in the world, the sole super-power gentlemen, we must crush the crypto-moujik-commies and their allies, steal their wealth, put our flag on the planet, only then shall we have World Peace”). Sounds like a Miss UN-iverse contest gone wrong, a galaxy of idiots in motion. These people must love the day Slobodan Milosevic was born; he made it so easy for them, he provided the frame and did the sketch, NATO streamlined it, signed it and sold it. Now the US are finishing the work started with the Marshall Plan; they controls areas of Europe they never did, have an almost open road towards Eurasia, the richest undersoil on the planet, the gas, the oil; it’s total bliss with a “zero death policy”.
You are an Artist. Big deal.
You cruise between the stream of your own consciousness and the flow of data you are being served daily, trying to give a shape to your speeding images, trying to make-sense-through-art. Everything clashes, there are no gimmicks here only patterns of a global insanity, a logic that gave up logic, and you feel the hardcore reality unveiling under it all. So there it is, all the ingredients spread in front of you, an image, a quote, an object, a story, a sound or a memory. You pick them up, and arrange them in an order that is your own. You create a bouquet of bitterness, justifying thus your activity. You are “DJ Arty” making your compilation, the full-download-mix. In it there are paintings, pure blood on canvas, taking the shape of your inner monsters, the dark side revealed, a print of your soul. There are photographs, something good enough to be just what it represents, the fucked-up reality. There are objects, bits of a shared tragedy, unlikely symbols of multiple destinies reunited through their forced use. In art it’s called a “ready made”. In life it’s called survival. There is History doing warps, repeating its patterns in different places at different times.You find the connections, they come to you. There are songs with prophetic choruses and haunting omens. Words that come out clicking better than an image ever could. It becomes a whole, it is your Work. You have given a shape to every aspect of your confusion, exploited all the means at your disposal, seen it from all its angles in order to say the same thing in a hundred ways. The Same Thing.
Nothing changes but the Medium.
In the end you get a seemingly messy collection, samples of history and memory. You give it shape, you aesthetize it, make it sublime. Do your job.
Then you try to justify it, or wait for someone to do it for you. Some like it, some don’t, it doesn’t change a thing. Your country is a ruin, split apart by Old Men, uranium in your lungs, collective guilt , individual responsibility and the international blackmail squad in badly tailored suits coming to tell you what to do, again… You rethink about the Marshall Plan, about Germany and the time it took its artists to digest and spit it all out. Time here is accelerating. We must hurry, and move on while leaving some traces of our presence just in case someone will stop and think for a second, about the Truth, about Power, about Dominion and the time we lost because of it all.
It took you 7 minutes and 48 seconds to read this. It’s the first day of summer in the 21st century. And it’s raining.
Welcome to my century.
21 /6 /2001 / Belgrade
“If you’re looking for trouble you came to the right place“ is a project that questions the progressive shift in the representation of the figure of the archetype or the idol within our societies, particularly in countries with a recent turbulent history.
The concepts of rebellion and of the rejection of old values are no longer channelled through the filter of a now softened pop culture but seem to enter a phase of radicalisation where blood and aggressivity have taken over.
From the kid soldiers of Liberia to the killer students on american campuses and all through the civil wars in the Balkans, the image of the paramilitary soldier has from its Hollywood representation to the video games characters replaced the old heroes in the imagination of millions, preferably young, people.
While the ideals carried by rock and pop music are melting in a pool of deceit and marketing campaigns, the myth of the soldier/paramilitary becomes a new field for the release of frustrations, of personal and national identities and bottled up emotions.
By hijacking a symbol (The King) and by playing with his name (Elvis) we end up with a symptomatic anagram (Evils) which in itself contains all the new implications of the contemporary role models and idols.
This project doesn’t only deal with the turnovers within pop culture (in art and society alike) but faces us with the fact that just as so many illusions have been lost, so has innocence, maybe for ever, turned into cruelty….
Who’s your Hero now?
Painting has always been the core and essence of Art and thus, in an extended way, of Humanity.
It is the fullest, deepest and most complex form of expression in the Visual Arts. Installations, performances, concepts, abstractions can only explore certain aspects and areas. But they are limited because they were the limits themselves. In the end there seems to be no “beyond” that “beyond”.
Only painting fullfils that exploration of the mind, soul, space and time in which we live in.
As such it is the only true mirror of our Humanity, at a given time , in a given space or place.
And the only “last frontier “remaining in Art.
2013
Suggest, don’t impose, let the image Rise,
2012
Perpignan, FILAF 2012, during a conversation with the director of the Museum of Modern Art of Quebec, Line Ouellet, and Florence Viguier from the Ingres Museum visiting the “Under Realism” exhibition.
“Tous ces crânes, vous êtes obsédés par la Mort?”
“Non, au contraire, peindre, entre autre, un crâne, ne reflète pas une pulsion de mort, mais tout son contraire: un désir de la transcender, la confronter, la défaire. Ce qui par contre traduit cette possible pulsion de mort, est la forme d’art qui ne s’occupe que de transmettre la pratique d’un onanisme sec, rétentif et avare qui tout en se voulant innovant et moderne ne fait que se mordre cette queue molle d’où ne sort aucune sève, aucune jouissance, aucune joie et qui ne fait que démontrer un narcissisme cérébral et aride qui de ce fait est l’expression la plus froide d’une pulsion négative et d’un profond mépris à la fois de soi et de l’autre…”
28/6/13
By painting deconstructed bodies we attempt to antagonize the denial and fear of celestial and poetic bodies in Art today.
It confronts the dominant notion which implies that senses, sensual experiences, emotional interactions with a work of Art are debilitating and shallow. On the other hand, the purely intellectual connection is uplifting and deeper, more “intelligent”…It is an abomonation to deny Man’s full experience of Art by limiting it to one sole organ and in the process purposely insulting those who defy that notion. Art must be a full senses exchange as it has always been, and it’s within that realm that experiments and innovations are possible, Again…
Duchampian fear of flesh, fear of life, of subjectivity, of sublimation, and transcendance, fear of the other, of exchanges , makes him a narcissist and a coward in the end, who instead of taking a piece of mud and turning it into “something else”, just takes the piece of mud and puts it under a light , saying, “hey!, look how clever and cunning i am ( and you, a fool..)
