2003-03-10 - 3:09 p.m.

The splitting and cracking interiors, dazzling, noxious purples and greens, abortion pink and vomit yellow. The walls in my skull echoing and reflecting the urban landscape. A landscape of factories, electric saws, industrial noise, empty buildings, barbed wire, churning industrial slavery. A landscape of tortures, cults, vaginectomys, wars, unusual murders (especially by children and psychopaths), diseases, amputations, horrible revolting metasomatism, mutant animals made out of bits of chickens and rabbits sewn together. Like a strange spiderweb my mind suddenly becomes pure and clear and the humor becomes sidesplitting. I dash off a letter of congratulations to the editors of the Color Atlas of Forensic Pathology for their tremendous humor and great graphics! Oh, that golden Tuesday smeared and misunderstood and no space to move, blurting out insensitive and ugly things because all that is left after the thrashing and spewing are weedy fragments and slug bait. Meat-and-maggots-through-the-mail, stinking parcels curling edges turning brown and blistering, very healthy but horribly revolting. Mental suicide and violent self destruction. The technically sophisticated perversions of the wealthy white collar white. My own mind a theater of simulated warfare where machines run amuck in all directions preplanted explosive charges multiple warhead targeting obsessive morbid inventiveness; the transmission of specific ideas and the repeating of meaningless words over and over only to get confused and so begin again. The womb pierced with a rusty knitting needle, the bag of brown and black and red liquid the consistency of gravy leaching over the graveyard of the industrial revolution. Constant slaughter: The pigeon eating centrifuge, mechanical scorpions, face stabbing conveyer blades, the fragrant scent of the auto-de-f�. The umbilical cord is cut. The mating of meat and machinery, a robot with flesh parts, that is, an organic robot. But for some reason dead things make people feel funny. However, my thinking results from a series of chemical combinations in which I collect information, verify it, and come to some sort of conclusion. Like I?ve always spent alot of time thinking of all the awful things that could happen to me and then the structure of my mind starts to fall apart and I can?t think effectively anymore. It?s like sometimes when you?re dreaming and you didn?t know it until something wakes you up and then later you?re not sure if what happened really happened or if it was a dream or happened in a dream or part of it and part of it was in a dream and part of it real and you?re not really sure which when you think about it and then try to figure it out later. It?s sorta like when people get in an accident and they say, ?It was dream-like. Everything was in slow motion.? They?re not really sure about it. Like, I knew someone once who would say something happened but I knew that it didn?t happen! That person just dreamed the whole thing. At least I think I knew a person like that. And I think stuff like that also happens to people who take too many drugs, or bad drugs, or the wrong kind of drugs or the set and setting is wrong. Or maybe they?re crazy. Only crazy people don?t know that they?re crazy. The brain does the thinking and when there?s a problem, it?s the last to know. So someone mad doesn?t think they?re mad. But a healthy person doesn?t think they?re mad either. And no one can say what madness is anyway, at least on the fringes of neurosis, so all this makes for a great deal of confusion. And then there is the group who question their sanity. Since neither the crazy or the sane question their sanity, what side of the fence do the fence sitter belong on? That obviously leaves us with the conclusion that there is no such thing as insanity, just different ways to meet the challenge of life. The way to address life takes different forms in different cultures and gives rise to the various moral structures therein. When the world becomes as small as it is now, and a country becomes as heteromerous as ours, then the question becomes not what is the correct or right moral structure or value system, but rather is there a correct moral or value system? Once one questions mores, they cease to exist because questioning means doubt. And doubt means grey area. Mores have to be absolute, right or wrong, black and white. For example, most believe pornography is wrong. Only they don?t know what pornography is. This was the dilemma of Henry Miller: art or pornography? Once it was obscene, now it?s literature. The great hidden secret is that it?s possible to be both art and pornography at the same time. And that is the problem the moral definers of our society have, grey area: literature as pornography. Our society will allow literature no matter how fine a razor?s edge it walks as long as it has some ?redeeming value.? It cannot be both. Just as a person cannot be mad and sane at the same time. No grey area allowed. And that?s curious, because our society will allow for gray in other aspects of life, such as intelligence: it?s perfectly OK to be skilled in math and not so good in music. Things really get confusing when something like onanism enters the picture. Now, all men masturbate, yet somehow it seems wrong. I could never approach a group of men and ask, ?How many of you guys love to jerk off?? They would think me nuts just for wanting to talk about it. The feeling is, is that even though they do it, something is not quite right about it. Art fits in here someplace. Art is mental onanism, and like pornography, it cannot be defined: ?I know it when I see it.? What holds true for art, holds true for pornography.

