Question: Is Your Art Theory Half Full Or Half Empty?

Fig. 1. Cildo Meireles - Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project, 1970


'Expression, like construction, signifies both an action and its result. ... If the two meanings are separated, the object is viewed in isolation from the operation which produced it, and therefore apart from vision, since the act proceeded from an individual live creature. Theories that seize on "expression" as if it denoted simply the object, always insist to the utmost that the object of art is purely representative of other objects already in existence. They ignore the contribution which makes the object something new.'

John Dewey

Hi - My Name Is Lucio And I Am A Manic-Depressive

Fig. 1. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Grand Opera House, San Francisco, 1901

Is Mood A Language?

Sadness is the fundamental mood of depression, and even if manic euphoria alternates with it in the bipolar forms of that ailment, sorrow is the major outward sign that gives away the desperate person. Sadness leads us into the enigmatic realm of affects - anguish, fear, or joy. Irreducible to its verbal or semiological expressions, sadness (like all affect) is the psychic representation of energy displacements caused by external traumas. The exact status of such psychic representations of energy displacements remains, in the present state of psychoanalytic and semiological theories, very vague. No conceptual framework in the relevant sciences (particularly linguistics) has proven adequate to account for this apparently very rudimentary representation, presign and prelanguage. The "sadness" mood triggered by a stimulation, tension, or energy conflict within a psychosomatic organism is not a specific answer to a release mechanism (I am not sad as a response to a sign or for X and only to X). Mood is a generalised "transference" (E. Jacobson) that stamps the entire behaviour and all the sign systems (from motor functions to speech production and idealisation) without either identifying with them or disorganising them. We are justified in believing that an anarchic energy signal is involved, a phylogenetic inheritance, which, within the psychic space of the human being, is immediately assumed by verbal representation and consciousness. Nevertheless, such an "assumption" is not related to what occurs when the energies that Freud calls "bonded" lend themselves to verbalisation, association, and judgement. Let us say that representations germane to affects, notably sadness, are fluctuating energy cathexes: insufficiently stabilised to coalesce as verbal or other signs, acted upon by primary processes of displacement and condensation, dependent just the same on the agency of the ego, they record through its intermediary the threats, orders, and injunctions of the superego. Thus moods are inscriptions, energy disruptions, and not simply raw energies. They lead us toward a modality of significance that, on the threshold of bioenergetic stability, insures the preconditions for (or manifests the disintegration of) the imaginary and the symbolic. On the frontier between animality and symbol formation, moods - and particularly sadness - are the ultimate reactions to our traumas, they are our basic homeostatic recourses. For if it is true that those who are slaves to their moods, being drowned in their sorrows, reveal a number of psychic or cognitive frailties, it is equally true that a diversification of moods, variety in sadness, refinement in sorrow or mourning are the imprint of a humankind that is surely not triumphant but subtle, ready to fight, and creative . . .

Literary creation is that adventure of the body and signs that bears witness to the affect - to sadness as an imprint of separation and beginning of the symbol's sway; to joy as imprint of the triumph that settles me in the universe of artifice and symbol, which I try to harmonise in the best possible way with my experience of reality. But that testimony is produced by literary creation in a material that is totally different from what constitutes mood. It transposes affect into rhythms, signs, forms. The "semiotic" and the "symbolic" become the communicable imprints of an affective reality, perceptible to the reader (I like this book because it conveys sadness, anguish, or joy) and yet dominated, set aside, vanquished.

Julia Kristeva

Addendum #1:

Fig. 2. The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (still), 2006 - Stephen Fry (click image to start watching this documentary on YouTube)

Addendum #2: And Now For Something Completely Foreseeable

The Life of Brian, 1979 - d. Brian Jones (click image to watch clip on YouTube)

Ladies And Gents - Allow Me To Style Your Cramps

Fig. 1. The late Lux Interior (Erick Purkhiser) of The Cramps


Mouth

The mouth is the beginning or, if one prefers, the prow of animals; in the most characteristic cases, it is the most living part, in other words, the most terrifying for neighbouring animals. But man does not have a simple architecture like beasts, and it is not even possible to say where he begins. He possibly starts at the top of the skull, but the top of the skull is an insignificant part, incapable of catching one's attention; it is the eyes or forehead that play the meaningful role of an animal's jaws.