I will not confront you and give you anything, i will just demonstrate my superiority by exposing my inner void and present it as something meaningful and holly.
And that is by all means, Deceit; therefore Art, becomes a tool, a ruse, a way to fool someone by imposing on him the notion that he HAS to see or understand otherwise he’s an idiot. But at no time is he asked to FEEL.
That is…degrading.
The practice of a total “sensorial” art not just conceptual, cerebral and now, autoreferential, becomes an act of survival, of rebellion, a grasp for air.
A call to claim back Humanity within ourselves, to offer Mankind a vision, a goal, with ideas going beyond the enclosed narcissism of shallow narrow minds, afraid of their own flesh who want to compress anything that approaches that ambition are dare to call any such attempt “degrading and fascist”…Subjectivity and imagination and the release of one’s soul through Art are liberating acts; Anything that goes against it IS antihuman and fascist. We are de facto in a state of conflict with anyone of that obedience…
Fascism is Despise (Albert Camus).
Is Conceptual Art, which rejects subjectivity and as such is a manifestation of Self Loathing and Loathing of the Other, a Totalitarian and Regressive form of Art?
2013
“Expliquez moi votre travail?”
cette question malheureusement banale et usuelle reflète un état de fait désastreux. Un réflexe, une habitude à se servir non plus de ses propres acquis, visions, réflexions et sensations, mais d’avoir recours à un décryptage parfois fumeux et scolaire car systématisé de ce qui devrait être lisible, en le rendant illisible afin de révéler non pas la qualité artistique d’une oeuvre mais sa capacité de déception et sa prétendue “intelligence”…
Cette posture infortunée devenue règle quasi-obligatoire entretient le malentendu que l’explication non sentie ou perçue au préalable par le spectateur lui-même valide seule l’ interet et la qualité de l’oeuvre.
Or cela est est encore une fois la mystification usuelle qui fait que cette question sous entend que le spectateur doit être “éduqué”, “introduit”, doit voir ce qui n’est pas visible (car souvent invisible) et donc se soumettre à la proposition de l’artiste. Ce n’est donc plus la subjectivité et la perception par le regard de l’autre (et son propre système intrinsèque) qui crée le lien mais le diktat intellectuel dépourvu des outils sensoriels qui doit être ici subi.
Si comme Lawrence Wiener, se “soumettre à la subjectivité d’une oeuvre est un acte fasciste” qu’en est il alors de la soumission à une proposition plastique compréhensible uniquement par le biais de mode d’emploi fournis par l’artiste aux dépends de la propre capacité sensorielle, intellectuelle et émotionelle du spectateur..
La soumission à ce narcissisme contrarié et non affirmé est un acte de servitude.
Car TOUS doivent voir la même chose, même si le discours s’en défend, évidemment.
L’artiste ose, il propose, le spectateur dispose.
En toute liberté. Seul un Art fonctionnant sur ces paramètres et qui se place au centre des questions séculaires, essentielles, à un moment donné a du sens devant l’Homme et devant l’Histoire.
Tout le reste sera balayé par les mêmes comme les décorations peintes sur les colonnes de l’Acropole…
THE MESS YOU LEAVE
THE MASS YOU LEAVE
The Art we make is that.
A trace, left for others to ponder and judge if we’ve succeeded in offering answers to some questions and their relevance in Time.
And that’s all there is, really.
The idea is to stretch and explore the territory both physically and mentally, guided by the same spirit. It means revealing it through all possible means, primarily with the most immediate tools, drawing and painting, and then further with more complex ones, sculpture, installations, audio, video or light objects. This explorations and the cycles of revelations acquired through the work goes not only horizontally but also vertically, with various levels of depth or connections with reality. Some works are connected to the unconscious and others to the process of vivid reaction to the surrounding world. in the end it becomes a personal mapping visible only when you zoom out or the whole experiment reaches its own end.
My paintings are like huge slides inserted in the surrounding reality.
Pieces of a mental and emotional hologram made of canvas, paint and wood. They stand in the room like an open window to an extract of my mind. The fact that my figures often stand in profile makes it even more remote, as if an altered world was passing by and was caught in a moment each time you look at it.
13/03/02
My paintings are autonomous freestanding objects in a collapsing world.
Many artists today seem to explore multiple forms of expression within their work. Often though it resembles, to use architectural metaphors, an assemblage of styles. A house with a wooden floor, glass walls, gothic windowpanes, a few Doric columns and a straw roof. A bit of everything sampled but without a deep exploration of the chosen elements. I would like to have a piece of land and on it build different but coherent buildings, with each his own style and essence.
Top to bottom. My houses. On my Land.
29/2/03
Fucking up many people’s lives in a smooth corporate fashion can only be opposed and balanced by an extreme individual or small group’s radical action. That would then be defined by the first entity as terrorism. It can only be felt as rebellion or desperation by the second one.
When you look at it with a bit of distance, ready-mades appear as disposable disappearing items with no real relevance to mankind.
They are relevant only to a somewhat hermetic and suffocating Art World. Outside of that realm they are of no interest or consequences.
Ultimately, as all things, each of those objects will in time regain its original and initial purpose and return to its essence, of just being that object.
There is a special path, one’s own to reach your dreams.
A channel, only yours to find that gets you where you want.
It is an astral thread that holds you from above to the ground and leads you, a half awake puppet, through your life and time.
Between desire and the stuff of reality there is a bound created by your hopes and visions, making them real only then, when the line is clear and your own system becomes one with the one above, a synchronized unit rewarded by the cosmic clock.
I heard an artist talk about his work and somehow I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying. His words didn’t connect with the images shown on TV as he spoke. There was a gap, a fog. He was playing with words, concepts and postulates but no form, shape or vision was coming out of it. If words don’t produce sparks how could we be enlightened about or by the works?
Words, if they are needed, should shed a light onto the work not blur the connection between the viewer and what he sees. The light is the meaning. I want to be enlightened and illuminated. Most of the time, millions of words can’t help the work be better or clearer. If you don’t get it clean and straight it probably means there’s no light and no meaning in it and someone is trying to fool you or be condescending. It’s mostly a lot of matches trying to be lit in a rainy night. I can’t buy that anymore, never really could. No time for it, I’m too experienced, too old or too clever to be fooled. Pure light is wordless. I leave the fog and the dimmers to whoever wants to get lost in them.
