Motion
By Amnon Ben-Ami, translated by David Stromberg
I'll start with what I read aloud during the exhibition's opening. I thought, and I still think, that this is a good opening for the works presented here.
In his book of American lectures, the author Italo Calvino sets down a number of values of literature that in his opinion are fundamental to preserve for the next millennium, the third millennium, and the first value he gives is that of lightness. This is what he says:
After forty years of writing fiction, after exploring various roads and making diverse experiments, the time has come for me to look for an overall definition of my work. I would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. . . . I have come to consider lightness a value rather than a defect. . .
The next values that Calvino puts forth are quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity. He died before having the chance to write the lecture on his last value: consistency. Calvino ends the section on the second value – quickness – with a Chinese story about a painter:
Among Chuang-tzu's many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. "I need another five years," said Chuang- tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.
Contrary to this story about quickness (or slowness), Merleau-Ponty opens his article “Cézanne's Doubt” with an opposite example of quickness (or slowness). It begins this way:
It took him one hundred working sessions for a still life, one hundred fifty sittings for a portrait. What we call his work was, for him, only the attempt and the approach of his painting. In September of 1906, at the age of sixty-seven – one month before his death – he wrote: “I was in such a state of mental agitation, in such great confusion that for a time I feared my weak reason would not survive. . . . Now it seems I am better and that I see more clearly the direction my studies are taking. Will I ever arrive at the goal, so intensely sought and so long pursued?”
Toward the end of the article Merleau-Ponty sets down Cézanne's aim:
He was, in any case, oriented toward the idea or project of infinite Logos.
In this exhibition, there are many references to Cézanne – through the paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire and those of apples. I arrived at Cézanne through Rilke. In his Letters on Cézanne – letters Rilke sent to his wife from Paris and which were for the most part an account of Cézanne's painting – the poet wrote on 19 October 1907:
You surely remember . . . from the Notebooks of Malte Laurids the passage that has to do with Baudelaire and with his poem: "The Carcass." I could not help thinking that without this poem the whole development toward objective expression, which we now think we recognize in Cezanne, could not have started; it had to be there first in its inexorability. Artistic observation had first to have prevailed upon itself far enough to see even in the horrible and apparently merely repulsive that which is and which, with everything else that is, is valid. . . . Cézanne knew Baudelaire's poem, “The Carcass,” by heart and even in his final years would recite it word for word.
The Carcass
Remember that object we saw, dear soul,
In the sweetness of a summer morn:
At a bend of the path a loathsome carrion
On a bed with pebbles strewn,
With legs raised like a lustful woman,
Burning and sweating poisons,
It spread open, nonchalant and scornful,
Its belly, ripe with exhalations.
The sun shone onto the rotting heap,
As if to bring it to the boil,
And tender a hundredfold to vast Nature
All that together she had joined;
And the sky watched that superb carcass
Like a flower blossom out.
The stench was so strong that on the grass
You thought you would pass out.
Flies hummed upon the putrid belly,
Whence larvae in black battalions spread
And like a heavy liquid flowed
Along the tatters deliquescing.
All together it unfurled, and rose like a wave
And bubbling it sprang forth;
One might have believed that, with a faint breath filled,
The body, multiplying, lived.
And this world gave out a strange music
Like of running water and of wind,
Or of grain in a winnow
Rhythmically shaken and tossed.
Form was erased and all but a vision,
A sketch slow to take shape
On a forgotten canvas, which the artist finishes
From memory alone.
Behind the rocks a fretting bitch
Looked at us with fierce mien
Anxious to retrieve from the corpse
A morsel that she had dropped.
Yet to this rot you shall be like,
To this horrid corruption,
Star of my eyes, sun of desire,
You, my angel and my passion!
Yes, such you shall be, you, queen of all graces,
After the last sacraments,
When you go beneath the grass and waxy flowers,
To mold among the skeletons.
Then, oh my beauty! You must tell the vermin,
As it eats you up with kisses,
That I have preserved the form and essence divine
Of my decayed loves.
