At one moment. At one moment I feel I feel that, I feel that I’m on the edge of something absurd, mad even. All this talk of art, of life, as if society doesn’t come into it, as if, as if somehow one can draw a line between art and life ...

 If anything the critical relationship is between art and the social, not, alas, the social strictly speaking but that other social that lurks within, that demands appeasement, entertainment, something, something almost in the form of a tombstone, a decoration not of angels  (though that will do in a pinch) but of lines, lines that promise, lines that promise clarity or something like it, a route straight to hell

This is the social of art: the scene

So let us forget about art for a moment, life too, the social, the scene, any sense of responsibility or belonging or anything else. And then, and then …

In the meantime and as a health measure give up on confectionery, wrapped sweeties, sweeteners of any kind

And then, without making it a special order of the day, just forget about the boundaries, limits, constraints for at the end of the day the boundary is an internal matter only, an entire artifice. The boundary resurrects. To transgress is merely to resurrect, to re-ordain, to re-institute the order it claims to transgress

If all signs lie then there is no point worrying about lying. It becomes irrelevant. Or to worry about some gap or relationship even between the signifier and the real as if there is any real – or if the real is anything more than a sign of itself, as a sign of reality. The trick is to make a sign that is not real or that makes all signs under the threat of the unreal to become the hyper-real or something

Meanwhile grammar is turfed out the window. It’s all signs without structures. (Now there is a true achievement, a miracle before or not our very eyes!)

It is only when signs don’t have meaning that they mean. Otherwise they are already in the dictionary, the lexicon, nicely positioned and pinned down. To look for meaning in the world of art is to play Captain Plod of the Yard. Art is not about detection or decoding or anything else. If it stands for something other than itself it disappears into its sign value. It de-realises before our very eyes

An image is an image which is also another image. We image it wrongly. We image it as we do. We work on it. We re-render and we mis-render it. We play our distortions on it. We render our histories and longings and fantasies and judgments on it. It has the last laugh for it can always come back to haunt us or even slap us in the face. Every catalogue gets it wrong for it is not the work itself that is present but an image and that image a crude effort to control the image-image of the image itself. Then we ask the artist to explain the work thus propelling it into some odd nether region which it may never escape. How many ladybugs crawl on the prickly pumpkin leaves of art, how many cabbage moths flutter in desultory fashion over the veggie patch that someone, not us, has planted? The veggie patch always comes from elsewhere. It’s an odd fateful productivity. Even when you plant it yourself it is the product of another hand

A short short story about a worm that strangles the early bird. The bird doesn’t know what hit it. Other birds see the bird and fly on. ‘That bird’, they say, ‘is fit only for the birds’. They don’t know what they are saying. They should say ‘That bird is fit only for the worms’ but they’re caught up in the usual chitchat, all about birds. That’s why they talk about birds and not worms, certainly not the ones they’re supposed to be up early for. Birds will never talk about the worm turning. That is for some other species, maybe the worms.

John von Sturmer

17 May 2010