Oct 06
To those who ask me why I do so many different things, so seemingly unrelated to each other, why I don’t have my “style” (?), I say that is a roundup, a gathering before it all goes to hell. I want to explore everything, all aspects, do my own review, my own compilation of what can be done, has to be done and then as maybe we shall all disappear, so will our understanding of Art; why it existed and how. So before I go back to my own Hell I will make my own 360° paramount survey. Then I’ll just do what I did in the beginning. A full circle. A life. (From Alpha to Omega and back again).
Jan 2006
The Anti-Branding of Artist. By being fragmented against the fragmented world itself.
A Fragmented World implies a Hybrid Artist with fragmented artistic propositions linked to each other only through the Artist himself.
CPA, “Constant Partial Attention” as an Asset.
The artist’s brand is what he REPEATS, and gets recognized for, usually ONE single thing.
> Now the identity can be MULTIPLE in its artistic choices and directions. So that the Brand will have to become and be multiple. The artist will be recognized for SEVERAL things> a less linear and simple approach and lecture….
This whole World we used to have, the 3 TV channels world, the 7 hours/day sun tanning world, the “never again” world… That whole world is going Atlantis, and we were the last generation that came out of it, before it all went Mach 7, full speed ahead in the fragmented sky, exploding in the expanding stretched out void… Beauty Forever.
Think about this: what if our knowledge of language, written and spoken became so diluted, so sparse that in a certain future we, as a race, will be unable to fully comprehend the literary works of the past.
The language would become so opaque and remote that the very ideas, concepts and notions carried by it will become incomprehensible….the “Newspeak” will make it all so easy to control us since we will have lost the access to ideas and the questions they generate…
If all the ancient languages derived from a same source and evolved through migrations and exoduses and thus played with each other so that you could find a similar root for a word throughout countries and distant lands, then it would be safe to assume that the stories which were carried by those languages and dialects used the similar/same myths and legends to be the vehicle and illustration of them all.
The myths were the same, they only assumed different names, forms and settings.
Until someone sat down and decided to write it all and give it a definitive form.
Somebody “Christian”.
Somebody religious…
There are 2 kinds of people who dismiss some ideas as “conspiracy theories”.
1> those who are comforted by the state of things and how society is structured with those who have power and those who don’t, those who know and those who don’t, those who find their place within that hierarchy of power, of knowledge etc… Their system of belief is not to be shaken because it would destroy the foundation of their lives, what they know and function in. It would create a fear, unidentifiable…
2> those who are in that system of power and hierarchy but at the top or very top and who by dismissing such ideas use their acquired power, knowledge, social position as a tool for imposing their way as the Only Way. Power being political, financial, educational, institutional, it is used as an authoritative mean which makes the system what it is. Questioning it would be an attempt to shake the pyramid’s foundations and induce doubt and fear in the system.
It’s a Catch 22 situation because it would mean questioning one element would compromise the whole ensemble.
If you do that, you are then accused of the evils of the world.
It usually follows a determined pattern of accusations with little variations since they have been proved to work unless you are resilient and don’t yield easily.
But beware of those who do that vehemently, they might have the most to hide…
I believe the next Pandemic will be Man Made.
There will be no natural causes, disasters or cataclysms responsible.
It will be done by Men against Men.
It will be done by Big Men against Little Men.
It will be done by corporations and companies and governments against the common people.
They will then produce inefficient treatments and remedies so they’ll appear to be concerned and try to solve the problem, but the price at which they’ll sell those treatments will only condemn the people whilst making them money in the process.
They will create dependency and control through mayhem, fear and ignorance and gain even more power.
I believe the next Famine will be Man Made.
It will use the same mechanisms as for the Pandemic.
Nature doesn’t violate Nature.
Nature doesn’t sicken healthy soils, it doesn’t play God with what we drink and eat, Man does.
Nature doesn’t waste, it distributes. It doesn’t serve the economy, it IS the Economy. Nature doesn’t pollute itself, Man pollutes her, Man turns the plentiful into the scarce.
Man will hunger Man.
I believe as always, like every other time, that the next War will be Man Made.
A few Men will decide the inevitability of it, the need for it, the reasons for it.
No one will ask you, or you will have been long convinced of its necessity by the Few Men. And again, once you’re in it and everything crumbles and falls and your animal instinct takes over and your mind will try to battle it, you will be forced to face all of this and realize how dumb you were…
The Air we breathe is killing us
The Water we drink is killing us.
The Food we eat is killing us.
The Medicine we take is killing us.
The Machines we build are killing us.
We have managed to turn everything which was given to us, free and pure, into a menace, and all that through our own interventions and actions.
Everything has become corrupt and toxic; we broke the balance for greed and power, for dominion and possession.
It is a sad landscape of humanity, twisted inside out for the benefit of a few.
One possible meaningful prism through which to consider art today and its relevance in the future>
The main, perhaps the only position to evaluate the importance of an art piece or an artist’s work is to try to imagine its or his relevance in about 50 years time.
Can we really say that the utter blandness and decorative void of Buren’s stripes will have any historical importance for the viewer of the future? Or a giant photo portrait of an ordinary person? Or some abstract painting done in monochrome ? Or an oversized sculpture of a toy?
Or will the eyes of the future be more interested in a form of art that will have tackled some human issues, tried to ask/answer the secular questions of Who We Are and Why We’re Here, what is our Purpose, and all we do to mess it up or make it happen?
Won’t the minds of tomorrow be more sensitive to art forms that had tried to reflect mankind in a given time and space with the issues and points of views of that given time? Beyond the purely aesthetical or decorative aspects which can be taken into consideration (the “Styles” of an era) isn’t that the only thing that makes us appreciate relevant art through the prism of history, ever since man printed his painted hand on a cave wall?