Among civilised men, the mouth has even lost the relatively prominent character that it still has among primitive men. However, the violent meaning of the mouth is conserved in a latent state; it suddenly regains the upper hand with a literally cannibalistic expression such as mouth of fire [bouche à feu], applied to the cannons men use to kill each other. And on important occasions human life is still bestially concentrated in the mouth: rage makes men grind their teeth, while terror and atrocious suffering turn the mouth into the organ of rending screams. On this subject it is easy to observe that the overwhelmed individual throws back his head while frenetically stretching his neck in such a way that the mouth becomes, as much as possible, an extension of the spinal column, in other words, in the position it normally occupies in the constitution of animals. As if explosive impulses were to spurt directly out of the body through the mouth, in the form of screams. This fact highlights both the importance of the mouth in animal physiology or even psychology, and the general importance of the superior or anterior extremity of the body, the orifice of profound physical impulses; one sees at the same time that a man can liberate these impulses in at least two different ways, in the brain or in the mouth, but that as soon as these impulses become violent, he is obliged to resort to the bestial way of liberating them. When the narrow constipation of a strictly human attitude, the material look of the face with a closed mouth, as beautiful as a safe.

Georges Bataille

Your Ears Will Orgasm #43: The Cramps - Tribute Mix (MixPod Player)

1. All Women Are Bad
2. Sunglasses After Dark
3. Lonesome Town
4. Goo Goo Muck
5. Aloha From Hell
6. Surfin' Bird
7. Miniskirt Blues
8. I Was A Teenage Werewolf
9. Bikini Girls With Machine Guns
10. Two-Headed Sex Change
11. Mystery Plane
12. Human Fly
13. Don't Eat Stuff Off The Sidewalk
14. The Way I Walk
15. New Kind Of Kick
16. I Can't Hardly Stand It
17. Garbageman
18. What's Inside A Girl?
19. Return Of The Living Dead
20. Daisies Up Your Butterfly
21. She Said
22. Zombie Dance
23. Saddle Up A Buzz Buzz
24. Drug Train

Obituary: The Last Of Blossom, Dearies (Telegraph, UK)

Fig. 2. Blossom Dearie (1926-2009) - The Adorable Blossom Dearie

Stairways To Heaven Are Always One Person Wide

Fig. 1. Jan Matejko - The Astronomer Copernicus, 1872


'We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.'

Oscar Wilde

The Limits Of The World Must Always Be Sought Out*

Fig. 1. John William Waterhouse - Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891

'The artist is meant to put the objects of this world together in such a way that through them you will experience that light, that radiance which is the light of our consciousness and which all things both hide and, when properly looked upon, reveal. The hero journey is one of the universal patterns through which that radiance shows brightly. What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There's always the possibility of a fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss.'

Joseph Campbell

* 'Everyone takes the limits of their own vision for the limits of the world.' (Arthur Schopenhauer)

Your Ears Will Orgasm #42a: Olivier Messiaen - Oraison (MixPod Player)

Your Ears Will Orgasm #42b: Gustav Mahler - Symphony No. 2 ("Resurrection") (MixPod Player)

Addendum: How wonderful! And how apt, too! You outdid yourselves last time, ladies: now, amazingly, you have outdone your outdoing!

I will set my sails to take full advantage of the breezes blown by your inspirational words.

Thank you, Katie (and Edna):

Today is as good as any other day (!) to set yourself free to embark on a hero journey. The possibility of bliss is definitely worth danger and fiasco.

ESVM also thinks it's time for you to test your limits:

On Thought in Harness

My falcon to my wrist
Returns
From no high air.
I sent her toward the sun that burns
Above the mist;
But she has not been there.

Her talons are not cold; her beak
Is closed upon no wonder;
Her head stinks of its hood, her feathers reek
Of me, that quake at the thunder.

Degraded bird, I give you back your eyes forever, ascent now wither you are tossed;
Forsake this wrist, forsake this rhyme;
Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost,
But climb.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

If You Find Yourself Going Through Hell, Keep Going*

Fig. 1. William Blake - Dante Running From The Three Beasts, 1824-27


'The only way round is through.'

Robert Frost

* 'If you are going through hell, keep going.' (Winston Churchill)

HOT AS HELL: Today's maximum temperature ... 46.4!


Your Ears Will Orgasm #41: Diamanda Galas - Litanies of Satan (MixPod Player)

Prayers In A Place Where All The Clocks Are Broken

Fig. 1. Arnold Böcklin - The Sacred Grove, 1882

'The torch does not illuminate its base.'

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

Your Ears Will Orgasm #40: Hildegard von Bingen - Geistiliche Gesange: Vos flores rosarum (De Martyribus) (MixPod Player)

Obituary: Lux Interior (1948-2009)

Fig. 2. 'Lux Interior dies at 62', Los Angeles Times (04.02.09)