The word art. as we now define it, was coined in the late 18th century at the time of the French Academy. The people who visited the Salons knew what art was: it took a great deal of time and skill and looked real. Actually an idealized form of reality. Manet painted a dead Jesus as real and it caused an uproar: he painted a cadaver! Poor Manet never could get it right. People didn?t want that kind of reality. Manet is the one who started the downfall of ?Art,? the one who created doubt in the status quo. What an irony! Manet wanted to be a part of the status quo. He hated the impressionist ism he started. The doubt he created was because art doesn?t exist. Art is a late eighteenth century idea. For quite some time after Manet, people asked, ?What is art?? Until Duchamp . . . he went into a hardware store, bought a snowshovel, signed his name, and started the real question, ?What isn?t art?? We know the very day that Native American art became Art. Someone took the ?Artifacts? from the anthropological of the university museum, moved it upstairs to the art wing, wrote a catalog on it, and it became Art. Before Leonardo?s time, art was just one of the lessor guilds. And it was Leonardo, that old pederast, who used his influence with the reigning powers to elevate art to the same level as the music guild, using the logic that the eye was just as noble an instrument as the ear, or some such thing. Leonardo disliked sculpture because it required physical labor and one got dirty. Nasty business. Michelangelo, for his part, signed the Sistine ceiling, ?Michelangleo the sculpture.? Even they couldn?t decide what art was.

And just as somewhere along the line onanism became bad, art became important. And not just important, but good for you. People go to museums to better themselves! It?s incredible what people are capable of believing. I remember a great story my iconoclastic Art History professor Dr. Krause told me. He and some friends were sitting around one night getting high. This was the night before one of the guest?s art shows. They loaded up a paper bag with garbage and put it in the gallery. The next day they watched with great amusement as people circled the garbage intently, studying it, making reverent, hushed comments. And they were right! Because what?s good is a matter of opinion. Or, Dr. Krause?s maxim: ?Taste is privileged, scholarship is not.? Scholarship, like mathematics, is something that can be weighed, measured. Whether or not one agrees with the conclusions is largely beside the point. The point is to tell the truth as cleanly as possible. Scholarship doesn?t deal in opinions, just the facts, ma'am. Art criticism is so far removed from scholarship that reading most polemics becomes a ponderous exercise in patience. I?m not against polemics or reviewing art, after all, an artist cannot exist in a vacuum. What I?m against is the self appointed guardians of what is good art. Art is an internal condition, like love, and the artist addresses this condition. The artist is a visual poet. An example: One is in love ( an abstract condition) and is watching a breathtaking sunset (a subjective experience). The next day the experience of the evening before cannot be put into words. A poet can put this into words though. That is why a poet is apart from the experience, a voyeur. The artists job is similar: to create beauty. ?What is beauty? Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously. Other happenings give us a joy and afterward a peace, but in beauty these are the same experience. Beauty is serene and at the same time exhilarating; it increases one?s sense of being alive. Beauty gives us not only a feeling of wonder; it imparts to us at the same moment a timelessness, a repose - which is why we speak of beauty as being eternal.?

This is the artists job: to create beauty. Beauty may take many forms. One might speak of a terrible beauty, for example. But creating this poetry for the canvas is what separates the artist from the illustrator or the propagandist. One can take a picture of a sunset, but it isn?t the sunset. One doesn?t view painting with the eyes any more than one hears music with the ears. It is done with the heart. After all, any animal is able to view what we view, we alone respond aesthetically. Viewing art with the heart is just nystagmus. The artist both forms and reflects the world they live in. Many times that world is a beautiful, horrible place. A place of loneliness, despair, and pain. A place where sewer rats eat the aborted fetuses of the predoomed. A place where the great unwashed masses compete with the sick and numbing depressions of the wealthy. A place where violence and death is a growth industry; where dying and killing takes many forms: genocide, homicide, parenticide, patricide, matricide, regicide, tyrannicide, vaticide, giganticide, infanticide, aborticide, feticide, pesticide, rodenticide, vermicide, filaricide, insecticide, microbicide, germicide, fungicide, herbicide, and that old favorite of the artist, suicide. Man?s ceaseless creativity has produced the scaffold, block, guillotine, ax, iron maiden, stake, cross, gallows, gibbet, electric chair (ever cook a hot dog with electricity?), gas chamber, stocks, trebuchet, cucking stool, whipping post, wooden horse, treadmill, crank, cat-o-nine-tails, garrote, burning at the stake, shooting, defenestration, poisoning, stoning, bastinado, truncheoning, cudgeling, spanking, rap on the knuckles, box on the ears, slap in the face, jailing, imprisonment, keelhauling, tar-and-feathering, railriding, picketing, the rack, impalement, dismemberment, strappado, estrapade, grill, wheel, thumbscrew, iron heal, scarpines, the bed of Procrustes, decorticate?

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