That and only those artists who, through history, have mirrored our condition and questioned our humanity can be truly relevant and accomplish the true mission of the artist; To expose, point, question, form, deform and reform ad infinitum the nature and meaning of our existences. All the rest is mere wallpaper, decorations and blinks lost in the void…
26/5/10
Duchamp is Death?
Alienation of the viewer
Alienation of the Artist himself.
Confinement of an artistic process to a purely intellectual mechanism, devoid of emotions, guts and soul.
The product defined as conceptual is hermetic and therefore acutely selfish and narcissistic but in a repressed and contrived way.
All his projections through objects reveal nothing but a void hiding a tragic lack & fear of life. And that should be the paradigm that should ultimately define which Art goes towards Life and which towards Death.
That and the undeniable essence of things: Every thing, object, regains its initial nature in the end. When the discourse and concepts fade away, the object remains what it was in the beginning and what it was intended for. The theoretical web collapsing, the work ceases to be a “work” and remains what it was before.
Painting has always been the core and essence of Art, and thus of Humanity itself. It is the fullest, deepest, most complex form of expression in visual arts. Installations, performances, concepts, abstraction can only explore certain aspects and areas. But they are limited because they were branded as being the limits themselves. But there is no “beyond” beyond that “beyond”. Only painting fulfills that exploration of the mind, the soul, of the space and times we live in. As such it is the true mirror of our Humanity. And the Only remaining “Last Frontier” in Art.
19/3/2013
By painting deconstructed bodies we attempt to antagonize the denial and fear of celestial poetic bodies in Art today.
It confronts the notion that seems to prevail which supposes that senses, sensual experience, emotional interaction with the work of Art is debilitating, whereas the purely intellectual connection is uplifting and more “intelligent”. It is an abomination to deny Man’s full experience of Art by limiting it, to put it simply, to one sole organ and in the process insult all those who defy that notion.
Art must be a full senses exchange as it has always been and it’s within that realm that experiments and innovations are possible. Again.
Duchamp’s possible fear of flesh, fear of life, of sublimation and transcendence, fear of the others, of exchanges could suggest he is both a narcissist and a coward who instead of taking a piece of mud and transforming it into “something else” just takes that piece of mud and puts it on a pedestal, saying: “here, look how clever and cunning I am (and you are a fool)”.
I will not confront you or give you anything, I will just demonstrate my superiority by exposing my inner void and present it as something meaningful and holy. That is by all means a deceit. Therefore Art becomes a tool, a ruse, a way to fool someone by imposing on him the notion that he has to see or understand, otherwise he is an idiot. And at no time is he required to feel because it would be degrading…?
The practice of a total sensorial Art, not just a conceptual, cerebral or even now an auto referential one, becomes an act of survival, rebellion. A call to claim back humanity within ourselves with a vision, a goal, with ideas going beyond the enclosed narcissism of narrow shallow minds afraid of their own flesh who want to compress anything that resembles that ambition by calling it degrading or fascist. Subjectivity and imagination, the release of one’s soul through Art are liberating acts. Anything that goes against it or denies it IS antihuman and fascist. We are de facto in a state of conflict/war with anyone of that obedience…And they are the majority.
The american politics will likely never change. Change is in itself a technical impossibility there, too much is at stake.
The illusions of change are the only reality in the american political realm. They are merely surface scratches, enough to produce momentary hope and prepare for new deceit.
Because what lies beneath is a solid block of very dark matter.
What we see now is the end of the Myth, and thus the end of the Dream.
And when a dream ends, you know what happens…
THE MAN WHO STAYED ON EARTH
A CONVERSATION WITH THOMAS JEROME NEWTON
BY EDGAR GORDON GUEST
Note: This is a fictional interview with a fictional character, Thomas Jerome Newton, which the “Newton Initiative” project transforms into a real one. The whole project juggles with that notion, blurring the line between the biographical and the imaginary.
IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN 25 YEARS SINCE WE FIRST HEARD OF THOMAS JEROME NEWTON.
HIS MYSTERIOUS BEGINNINGS, HIS LIGHTNING RISE TO FAME AS ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL INDUSTRIALIST, INVENTOR AND ENTREPRENEUR WHOSE PRODUCTS AND ENDEAVORS CHANGED OUR LIVES FOREVER AND MADE HIM ONE OF THE WEALTHIEST MEN ON EARTH.
AND ONE OF THE MOST SECRETIVE.
HE HAS ENLIGHTENED US WITH SOME STARTLING REVELATIONS REGARDING HIS ORIGINS THROUGH AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY PUBLISHED A FEW WEEKS AGO.
THOSE REVELATIONS CAME AS A SHOCK TO EVERYONE; THEY CONFRONTED US WITH SOMETHING WHICH SUDDENLY PUSHED US IN A WHOLE DIFFERENT DIMENSION: MR NEWTON WAS AND IS OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL ORIGIN.
AN “ALIEN”.
WE ARE SLOWLY LEARNING TO LIVE WITH THIS NEW ASPECT OF THE NEWTON RIDDLE AND ACCEPT HIM WITH THIS NEW DIMENSION ADDED UP TO AN ALREADY MYSTERIOUS AND PUZZLING FIGURE.
BUT WE NEVER QUITE KNEW WHAT THOMAS JEROME NEWTON THOUGHT OF US EARTHLINGS, AND WHAT WERE THE VIEWS HE HAD OF US THROUGH THOSE PARTICULAR EYES OF HIS.
FOR THE FIRST TIME HE HAS AGREED TO COME OUT OF HIS WELL PROTECTED PRIVACY AND TALK TO US ABOUT IT ALL, OPENLY.
E.G.G.>Mr. Newton, you came upon this world almost like a God descending to grace us with gifts of unimaginable value.
You have revealed a lot in your autobiography “Icarus to Daedalus, from the Sky to the Maze”, published a few months ago and also through some records you made in hope your people will hear you out there, or in some of the children’s books and educational TV programs you sponsored…but what are your considerations about us, or our planet, after those 30-odd years among us?
T.J.N > You should be more specific, try something more precise and we shall build up from there…
Well a recurrent theme in your writings and in the messages you dispense us with seems to be a warning about our attitude towards our environment, close or far, and how we seem to treat it with disdain and irreverence.