Charles Baudelaire
From http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-carcass/
I arrived at Rilke through Heidegger. In his work, “What Are Poets For,” which is largely dedicated to Rilke's writings, the philosopher attempts to decipher the poet's notion of “the open.” He has no choice but to himself turn into a poet when he tries to do this:
Rilke likes to use the term “the open” to designate the whole draft to which all human beings, as ventured beings, are given over. It is another basic word in his poetry. In Rilke's language, “open” means something that does not block off. It does not block off because it does not set bounds. It does not set bounds because it is in itself without all bounds. The Open is the great whole of all that is unbounded. It lets the beings ventured into the pure draft draw as they are drawn, so that they variously draw on one another and draw together without encountering any bounds. Drawing as so drawn, they fuse with the boundless, the infinite. They do not dissolve into void nothingness, but they redeem themselves into the whole of the Open.
I'll end with a section of my own writing from 2010 which begins with a reference to Heidegger's article, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in the middle makes a note about Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and ends with restless writing on speed:
Heidegger: the origin of the work of art is art. That which has nothing to do with the thing itself. With the object. There's no need to worry about the artistic, it's there even without any object. Without any tangibility. There's no need to make it, no need to see or sense it. Art is allowed to exist by means of the work of art but anything tangible in a work of art is not art.
Be soft toward reality, toward people, toward the world. Passive. Receptive. Given to reception. Let things come your way. Dwell inside you. Pass through you. The liquids of my brain. Brain liquids. Mind liquids. Art liquids. That which isn't the thing, the art thing, the art object. Art liquids are also not art, brain liquids.
Heidegger points out two things about the work of art: revealing the world and bringing forth the earth. Earth. I would say opening and closing. Opening space, opening something, making something possible (to something or someone else), and bringing forth the earth. Set forth. A support. A comfort. Stability. An abyss and a support. But mainly an abyss. Even the earth is an abyss. Even the earth is an open. The open. The work of art will be the earth (the ground) in the way it directs emotions. While facing art (which inhabits the work but is not in it) the viewer is a viewer-abyss. An abyss looking at an abyss. Two abysses. Now the viewer is more comfortable with existence in the everyday. It's easier with the everyday-abyss than with the everyday alone. It's easier for an abyss to be with an abyss than with the earth, and in this sense the work of art is earth (ground).
Yes, Heidegger claims that art is the origin of the work of art, and that art is not an art thing (object), but rather dwells there, the work of art allows art to dwell within it. He compares it to the dwelling of divinity in a Greek temple – the temple is not divinity but it makes it possible or perhaps is even a condition for the presence of divinity. Is art something groundless like divinity? What about the soul? Is the soul's dwelling in the body also a suitable analogy for the dwelling of art in the work of art? What are these evasive things – art, divinity, soul – which are not the things in which they dwell but which those things can't do without. Which are not things at all but which, without things, don't come to mind.
On the nature of art. On the nature of verbality. On the nature of pre-verbality and the nature of pre-art. On the nature of my body. On the nature of things. All things. On the nature of the perception of things. The impression of things. On falsity.
On the one, the single, the singular. On existence. On existence as the one and only. On falsity. Reality can be called falsity. On existence and reality and nature as amorality (the inanimate, not the living). Not only the living. That which stands before us – is its essence falsity? Deceit? Knowledge is enclosed in behavior. Something is enclosed in behavior. In all behavior. In the behavior of each thing. The knowledge of someone is enclosed in their behavior. Even the other way around: people's behavior is knowledge. Their behavior-knowledge. Like when we say about people that they behave this way or another as if to say that they know this or that.
The tendency to think that there is something outside of falsity. An inverse of falsity. Heidegger claims that truth happens, among other things, in painting. In art. This is our tendency to grab onto something that is not falsity. Also, he claims, in lines of poetry. In the poetic, he claims, truth happens. The poetic, or the artistic, is not the work of art itself but it, along with truth, happens in the work of art. The work of art makes it possible or perhaps even generates it. The poetic, the true. Human misery that stutters toward something that isn't false. Stuttering: there is something.
