From Chapter 4, How do substances occupy the mind?, in reference to the image which served as thumbnail to this post-

Rembrandt is well-known for the buttery dab of paint that he sometimes puts on the ends of the noses of his portraits, and this nose is certainly greasy and has its little spot of white. But touches like that do not stand alone: when Rembrandt was interested in what he was doing, as he was here, he coated entire faces in a glossy, shining mud-pack of viscid paint. The skin is damp with perspiration, as if he were painting himself in a hot room, and he slowly accumulated a slick sheen of sweat. It is impossible to ignore the strangeness of the paint. If I looked at my face in the mirror and saw this, I would be horrified. The texture is much rougher than skin, as if it is all scar tissue. As a painter works, the shanks of the brushes become repositories for dried paint, and flecks of that paint become dislodged and mix with fresh paint, rolling around on the canvas like sodden tumbleweeds. They are all over this face, forming little pimples or warts wherever they end up. (There is a large one halfway up the nose.) Among contemporary artists, Lucien Freud has made an entire technique out of these rolling flakes and balls, and he lets them congregate in his figures’ armpits and in their crotches. In short, the face is a wreck, much more disturbing than the unnaturally smooth faces that most painters prefer.

Although historians tend to see Rembrandt’s method as an attempt at naturalism, it goes much farther than portrait conventions have ever gone, then or since. Consider what is happening in the paint, aside from the fact that it is supposed to be skin. Paint is a viscous substance, already kin to sweat and fat, and here it represents itself: skin as paint or paint as skin, either way. It’s a self-portrait of the painter, but it is also a self-portrait of paint. The oils are out in force, like the uliginous oozing waters of a swamp bottom. The paint is oily, greasy, and waxy all at once—even though modem chemistry would say that is impossible. It sticks: it is tacky and viscid like flypaper. It has the pull and suction of pine sap. Over the far cheek, it spreads like the mucilage schoolchildren use to glue paper, resisting and rolling back. On the nose—it’s rude, but appropriate—the paint is semi-solid, as if the nose were smeared with phlegm or mucus. On the forehead, it looks curdled, like gelatin that is broken up with a spoon as it is about to set. There is drier paint around the eyes, and the bags under the eyes are inspissated hunks of paint, troweled over thin, greyish underpainting. The grey, which is left naked at the corner of the eye and in the folds between the bags, is the imprimatura, and the skin over it is heavy, thick, and clammy. The same technique served for the wings of the nose, where dribbles of paint come down to meet the nostril but stop short, leaving a gap where the grey shows through. Of course, the nostril is not a hole, but a plug of Burnt Sienna with Lamp Black, and it also lies on top of the grey imprimatura. Rembrandt’s thin moustache is painted with wiggles of buttery paint, almost like milk clinging to a real moustache. Over the eyes and eyelids there are thick strips of burned earth pigments -Lamp Black and Burnt Sienna— covering everything underneath. The tar spreads up and inward, and then falls into the hollows between the eyes and the nose in dense pools like duplicate pupils.

There is no limit to this kind of description, because Rembrandt’s paint covers the full range of organic substances. It is more fully paint, more completely an inventory of what can happen between water and stone, ⊕ than the other examples in this book. And that means it is also more directly expressive of qualities and properties: it is warm, greasy, oily, waxy, earthy, watery, inspissate. It is not dried rock, like Monet’s cathedral, nor water, like his marine paintings. The thoughts that crowd in on me when I look this paint have very little to do with the underlying triad, or with the named pigments or oils. They are thoughts about qualities: I feel viscid. My body is snared in the glues and emulsions, and I feel the pull of them on my thoughts. I want to wash my face.

-James Elkins.

“I want to wash my face.” Ha. Love it.

More to come…

Recently something dawned on me. I came out of my office and turned south toward the N/R station. I happened to look up and saw the emptiness which terminated the pinpoint of a horizon, where, as it so happens, the towers used to be. It struck me, looking up casually and unthinking, that what I really wanted to see were those towers. It wasn’t a sad moment, I didn’t crash knee-down on the pavement and (damn them!) launch into a Heston-worthy soliloquy. I simply looked up and realized for the first time, that long after all the sadness and shock and directionless anger, after the promises and grand plans and presentations that what I would most fondly like to see were those two towers again. My opinion suddenly formed solidly on what should be       built on that ground.

A few months ago I had to go down to the court building to throw my name into the jury-duty hat, and afterward walking by the site of “ground zero” I was dismayed to see what, after nearly 5 years, all the glitzy competitions, heated debate, and ponderously heavy rhetoric had wrought… exactly nothing. “Ground zero,” suddenly a doubly fitting name, was ground that contained zero. It was a huge fucking hole in the ground; that’s it. I don’t know whether those of you living outside of the Tri-State area realize that. With all that has been said and all that has been done in the reverent name of 9/11, the actual site, the “holy ground” which evidently just radiates with meaning and power, is still, 5 years later, a dirt hole. It seems that in “this post 9/11 world” symbolism and rhetoric are all that can be built-up, with passionate gusto, tall and strong. 

When I say what I really want to see when looking south are those towers I mean it literally. You know what I don’t really want to see? A hideous fucking monstrosity, covered in prisms, couched in forgettable hackneyed concept, birthed from the piteous wombs of politics, greed, and compromise.

Message to George Pataki- You and your “Legacy” can suck cock. I can only take heart that your utter failure will impede your using our tragedy to bolster a presidential bid (like a certain Mayor, who everyone seems to forget was widely despised by those he governed before events allowed him to don the hero-mask… oh wait… it’s 2006… that’s a Presidential pedigree today isn’t it?)

