WORK IN PROGRESS
In September 2023 I began my studies at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, NL. There have been many exciting shifts in my life and artistic practice! It has been some time since I have "finished" a work of art. My process in general is a bit slower. I have not updated this website in years. I would like to use this page as way to share some of the progress I have made. I have here some documentation of some of my works I made and installed in my studio here at Karel Doormanhof 5. The works and text displayed below will likely go through some big changes over the next year. It is a wonderful privilege to be able to take my time with these objects and ideas.
My current "project", it seems, fails logic, language, and thought – which might be what it's all about. Sometime in the year 2021 (I'm not too sure) I began to stumble into the Land Beyond the Lexicon. At the time I was reading Inner Experience, by Georges Bataille, which became a guide for dealing with the agitation and ecstasy of what I now call brain spelunking.
I should tell you that what I have been attempting to articulate is the concept of a hole and its overlapping absurdist, sacred, and erotic tangents. To put it in the most annoying terms, I have been examining themes of excess and refuse, the endless cycle of remembering and forgetting, the cynical cycles of consumption that isolate objects from the profane and the sacred, and the reticular motion of contradiction which has the potential to create space for apophatic thinking. However, much of my thoughts these days defy the contours of linear linguistics. This seems to be the case for my fellow spelunkers. For now, an offering: some verbal diarrhea: the fragments that follow are part of a text-in-progress and maybe always will be: my attempts to put words to some of the mystical encounters I have come by through thought, non-thought, conversation, and art making.
ok this is a work in progress but that is beside the point 🤷🏻♂️ I am thinking: SOLAR ECONOMY 💸💸💸 I am thinking: signifying systems are CRUMBLING 😱 Rabbi can I get a sign!?🎺 I am asking DO YOU GET IT?? I am thinking hope in the face of hopelessness which is the only place where hope exists 🤔 I am asking are you just throwing caution to the LOTTO MACHINE?? 🎰🎰🎰 Or are you gonna choose CHOICE?
"If we didn't naively draw from the wellspring of suffering, which gives us the insane secret, we could not have the transport of laughter: we would have the opaque visage of calculation" Georges Bataille, The Impossible
the dogs got her own tail pinched firmly in her teeth. Do you really think there’s an endless supply to feed on? I’m not sure metaphors exist anymore but parody sure does and it’s happening everywhere as that old monkey says. And it’s not just “nature” that’s doing that dance.
I’ve walked 262,934 steps in the past week I’m walking circles in this city I’ve got holes in my shoes in my socks in my feet. I write while I walk because that’s the only thing that gets the gas going and also I’m afraid if I stop —
...the so called garbage on the street winks at me and I sure as hell do more than wink back. You could say this comes from a particular loneliness.
and the words everything everything EVERYTHING everything repeated in my head like an affirmation. no. an invasion.
how it pervades
Oh, you want a sign now? I’ve got nothing but screws in my pockets!! I might as well tell you now that I’m ruled by three cosmic clowns in the sky who laugh down at me every time I ask them why. But this is all to say I have every reason to believe that nothing IS actually meaningful and I belong to a broken tradition that happens here and there sporadically through time
I know how the Sausage is made
Distant memories – faded icons – symbols I can't recall caught in coils on coils on coils. Restless nights, restless thoughts, stored in the rusty old skeleton of the hump-pump-pump mattress. What was it we were trying to recover?
Hands squeeze mud through sheep guts: following the bit to understand shit and its natural process of profanation. If you recoil at this thought, consider that motion to be useful here!!
All that's left, it seems, are remnants of derma, excreta, etcetera, etc. Traces of supposition. There is something at work here. Lean in and over and you might fall and arrive at the peak of a summit and thus fall again.
A thinking machine? A portal to dreams? An eversion of the bowels and the brain which is, by the way, how the sausage is made. This is to say that to truly get down to the bottom of a thought we must travel on up through intestinal passages.
Prototype for Pineal Digestion
"The eye, at the summit of the skull, opening on the incandescent sun in order to contemplate it in a sinister solitude, is not a product of the understanding, but is instead an immediate existence; it opens and blinds itself like a conflagration, or like a fever that eats the being, or more exactly, the head." - Georges Bataille
Why limit an understanding of the universe to what can be obtained through instruments of science? Pardon me?
Theory is theoretical. CHEW
ON
THAT
and digest.
Much is to be learned in the reason of myth.
Better yet: much is to be learned in the myth of reason.
To further the thought experiment laid out by Mr. Batialle, I would like to quickly add to the potential of his Pineal Eye. First of all, the ideal body has its pineal eye positioned directly inline with all other orificial organs. This allows for the passage of information to move swiftly through the body as all experience is recorded. Secondly, the body crawls, taking pleasure in the ground that carries it and the friction that provides a most humble understanding of its movement.
(Wooden sculpture by Suyoung Yang)