Kerouac in the middle of the thickness that is On the Road: “We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move” (80).
That which activates the hand when it writes is the same thing that activates it when it changes gears and turns the wheel. Isn't this what you meant, Jack Kerouac? Wasn't this Neal's art? That which activates the hand is that which is present neither in the work of art nor in any automobile. Heidegger's non-present which is the existence of truth in the work of art. Does Heidegger get that in van Gogh's painting, A Pair of Shoes, the object to be discussed is not the shoes but the oil and the canvass and the interior frame (the stretcher)? Or perhaps not even that. What is the object to be discussed? No, not even that. From painting to painting like from city to city. There are no objects to be discussed. Flight from the object. Retreat from the object. That which activates objects. That which activates. The activator. The cause. The reason. Motion and object.
Is this a struggle? Motion and object. Motion: life. Death: object. The pure motion of the brain. That's in the brain. Or not in the brain. Pure motion of any kind. Pure of what? Pure; free of what? Pure thought. Unadulterated motion, without gases. The motion of something? The motion of an object? Motion without an object? Thought: some kind of absolute motion. Of what? The being of motion. The being of motion. A deep and dark contradiction: pure motion. The subtleties of my existence. The subtleties of my motion, which is me. The motion that I am. Who can know the deep subtleties of my motion? From the diffusion of objects into motion, into thought, into consciousness, into perception – I come into contact. Matter diffuses, the diffusion is me. Is light something like unadulterated motion? What does the fact that I see say? What needs to be in me in order for me to see? Is sight already thought?
Speed. The speed of light. The speed of sight. The speed of thought. Speech and hearing seem slow when compared with the madness of the movement of particles of matter. Or whatever that is. The speed of light, the speed of the brain's electricity. I'm uncomfortable with having to limit thinking to the brain every time. It's uncomfortable to have to limit myself every time to the brain. If I'm motion then motion cannot stand limits. The object, or maybe the concept of the object, limits motion. The object: the non-moving, the non-renewing, the self-repeating again and again. Thought, as paradoxical as it is, wrestles with the concept. The concept limits thought, as paradoxical and miraculous as it is. Thought wants to rid itself of concepts. Its concept. Motion. Speed. Object. Concept. Light. Electricity. Brain. The speed of motion. Concepts stop thought.
I would have liked to be thought at infinite speed. Or simply to be at infinite speed. To move. Then, at infinite speed, it's impossible to speak about speed at all. Or about motion. Thought experiment: to imagine motion at infinite speed. Light would not limit me. The speed of light would not be a limit. The speed would be unmeasurable. Immeasurable. I'd be everywhere at once. Everywhere! Beyond the speed of light.
There is something beyond the speed of light and it is found everywhere at the same time. The same thing is found everywhere at the same time. Not extensions of it, not parts of it, the thing itself contrary to the law of contradiction is found at the same time in each and every place, as expansive as the universe may be, may it be infinite, may it be infinite universes. Let its form be whatever it may be, whether given to knowledge or not given to knowledge. The speed of thought. Is there a connection between the essence of thought and the speed of thought? Is there some kind of point to the speed of thought? Don't all thoughts move or change at the same speed? Is the brain a kind of particle accelerator? Something that pushes and accelerates the speed of thought more and more? An increase in the speed of thought will be an essence that will express itself in the clarity of consciousness. The speed of thought in the clarity of consciousness. Place and object and motion.
What moves and where? The what and the where. That which limits motion, that which allows it, and that which accelerates it. Place (space), the object, the object's motion and pure motion (the motion of nothing). Speed. Object. The motion of an object. Motion with no object. Speed of motion. Speed without motion. Now: speed without motion. Against all conceptuality. What makes thought possible? What accelerates it and what limits it? What makes me possible? Me, the darkness of depth, what makes me possible? Me: speed, without motion, without object. If not speed then at least total darkness. Total absence without limits. Absence is limitless.