Nature rules, you must be conscious of that. Humans don’t rule Nature; every attempt to do so is doomed and has been proven to create more havoc than anything else. You have to go along not against if you wish to survive and all I have seen were attempts to dominate Nature, submit it to your needs and whims, but that just isn’t the way it works: There needs to be a system of interaction and mutual consideration if you want to carry on as a species… it seems you have been disconnected from your natural habitat; you have relied on your acquired knowledge and technologies to alienate yourselves from it and create a fence, as if you were two distinct entities…very uncanny!
I think some kind of initial fear must have entered your original code, or DNA as you call it, and your primitive fear of Nature became a fear of God, or Gods, and you became dependent on some immaterial thread between you and an imagined all-powerful and all-seeing figure who ruled your lives…and that cut you off your true environment…you cannot understand anything, the World, in isolation of its environment.
Are you referring to the idea of “as above, so below”? That all is intertwined, feeds off, rubs off and morphs…that all things in the Universe and on our own little world are eternally and cosmically bound?
I had to read quite an extensive amount of works by your thinkers; I did a lot of that so I could get a better insight into your minds and ways of thinking… I found some interesting things such as the “Hermetic Principles”: The abolition of opposites creates unity, and unity is incorruptible.
The Cosmos is Unity, cosmic energies are projected macroscopically through the Universe and microscopically on men; all processes repeat themselves but only the scale really changes. So yes, “as above, so below”…where did I read that?
Maybe Gurdjieff?
I cannot quite recall all the names of the writers and thinkers I have studied…it took me some time to assimilate all that data and make a selection…I did not get all those information from your television programs we were receiving on Anthea, which I used for my study of your world. But anyway certain of those theories seem to me a much more valid way to apprehend life than your somewhat odd and contrived religious principles.
Are you implying that Religion is responsible for our mistreatment of our planet?
No, that would be an exaggerated simplification and with you nothing is ever simple…what I mean is…well, we don’t have “Religion” on my planet, Anthea, and I was not familiar with such a puzzling concept…It took me some time to decipher, to understand what it had brought to you but also what it had taken away…As a modest witness to your ways it seems to me that you had to pay a terrible price for an hypothetical redemption and peace in the Beyond.
All those wars, the hatred, the gaps it had created among your tribes, it’s so terrible! They separate you from the others who might not be exactly like you, but you know from my perspective you are all the same.
What is the purpose and the goal is what I cannot fathom…I see no logic and maybe there is none, but what then is the reason for those religions to be? As guidelines they have failed because you cannot have the light and leave the darkness apart, they are one.
And it seems surrendering to those beliefs only made you slaves to some people who needed to control others.
You tamed your natural primal fears with a bigger fear of a supernatural kind. You disowned your place on this world and your role in it for some illusion of a better life elsewhere…But you know, I come from that Beyond, the stars…I’ve crossed numerous galaxies and seen nothing else but the beauty of the Universe unfolding like a magnificent benevolent gesture of light and matter, all sparks and wonders, an eternal source of amazement…it is so much bigger than you could imagine! I’ve seen stars die in a whirlwind of glittering rains, fireballs the size of some of your cities rush by my ship in complete silence…meteorite showers on distant moons you’ve never heard of, exploding like a puff of glazed sugar…all those things seem so remote from your godly creations which made you bend your head instead of holding them up.
But beyond that what puzzles me the most is the utter pretentiousness of the whole thing…
What do you mean?
Well it lays in the idea that Man was created in God’s image: you have created a deity which has created the whole Universe, beyond your reach and comprehension, but he has “created it all”, and of all the galaxies and planets He has chosen you and your Earth to make a species in its own image?
You have invented a system which puts you in the middle of that Universe as the sole species worthy of being created in God’s image and by that be some kind of “chosen “ race…it is a form of cosmic ethnocentrism isn’t it?
You have project your kind throughout the whole Universe as the de-facto only kind and created a God, your own God or Gods with different names, that has created you in its own image in return…isn’t that a true expression of a bottomless doubt and anxiety regarding your origins?
Then to consolidate the whole thing you have made some men become gods or God’s sons…it is all so…childish.
Though having travelled through the Cosmos, I do understand the immense feeling of void and disarray in front of it and the need to reassure oneself, create some kind of shield and meaning, a buffer between Man and Universe, define a purpose and a place in the midst of it all. Your whole culture and evolution is based on those parameters.
On the other hand, I hope I will not sound rude, I truly believe that if ever your Jesus were to return, which I can assure you won’t happen but let’s imagine…I think he would probably meet his fate for a second time in similar settings.
You mean we would…kill him?
Absolutely.
That’s…Violent?
Of all the countless worlds I have known, of the myriads of planets upon which I have trod on my way towards this one, never have I met a race so filled with Fear…with dark distrust…with the seeds of smoldering violence, as yours.
You seem to deal with everything through violence but violence is not universal, it’s a human dysfunction and you project it all over the Universe. And that it linked to your individualism, forced competing and selfishness… You are such by inertia, or as some of your thinkers say, culturally. You are conditioned but I don’t think it’s your true nature, you have just distorted some values and put them up as “standards”…You are in a “Value System Disorder” society…
Why do Earthmen refuse to trust those who are alien, who are different? If I am to remain for good on this world I must solve that mystery…
Since the dawn of time your history has taught that none ever profits from violence…and the wages of warfare are Death, and yet you persist…But why? What is the factor that keeps you so perpetually insane?
Well arguably “Power” comes first to mind. Do you think it’s the root of all evil?
Certainly, it has taken away all your freedom, and kept you from realizing your true place and nature in the Universe, cut you away from your Destiny.
You are condemned to dwell like insects in a hive never knowing the glories of that endless Universe!
No matter what God you pray to, no matter what flag you may follow, in every land and every level of your society, your goal is Power!
Power which must ever fade in crumbling ruins and drifting dust…When if ever will you learn to live in peace, as brothers? When will you learn that Love is the power supreme?
You have grown into a strange system ruled by impalpable things, by money…Your whole world revolves around it…But it only leads to poverty, madness and dysfunction. It affects all you do and think. All your wars are triggered by it. Money is your true God…
And according to you, a fascination with the dark and bad things in ourselves?