Message to Larry A. Silverstein- Kill yourself. Seriously. You are a Scumbag. I’d rather tongue-kiss a lipless leper crack-addict than even look at you. 

Message to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation- Fire yourselves.

Message to George W. Bush, his cabinet members, and the sycophantic House and Senate- Get the term “9/11” out of your filthy fucking mouths. I don’t want to hear another tangential argument given weight by your use of September 11th as ballast until the “ground zero” of those events is afforded the same weight, in physical reality, as it is in your “stirring” words.

You know that primary construction on the original Twin Towers only took about 5 years? That means that if our leaders were not so full-of-shit, if our business-men were not so totally devoid of social conscience, and our citizens were not so listless, that we New Yorkers could look south and see, if not this September then one very soon, two reassuringly familiar (albeit structurally improved) towers rising to fill the empty spaces? How “right” would that feel? As things stand symbolism is threatening to usurp reality completely. If the incompetence continues much longer the symbol itself might be threatened with transformation. Anyone who says “Think of 9-11” will be saying “Think of how utterly full-of-shit we are.”

This is another photograph I took years ago. For some reason this image of a classic (Milton Glaser designed) “I heart N Y” coffee cup substituted with the word “V O I D” had a vitality and meaning to me. I made the cup and shot a whole role of it. I think I even had a t-shirt. Today, if I’m being honest, I have no idea what it meant to me exactly, or why it resonated. But again, as with the “towers in heaven” image, it seems to have found a new relevance, resonating for more obvious reasons. It’s an accidental protest image I suppose and I would like to offer it to you.

If anyone out there finds themselves similarly dismayed and upset by the void which still occupies what is ostensibly one of our countries most important sites, one which seems to symbolically initial all manner of political blank-check, then take it and use it.

Here is another:

Fuck it. What else is there for me to say? I’m tired.

Text Reads:

I bought this at Chelsea Fleamarkets for twenty-five cents. I can’t help but wonder that if maybe Karen had scanned it into her computer and applied a decent black border around, perhaps I would suddenly consider it art. Images like these are ubiquitous in Art; we all like to think that we are somehow profound because we appreciate images such as this one. We look at this photograph and we think, “That’s someone’s great grandmother” and we yearn for the identities of these people. And we yearn for our own identities as well, because we have no sense of family in the way that our grandparents do. And so we yell everyone that it has aesthetic value because we don’t even know who we are, and then we blame them for not understanding our Art. We subject the entire world to our idiosyncratic insecurities and then we think we are somehow deeper when they don’t get it.

“The sweetness of sorrow and love. To be smiled at by her in the car. That was the most beautiful thing of all. Always the longing to die & yet keeping oneself alive; this alone is love.” -Kafka.

Admission:
In April I bought 8 colored pencils and 5 different pads. They were beautiful things. The possibilities inherent in their eventual interaction were exciting. I imagined them as they’d look here on this screen. I imagined the birth of pixels rather than their simple relocation. I imagined the characters of A Voyage to Arcturis with their many eyes and foreign limbs rendered and neatly titled. I imagined my hand moving in sweeping arcs and careful angles. I imagined a flow which I’d call freedom. The pencils and pads are beautiful things still, dusty things in the museum of my desk.

What if I wrote? Wrote like a machine without a grammar-module or spell-check? Wrote like the eyes of a man lost in a jungle? What if I wrote hard and wild and whistled into the necks of empty bottles in the nighttime? Would you be gratified? What if I cast it all aside and hunted the head of my potential’s long shadow? Isn’t that what you do already? Can anything slow the relentless narrowing down of possibility into reality? No.

Admission:
I’ve forgotten how to write. What you see before you is what you see everywhere-compromise. It’s the road paved with good intention. It’s an anagen hair hiding its precious root-tip. It’s about as funny and beloved as a woman’s laugh lines. It’s all excuses. It’s the personal failure which passes for public accomplishment. You think I kid but I do not. No creator ever hungered to be a curator instead.

People enjoy it. So what? I brush up against thousands of people every day on the subway, in the elevator, on the sidewalk, in the hallways, at the bank and the deli; They file past my desk and window in an endless shambling stream. Their children shit themselves and scream and want; their dogs walk on the left and they walk on the right, taught leashes strung between like tripwires. “People enjoy it?” Yes. What the fuck do I care what they enjoy? Is it my job to tickle their asses with a delightful little feather? I don’t like them much, not sure I ever have. “Hope you enjoy.” How many times have you written that? Weak moments, punch-lines, every one.

Admission:
All is not what it seems. It’s less than it seems, and perhaps even less than that.

What if I called a spade a spade? Do you destroy a delusion by naming it as such? What if I called it what it was, self-absorption, and rather than prostrating myself and pretending at remorse I embraced it as my birthright in our culture? What if I wrapped myself in my own weaknesses? What if I split apart all syntax, ignored all context, and defied all expectation? What if I broke the contract and burst the bounds and spit in the eye of every passerby? That wouldn’t be like you. Exactly! And if “it” is me then to change it… But why would you want to change it?

Admission:
Because eventually the repetitive act of rooting out links and following them to their connected pretty pictures makes you want to do nothing so much as vomit.

What if I wrote a self-indulgent, rambling prose-poem, and posted it accompanied by meaningless scribbles? Would the result still be The Nonist? I don’t know. And does it matter?