By Amnon Ben-Ami, translated by David Stromberg
I'll start with what I read aloud during the exhibition's opening. I thought, and I still think, that this is a good opening for the works presented here.
In his book of American lectures, the author Italo Calvino sets down a number of values of literature that in his opinion are fundamental to preserve for the next millennium, the third millennium, and the first value he gives is that of lightness. This is what he says:
After forty years of writing fiction, after exploring various roads and making diverse experiments, the time has come for me to look for an overall definition of my work. I would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. . . . I have come to consider lightness a value rather than a defect. . .
The next values that Calvino puts forth are quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity. He died before having the chance to write the lecture on his last value: consistency. Calvino ends the section on the second value – quickness – with a Chinese story about a painter:
Among Chuang-tzu's many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. "I need another five years," said Chuang- tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.
Contrary to this story about quickness (or slowness), Merleau-Ponty opens his article “Cézanne's Doubt” with an opposite example of quickness (or slowness). It begins this way:
It took him one hundred working sessions for a still life, one hundred fifty sittings for a portrait. What we call his work was, for him, only the attempt and the approach of his painting. In September of 1906, at the age of sixty-seven – one month before his death – he wrote: “I was in such a state of mental agitation, in such great confusion that for a time I feared my weak reason would not survive. . . . Now it seems I am better and that I see more clearly the direction my studies are taking. Will I ever arrive at the goal, so intensely sought and so long pursued?”
Toward the end of the article Merleau-Ponty sets down Cézanne's aim:
He was, in any case, oriented toward the idea or project of infinite Logos.
In this exhibition, there are many references to Cézanne – through the paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire and those of apples. I arrived at Cézanne through Rilke. In his Letters on Cézanne – letters Rilke sent to his wife from Paris and which were for the most part an account of Cézanne's painting – the poet wrote on 19 October 1907:
You surely remember . . . from the Notebooks of Malte Laurids the passage that has to do with Baudelaire and with his poem: "The Carcass." I could not help thinking that without this poem the whole development toward objective expression, which we now think we recognize in Cezanne, could not have started; it had to be there first in its inexorability. Artistic observation had first to have prevailed upon itself far enough to see even in the horrible and apparently merely repulsive that which is and which, with everything else that is, is valid. . . . Cézanne knew Baudelaire's poem, “The Carcass,” by heart and even in his final years would recite it word for word.
The Carcass
Remember that object we saw, dear soul,
In the sweetness of a summer morn:
At a bend of the path a loathsome carrion
On a bed with pebbles strewn,
With legs raised like a lustful woman,
Burning and sweating poisons,
It spread open, nonchalant and scornful,
Its belly, ripe with exhalations.
The sun shone onto the rotting heap,
As if to bring it to the boil,
And tender a hundredfold to vast Nature
All that together she had joined;
And the sky watched that superb carcass
Like a flower blossom out.
The stench was so strong that on the grass
You thought you would pass out.
Flies hummed upon the putrid belly,
Whence larvae in black battalions spread
And like a heavy liquid flowed
Along the tatters deliquescing.
All together it unfurled, and rose like a wave
And bubbling it sprang forth;
One might have believed that, with a faint breath filled,
The body, multiplying, lived.
And this world gave out a strange music
Like of running water and of wind,
Or of grain in a winnow
Rhythmically shaken and tossed.
Form was erased and all but a vision,
A sketch slow to take shape
On a forgotten canvas, which the artist finishes
From memory alone.
Behind the rocks a fretting bitch
Looked at us with fierce mien
Anxious to retrieve from the corpse
A morsel that she had dropped.
Yet to this rot you shall be like,
To this horrid corruption,
Star of my eyes, sun of desire,
You, my angel and my passion!
Yes, such you shall be, you, queen of all graces,
After the last sacraments,
When you go beneath the grass and waxy flowers,
To mold among the skeletons.
Then, oh my beauty! You must tell the vermin,
As it eats you up with kisses,
That I have preserved the form and essence divine
Of my decayed loves.