The news are full of those dark sides of your lives; you favour them over positive and good things. As if the wrong was more worthy of attention than the right.
That need for Drama and Fear… As if their opposites were too good to be true so you dwell in the mud instead…and it is as if Humanity had to carry on being like that for more Aeons, like an unavoidable curse…A succession of evolutions through pain not through heart and mind or seldom it seems…
You have an overall negative opinion of us as a species, don’t you?
I couldn’t be so radical. But isn’t it what you constantly project? Through what I have just described but also as an image of your World throughout the Universe?
Put yourself in my place: I want to know about you and your planet; from my point of view, a far away one, all I get is what you send out in the Cosmos through airwaves, the radio, the TV…Let’s consider that images “speak louder than words” as you say, and that images are my main source of information, all I get is either a mass of very confusing and trivial flow of data or a vast amount of what I could simply describe as Violence. It screams out through the Universe: “We are violent people!”
Unless I have myself evolved in even more violent surroundings, do you really think I would perceive you as anything more than a very irrational population of very unfriendly beings which I have no intention of making contact with?
An “inferior” race?
That again is your disturbed values and conditioned history speaking out… No I could not say that, but yes you would be:
- Easy to submit and conquer.
- Not very interesting in the first place, not as much as your planet that is…
I get your point, we are not worthy?
The first immediate answer would be “yes”, but again so much extraordinary has been done by you that unless you realize your blessings and your luck as a whole, as an entity being part of a bigger one, you will never see the road ahead of you…And it is right there, all you need is to make some steps, the obvious will do the rest. You will understand that your path is clear.
It sounds like a New Age thing, or hippie.
I’m not sure I understand, sorry…is that a good thing?
It guess it is, ideally…it was something of an utopian dream too, a long time ago, or so it seems…
Well you have proven that if you have an idea you can make it come true, that is your power: everything within the realm of your imagination and invention you have found a way to make happen…good or bad things alike.
If you decide to build a bridge from Kansas to the Moon you will ultimately find a way to do it.
Instead of directing your researches and energies into building war machines and objects of destruction because of your defiance towards another nation or neighbour, you should direct it all towards creating goodness and add beauty to your world, not waste…
Beauty will save the World Mr Newton?
It sounds good Mr. Guest, but can you?
You are too preoccupied by the daily threats and worries you put over your fragile heads…you need to see a bigger, wider picture, zoom out, yes, zoom out…
That is a privilege you have, seeing us from so far away and yet now being so close, a unique witness…that is an almost Olympian privilege….
Talking about Gods, you came down as one?!
Oh dear! Not really as a god, I didn’t intend it to be so, but as my book title says, I was more like a modern day Icarus and I became Daedalus, lost in this earthly maze…all those Greek references!…I quite like them actually, the ancient stories and legends; they defined you so well and so long ago; in a way it seems only technologies changed, your cities, your cars…but the fundamental questions and issues, they remained almost the same, as if the answers kept sliding away as you get close to them…It seems to boil down to the same questions: why are we here, why us, why here?
I wish we could have asked ourselves those things, where I came from…
There is a question everyone wants to ask you: Are you the only one? Are there Others? Or on some other planet? You proved we are not “alone”, but wide is our ignorance in those matters?
Well I can’t be the only one, can I? I have told you about my planet, I located it for some of your scientists and described it as much and as extensively as I could.
Of course there are others! Planets! Races! Systems! All different and unique just as yours…we are dust in an endless tide of light and matter…
But if you think about what I said regarding your “cosmic ethnocentrism”, you can clearly understand why some of your rulers might keep some information regarding these notions away from the general public.
Look what happened to me and I was…alone.
One alien was almost enough to threaten your whole system…
Yes, I get your point, but let’s look at the bright side: you brought us lots of “gifts” with your arrival, offerings! One could say you came down with a splash.
Well I did rock some things in your lives, made them better, faster. It was a selfish adventure though, I needed colossal means and in order to get them I had to create wealth, money, profit; but I made you profit too; it was a fair deal in my opinion, but I got …lost in your ways, you saw me as a threat and as you always do, you sort of…crucified me…you didn’t kill me but you prevented me from fulfilling my destiny on my world by giving me a new one, here.
You are clearly referring to the harsh medical testing we imposed upon you which substantially altered your original metabolism and you also became the reason why the “Homeland Security” pushed the “Electronic Safety Bill” making you the first person to be implanted with a tracking electronic chip, so big was the distrust of our authorities…
It was such a regrettable action against you, so unfair after all you’ve given us!
Yes, fortunately it was abolished by the “Alien Act” in Congress, and I could regain control over my companies and stabilize my business on this planet, try to fit in…That’s why I wrote the book, to explain myself to your kind and, if there was any chance, so the words could reach my people on Anthea, even though I know there is probably nothing left…I sent it to the stars, like a message in a bottle as you say…
I am very grateful to all the organizations who brought this whole chip issue to the highest world institutions so it could be discussed.
I am very cautious of this whole dilemma; you must be careful and attentive to the state’s, any state’s permanent need to rule over its citizens…their control frenzy.
For every technological breakthrough there seems to be a dark, twisted side, a use which again boxes you in instead of giving you freedom and ease; I find it disturbing, both the fear and the hidden need for it…it’s very complex and paradoxical.
You also talked about the proliferation of electronic and electromagnetic waves and the problems it creates.
Well my initial metabolism was ultra sensitive to some of the things you cannot perceive such as X-rays or some type of frequencies…
Your frequencies are basically like what you call “tinnitus”, a constant buzzing in the ears which was very disturbing for me: they are continuous and as such not very healthy.
The worrying condition of the bee population is a clear sign of that: too many frequencies, electronic flows of the wrong kind are affecting you without you being aware of it really…you have to watch the bees.
The frequencies emitted by Nature, those you cannot perceive, are, how should I say…interrupted a thousand times within a second.
Such is the way of Harmony, all is vibrating, yes “vibrating” is a good word…your Earth is a vibrating orb with a billion of interacting flows of energies and pulses…if you knew that you would be looking for energy sources elsewhere or differently…like the wireless transport of electricity my company is now testing in some of our plants.