Charles Baudelaire
From http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-carcass/
I arrived at Rilke through Heidegger. In his work, “What Are Poets For,” which is largely dedicated to Rilke's writings, the philosopher attempts to decipher the poet's notion of “the open.” He has no choice but to himself turn into a poet when he tries to do this:
Rilke likes to use the term “the open” to designate the whole draft to which all human beings, as ventured beings, are given over. It is another basic word in his poetry. In Rilke's language, “open” means something that does not block off. It does not block off because it does not set bounds. It does not set bounds because it is in itself without all bounds. The Open is the great whole of all that is unbounded. It lets the beings ventured into the pure draft draw as they are drawn, so that they variously draw on one another and draw together without encountering any bounds. Drawing as so drawn, they fuse with the boundless, the infinite. They do not dissolve into void nothingness, but they redeem themselves into the whole of the Open.
I'll end with a section of my own writing from 2010 which begins with a reference to Heidegger's article, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in the middle makes a note about Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and ends with restless writing on speed:
Heidegger: the origin of the work of art is art. That which has nothing to do with the thing itself. With the object. There's no need to worry about the artistic, it's there even without any object. Without any tangibility. There's no need to make it, no need to see or sense it. Art is allowed to exist by means of the work of art but anything tangible in a work of art is not art.
Be soft toward reality, toward people, toward the world. Passive. Receptive. Given to reception. Let things come your way. Dwell inside you. Pass through you. The liquids of my brain. Brain liquids. Mind liquids. Art liquids. That which isn't the thing, the art thing, the art object. Art liquids are also not art, brain liquids.
Heidegger points out two things about the work of art: revealing the world and bringing forth the earth. Earth. I would say opening and closing. Opening space, opening something, making something possible (to something or someone else), and bringing forth the earth. Set forth. A support. A comfort. Stability. An abyss and a support. But mainly an abyss. Even the earth is an abyss. Even the earth is an open. The open. The work of art will be the earth (the ground) in the way it directs emotions. While facing art (which inhabits the work but is not in it) the viewer is a viewer-abyss. An abyss looking at an abyss. Two abysses. Now the viewer is more comfortable with existence in the everyday. It's easier with the everyday-abyss than with the everyday alone. It's easier for an abyss to be with an abyss than with the earth, and in this sense the work of art is earth (ground).
Yes, Heidegger claims that art is the origin of the work of art, and that art is not an art thing (object), but rather dwells there, the work of art allows art to dwell within it. He compares it to the dwelling of divinity in a Greek temple – the temple is not divinity but it makes it possible or perhaps is even a condition for the presence of divinity. Is art something groundless like divinity? What about the soul? Is the soul's dwelling in the body also a suitable analogy for the dwelling of art in the work of art? What are these evasive things – art, divinity, soul – which are not the things in which they dwell but which those things can't do without. Which are not things at all but which, without things, don't come to mind.
On the nature of art. On the nature of verbality. On the nature of pre-verbality and the nature of pre-art. On the nature of my body. On the nature of things. All things. On the nature of the perception of things. The impression of things. On falsity.
On the one, the single, the singular. On existence. On existence as the one and only. On falsity. Reality can be called falsity. On existence and reality and nature as amorality (the inanimate, not the living). Not only the living. That which stands before us – is its essence falsity? Deceit? Knowledge is enclosed in behavior. Something is enclosed in behavior. In all behavior. In the behavior of each thing. The knowledge of someone is enclosed in their behavior. Even the other way around: people's behavior is knowledge. Their behavior-knowledge. Like when we say about people that they behave this way or another as if to say that they know this or that.
The tendency to think that there is something outside of falsity. An inverse of falsity. Heidegger claims that truth happens, among other things, in painting. In art. This is our tendency to grab onto something that is not falsity. Also, he claims, in lines of poetry. In the poetic, he claims, truth happens. The poetic, or the artistic, is not the work of art itself but it, along with truth, happens in the work of art. The work of art makes it possible or perhaps even generates it. The poetic, the true. Human misery that stutters toward something that isn't false. Stuttering: there is something.
Kerouac in the middle of the thickness that is On the Road: “We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move” (80).
That which activates the hand when it writes is the same thing that activates it when it changes gears and turns the wheel. Isn't this what you meant, Jack Kerouac? Wasn't this Neal's art? That which activates the hand is that which is present neither in the work of art nor in any automobile. Heidegger's non-present which is the existence of truth in the work of art. Does Heidegger get that in van Gogh's painting, A Pair of Shoes, the object to be discussed is not the shoes but the oil and the canvass and the interior frame (the stretcher)? Or perhaps not even that. What is the object to be discussed? No, not even that. From painting to painting like from city to city. There are no objects to be discussed. Flight from the object. Retreat from the object. That which activates objects. That which activates. The activator. The cause. The reason. Motion and object.
Is this a struggle? Motion and object. Motion: life. Death: object. The pure motion of the brain. That's in the brain. Or not in the brain. Pure motion of any kind. Pure of what? Pure; free of what? Pure thought. Unadulterated motion, without gases. The motion of something? The motion of an object? Motion without an object? Thought: some kind of absolute motion. Of what? The being of motion. The being of motion. A deep and dark contradiction: pure motion. The subtleties of my existence. The subtleties of my motion, which is me. The motion that I am. Who can know the deep subtleties of my motion? From the diffusion of objects into motion, into thought, into consciousness, into perception – I come into contact. Matter diffuses, the diffusion is me. Is light something like unadulterated motion? What does the fact that I see say? What needs to be in me in order for me to see? Is sight already thought?
Speed. The speed of light. The speed of sight. The speed of thought. Speech and hearing seem slow when compared with the madness of the movement of particles of matter. Or whatever that is. The speed of light, the speed of the brain's electricity. I'm uncomfortable with having to limit thinking to the brain every time. It's uncomfortable to have to limit myself every time to the brain. If I'm motion then motion cannot stand limits. The object, or maybe the concept of the object, limits motion. The object: the non-moving, the non-renewing, the self-repeating again and again. Thought, as paradoxical as it is, wrestles with the concept. The concept limits thought, as paradoxical and miraculous as it is. Thought wants to rid itself of concepts. Its concept. Motion. Speed. Object. Concept. Light. Electricity. Brain. The speed of motion. Concepts stop thought.
I would have liked to be thought at infinite speed. Or simply to be at infinite speed. To move. Then, at infinite speed, it's impossible to speak about speed at all. Or about motion. Thought experiment: to imagine motion at infinite speed. Light would not limit me. The speed of light would not be a limit. The speed would be unmeasurable. Immeasurable. I'd be everywhere at once. Everywhere! Beyond the speed of light.
There is something beyond the speed of light and it is found everywhere at the same time. The same thing is found everywhere at the same time. Not extensions of it, not parts of it, the thing itself contrary to the law of contradiction is found at the same time in each and every place, as expansive as the universe may be, may it be infinite, may it be infinite universes. Let its form be whatever it may be, whether given to knowledge or not given to knowledge. The speed of thought. Is there a connection between the essence of thought and the speed of thought? Is there some kind of point to the speed of thought? Don't all thoughts move or change at the same speed? Is the brain a kind of particle accelerator? Something that pushes and accelerates the speed of thought more and more? An increase in the speed of thought will be an essence that will express itself in the clarity of consciousness. The speed of thought in the clarity of consciousness. Place and object and motion.
What moves and where? The what and the where. That which limits motion, that which allows it, and that which accelerates it. Place (space), the object, the object's motion and pure motion (the motion of nothing). Speed. Object. The motion of an object. Motion with no object. Speed of motion. Speed without motion. Now: speed without motion. Against all conceptuality. What makes thought possible? What accelerates it and what limits it? What makes me possible? Me, the darkness of depth, what makes me possible? Me: speed, without motion, without object. If not speed then at least total darkness. Total absence without limits. Absence is limitless.