That sounds like the projects Nikola Tesla was working on…In your study of our habits and ways, you must have found some individuals whose work or lives were interesting for you?
Yes of course, I had to study your technologies in order to see if I could improve them and build on where you left off or stalled.
You have a plethora of very gifted people, they actually make your kind more valuable and worthy of admiration. I liked Tesla a lot; I took some of his ideas and made them possible, made them work. Like wireless electricity now, the internet, solar harnessed energy, antigravity…
He was a sort of alien too it seems; he didn’t cope very well with people…I found a lot of similarities with him; despite his unselfish gifts to mankind he still suffered from the hands of your mighty and greedy and lost a battle he wasn’t even aware he got involved in…He wasn’t suited to his times, he came too early, but he got his victories in the end…
What gives you pleasure, where do you find solace in this world, how do you …unwind?
I like your Art, even though I don’t understand most of what it done today, it seems very childish or meaningless…very opaque and shady, it doesn’t communicate…very retentive, or that’s just how perceive it; it seems to come and go nowhere, just an intellectual posture; but I like your museums, the old ones, they tell me more about you than the new stuff.
There is so much craft, beauty and knowledge involved in your Art, a true wealth. It was the biggest inspiration and surprise to me when I got here. So unique.
I’ve never seen a race which managed to transgress its mortality by creating so much perennial beauty, like a hymn to its own gender.
I started my art books editions with that in mind, showing all the details possible, getting into the core of the artworks as much as possible.
With your track-zoom book system?
Yes, the idea was to allow the viewer to zoom into the works, navigate, and for sculptures, rotate them, so the experience can be total.
I was very happy with the results! We developed the Mylar-treated pages with tracking grids, like the ones you have on touch screens or phones now but with real books. It was more elegant; I like your books, the idea of a full big library, there is something very …civilized about it.
You also said you were not too keen on the music?
Unfortunately my auditory apparatus wasn’t suited to your complex harmonies; I tried but it wasn’t successful. Some simpler rhythms and tunes I can listen to but not too often. I find no real pleasure in it.
I had to do it though, make records, at least one, for my long lost people, far beyond this world, but it wasn’t very well received by the music critics!
I sounded odd I guess but I couldn’t do better than that!
You called yourself “The Visitor” for that project, an obvious choice?
That’s what I was, or am…for good it seems…
You disclosed in your book some concern about the transmission of knowledge?
The value of knowledge itself has been trampled underfoot by some strange powers that alienate you from the inherited wealth, beauty, history and learning you’ve gathered throughout your evolution. Your minds, your young minds, are being diluted in some gaseous mass of frivolity and nonsense…
Entertainment?
Not only, I like being entertained but it seems the whole tower of your knowledge is consciously being eaten away by some raving insects…let’s face it, Knowledge is Power; I came with a lot of it and became by your standards a very powerful person, but there seems to be a clear will to constrain knowledge to a privileged few instead of sharing it as much as possible.
You still don’t realize that creating inequalities of any form within your society is suicidal, it’s like setting tempered bombs among yourselves, everyone will suffer, it won’t be selective once it blows off…
There are times when you seem to me like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statues with hammers.
But it was us who painted the pictures, made the statues?
Only a few human beings Mr. Guest, only a few…
But you are right, compared to what we had on Anthea, it is so unique and it still fascinates me enormously, we just didn’t have such Art on Anthea…or any Art if I think of it…
You could go back now, could you? Technology made huge progress thanks to you, why don’t you?
It’s too late now…it was already critical then on my planet. The drought had destroyed almost everything, most of what I left and promised to return to and save is…gone now.
I would find nothing but rubble if ever there was anything to be found at all; I have made my peace with it. I have failed you know?
And anyway my body has undergone some mutations, permanent ones. It could not bear the travel now, I would probably die in the ship…
You became a wealthy entrepreneur and a key player in our economical and technological fields.
All your inventions have greatly improved our daily lives and yet you seem very weary of that system that made you an important figure in world economics. What are your concerns?
The rules of the economic game are invalid. There is no purpose to it as it is, and as many intend to keep it.
Unless it’s a clear voluntary decision to go overboard in flames.
The resources of this planet are wasted and destroyed in the name of profit and waste is a sickness; only the absence of waste is efficiency. This is…madness.
Like your dependence on fossil fuel, a purely greed driven addiction. You are in a permanent merry-go–round which is paradoxically a deadly status quo; greed is blinding you and you should direct your creativity and wealth towards new means of rationally sustaining your world before it’s too late, like it was on my world…
Oddly, you need problems to create profit and that, at this point in time, is like a fully crowded bus on a suicide run but only the driver knows it. You venerate money for money’s sake not as a mean for generating wealth in your society. You have created a monster that rules through the odd conception that some mysterious ways conduct your economic life; you have even put that element of mystery on your bills by writing “in God we trust”…But there is no God ruling the economy; it is done by a very few men, believe me I know, I’ve met them all, they all came knocking.
What is the solution?
In order to survive you need to switch to a resource based type of economy, where “economy” has a true meaning, with a clear distribution of those resources based on location, need, evaluated production. You also need to stop producing devices that are programmed to self-destruct or become obsolete very quickly.
You need to rethink all the symptoms of your ailing system before it chokes you forever. You must realize that all that will remain is crumbling rubble and the dismal sight of slow decay.
On Earth as in every corner of the Universe, civilizations grow, enjoy their brief moment of glory and sink once more into dust…
You have a planet possessed in rainfall in great abundance, soil fertile enough to feed a galaxy and a sun ever warm, ever constant, ever symbolizing new hope and new life. It is as if the Human race has been divinely favored over all who live and yet in their uncontrollable insanity they seek to destroy this shining jewel, this tiny blessed sphere called “Earth”…
You seem to predict a gloomy future for us! Do you really think that we are doomed, that destruction is our only way out?
You involve a tremendous energy in destruction, in violence, in order to get things you think you need…all those wars, those desperate short sighted actions you take…I saw the towers crumble, you know I had some offices in WTC 2…such a waste…how could you do that to yourselves?
Well we didn’t actually do it to oursel…
Oh! Please, spare me the controversy!
You did it to yourselves, as humans, for power, for greed, for fear!
I was alien to those things before coming to your world; I learned how destructive they were by being amongst you. Fear is such a powerful tool, fear rules in everything it seems, how strange to submit to such a paralyzing emotion; It blinds you and grounds you. It is bondage…I sometimes wonder if humans want to be free, feel the world fully. They would understand it much better if their eyes and hearts were open, truly open…
Alas!, many of you think peace denotes weakness and savagery strength.
You stated that our political structures were invalid, outdated to face the new era? Can you elaborate?
It appears that your political structures, your governments, are outrunned by other players when faced with world issues. They come after things happen: they are more like nurses than initiators of ideas or projects. They have been overtaken by corporations, lobbies, power and money people. So the governments struggle to achieve their function whilst having to deal with all those new actors in the game.
Also the political divisions of left and right seem outdated; the problems are not to be confronted by states or parties or on the level of cities or regions: they are smoke screens designed to maintain local political power. The real problems are global, reverberating off each other constantly. You need to face them accordingly, which brings us back to the resources based economical system which analyzes everything globally in real time and adapts constantly to the situations, needs, problems…
So politics are not the answer anymore?
Regrettably, your political systems run out of ideas and have fallen back onto the economic, or should I say, financial system that is now ruling most of the world’s affairs.
That is a tragic mistake.
I have witnessed ever since I ‘ve been here that you are in a permanent state of “Crisis”. If that state lasts for so long it becomes the natural, the only state of that society, so “Crisis” is your natural environment and all the other possibilities, a blissful society which provides, rewards and cares for everyone is the illusion or the utopia and that is the insanity of your actual world…You need to run it all differently, turn it around.
But how do you run that then? Some kind of “League of Nations”? We have that already, don’t we?
And what results did it produce?
Often those World organizations look more like firemen with flame throwers, creating more problems, instead of being a true arbiters, problem solvers, healers.
We had on Anthea something which could be described as a « Council of the Wise »: The different and most prominent members of our community would discuss the issues and bring solutions based on data, real time reports and analysis…something like the ancient Greek Agora, but with satellites and computers.
It was for the benefit of the community, not for the benefit of a party or an elite of selected few…And it worked quite well once the notion of Power had been replaced by those of global well-being and progress for all. Once the inequalities are erased, the game of Power becomes irrelevant and…primitive?
But I must state that we had a different nature; yours has to be elevated, quickly if possible.
It seems like you would like us to be something completely different. Do you think it’s possible?
Your ancient civilizations had elements of it, so it is within you. You have been remodeled and your codes have been modified by all those things we discussed earlier.
Look how narrow-minded you can be: You kept me for weeks and months, analyzing and testing me, questioning me about my backgrounds and plans simply because you thought I was an illegal immigrant and that my activities were dubious, suspicious or anti-American!
Not once did your officials see me as anything but a threat. You thought I was building a weapon, that I was out to destroy you when my ambition was only to save my own kind by building my space ferry and loading it with supplies and water so I could try to help them…and help you in the process with new technologies and inventions. You filmed me, probed my body, flashed all sorts of beams through me, almost blinded me with X-rays and modified my body structure with your chemicals, but not once did you seriously consider the option that I could be from another planet.
I was just a freak…with patents. I was a threat to your God-given values which have not gotten you anywhere better than being the next dinosaurs down the line!
My true nature appeared as secondary compared to what I might have been up to in your suspicious eyes. It says a lot about your government’s obsessions doesn’t it?
That constant and ever present fear will destroy you in the end unless you choose a new path. Staying on the current one will be like those movies you call « science fiction »; but there will be no science there, just a dreadful future…
Talking about Science Fiction, you have been developing some quite futuristic devices through your company « World Enterprise », how do you see that aspect of our future?
This seems to be a turning point in your evolution, a flashpoint.
Everything is accelerating exponentially, the amount and flow of information, the technological progress, the amount of available knowledge; The machines are getting more sophisticated and powerful by the hour almost…So one of the possible futures will be a merging with the machines. Thinking machines, machines with emotional responses.
We have been producing at « World Enterprise » some devices which were primarily used for disabled people: robotic limbs, electronic eyes, auditory systems, all integrated in your body which can be used now by everyone, as enhancers.
We are also working on programs which are more educational in the form of data downloadable directly to your brain. You could learn a language in one night as you sleep or know everything about a given topic just by loading it into you. That will take Humanity into a whole new era of its evolution; everything will change, everything.
But you have to change first, you have to realize that with those changes you need to evolve as people otherwise all the technology in the World will not be able to save you; you are definitely at a crossroad.
So what do you think is the answer, the exit from this situation we’re in, is it possible at all?
Despite the long years I have spent observing the human race I understand it no better than when I first set foot on this World…
You long for peace yet gird for war, you search for love yet harbor hate…
If Man is sane, the Universe itself is steeped in madness…But mad or sane, I still must walk among you
I have seen the births of planets and the death of worlds, I have seen galaxies crumble and new suns aborning, but never have I glimpsed the answer to the riddle of the Universe…
The real answer is in your hearts; you have to give up your old ways of creating inequalities, blindly destroying what has been preciously given to you.
You must re-bound with your World and your own kind, create what we called on Anthea the “Converging Rules” where all is integrated and shared, knowledge and wealth alike for the benefit of all, human or not.
I feel you have no faith in the future. You loose yourself in daily trivialities and instant gratifications but are unable to project yourselves beyond a very near tomorrow. You are crushed by the present, seek comfort in the past and sacrifice your children’s and even your own future for lack of vision…
You don’t dream anymore. You are assailed by constant threats, irrational ones mostly, which make you bend your head and look down…
You need to look up my friend, like you once used to and got carried away by dreams of greatness and cosmic glory…look up…
And what is your place in it all? Where are you all this?
I remain a stranger apart, ever adrift, ever to wonder and question, that is my fate now!
I cannot pretend being something I’m not. I am destined to live among you with all your light and your darkness.
As an “alien” I can try to communicate my knowledge and offer warnings, for your destiny may be ashes or glory greater than any ever known.
And whatever shall befall it is my fate to share it with those I now spend my life with.
Mr. Newton, thank you for your time and insights, I do hope we can all learn from you.