one (sadly small) example of the brutality of us

Sometimes I wish I believed in God.  Or could believe in God.  Or in any story that promised a way out of the brutality and domination we carry out on one another. One (sadly small) example of the brutality of us.

ordinarily terrifying strangeness: community, death, and dragons

Art does many things and has many forms in our culture. One (primary?) goal of artistic production is to put our sense of ourselves temporarily at risk, which means creating a liminal experience between normal life and the excess of life and death (to steal from Bataille). This is an opening of the normally closed boundaries of who and what we are, an opening of the range of normal experience, in order to feel comfort in the ordinarily terrifying strangeness of the excess of another. In other words art is sometimes play. And as we all know from games in the school yard, or card room, or organized field, all of life can feel wrapped up in the results of play.  Sometimes it is.

These old ABC Wide World of Sports clips point to what I'm talking about:

[It makes me sad that in our culture the only point of this human drama is to entice you buy something to control flaky skin by gluing it to your scalp.]

Some local friends of mine do circus freak kinds of things. [I was really excited to learn to breath fire with them. Sadly, all could do was put out the torch with a mouthful of fuel. Something I would have thought was impossible.] This a brief clip of one of their performances:

My experience everywhere I've lived in the United States is one of constant alienation. The cultural and psychological reasons for this are probably more complex than I can possibly understand. One (small?) reason I feel this way: I don't think that we Americans are people anymore. We have become commodities to be exchanged in a system of distribution and consumption where all value is externalized. Maybe we all feel this in some way? I don't know. I do know that some parts of me remember a place or time where there are different notions of the self and community. And in those places I have felt relatively comfortable in crowds.  Never here in the US.  And so it was with dread that I went to Knoxville's New Year's Eve block party to watch these guys perform.

And at first, I (maybe) thought that this performance would be more empty spectacle. A thrill filled with danger, titillation, and evidence of our mastery of nature and fire and bodies. And the performance had all of that. But something else emerged almost immediately. In the video you see my friend Kevin Horn riding a fire-bicycle-dragon that he made. And it was simply beautiful. It was a moving drawing of a dragon, drawn with fire, circling in a ring of men, women and children. It was also a threat of danger and catastrophe. It was literal a threat, most of all to Kevin.

He had loaded too much fuel onto the wicking material attached to the frame. He had to lean away from the flames. He had to switch hands and direction so the handle bar would cool enough for him to operate the vehicle. The brake was too hot for him to hold. If he lost forward momentum, it appeared that he would be consumed by the flames. If he he went too fast he would be unable to stop before careening into the spectators. The drama of life and death and threat circled in front of us.

And from that bike the flame passed to other performers who danced or breathed with fire. And at the end of the piece a clownish man, my friend Jake,  lit his stilts on fire and walked around the ring. He too seemed on the verge of being consumed by flames. And had he stopped moving, indeed he would have been. And that little narrative touch of motion and danger and spectacle and community resonated with all of us watching.

We were there enjoying the thrill and threat of violence. But that violence, that fire, transcended it's literal meaning. 

We are all, in some sense, chased. We are all, in some ways, always moving away from and towards the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and the more important place in between - a place of practice and tedium and joy where endeavor is its own value in part because it keeps life (flaming dragons?) from overcoming you, but also because it takes violence and turns it into something else. Maybe it's something that brings us together in a way where we are not the means for another's end.

The best dramas are the ones that feel real. Indeed they are real.

Come Dancing: on the inner aspect of the square dance, the group, and resistance to power

As most of you who read this blog know, I am often troubled to point of considering taking my own life. I am not necessarily suicidal in any clinical sense, and I have come to think of that pleasure/ anguish as simply a part of being alive. And hopefully I am able to turn it into a more nuanced and empathetic life than the one I might have had otherwise. I do feel my way through life. And while I oftentimes wish I were more like my more reasonable friends, often it seems that their reason is also insufficient to manage their inner lives... I have given up on managing the contradictions of my life – conflicts of love and death and especially dancing.

The following description is most certainly cliché. But not without some truth. Our music is a mirror of our bodies. Our bodies resonate, our heart and breath keep time, our bones and joints snap and moan. Our voice is very similar to wind and stringed instruments. Our instruments even at times look like us. And the principles under which they work are very similar to the principles underlying the sounds of our bodies.

And all of this close resemblance is part of the artistic production of music. I was once briefly in an experimental noise ensemble. We had a DJ, a guy playing tape loops, a percussionist, and me and my lover. Sadly, neither my lover or I had any gift for music. But we did have a rather developed love of fucking. And so I wired her for sound with little contact microphones placed over her heart, her lungs, her guts... She was a very responsive and vibrant lover, which made her an excellent musical instrument. You could hear her voice a little, as if under water, from the mics on her chest. But mostly it was the sound of breath and movement and heartbeats looped and tweaked along with everything else. I imagine the music kind of sucked. But it was really fun to make. Sadly, or thankfully, this was very short lived project with no recordings. And I think that what we revealed to ourselves was the close and obvious relationship between the erotics of bodies and of music.

We feel music, literally, as percussion on our bodies. And as I've pointed out before, music is not simply the willy nilly sounds of life, but an organized, anguished, practiced, striving artistic production. And the sensuality of human life is more than mere biology. It is akin to the divine. So in effect what we feel on our bodies in music is all of the tedium and joy of the musician, and all of the life of the lyricist combining with the spark of the divine in us. That it makes us want to move is a given. That it moves us communally is also a given. And yet we have lost much of that tradition in or culture.

The primary place where we move together in this time and country is the discotheque. I spent many years of my life in the US and Europe as a club kid, and many more as a bouncer in SF nightclubs. And I love to dance and dress up and hook up as much as anyone else. But something strikes me now when I look back on that time. The discotheque is the late capitalist version of dance. It is ultimately a site of the economic exchange of intentionally commodified bodies for mutual consumption. This is not without meaning. But, if you contrast the dance floor at a VIP room in any bullshit dance club in any any bullshit town with the dance floor of a square dance something very interesting emerges.

The discotheque is a site of the spectacular, both of the bodies moving and of the environment. A large portion of the ensemble of movement, music, dress, lighting, and consumption of drugs is designed primarily to titillate. Which is fine and meaningful in the sense that life sometimes requires the release and creation of excess. But when you move in a little closer, there is something missing. Rubbing crotches together to a beat is certainly dancing. But what it communicates is a kind of merely genital lust, a lust for an object of desire that is very similar in timbre to the drugs being consumed or the spectacles being performed: semi-stripteases, straight girls kissing for the benefit of a male gaze, revealing clothes (oh my, I am starting to sound like a prude), whirling dirvish style dancing where the dancer is lost in him or herself. In other words this dancing is essentially alone. It signifies the wish or fulfillment of an individual desire. The other is not in any direct sense required, except as a source of stimulation or as a mirror for one's own spectacle. This is just like bro fucking, despite its veneer of cool and outlandishness. Or maybe more appropriately, this is just like shopping.  All of this is not without an erotics, but it is at best a simulation of all that is meaningful in l'erotisme.

I went to a square dance last week. And in contrast to my my days in nightclubs, this dance was completely paired down. There was none of the excess of consumption, spectacle, and cool common to a disco.

But it was excessive. It had all of the exuberance, expressiveness and joy a person could want. But with a very different timbre than a disco. Square dancing has been around for several hundred years (I think it derived from the 17^th Century French dance called the minuet). And it is an incredibly simple form of partner dancing. There are no real steps to learn and it more or less comes down to walking expressively in a pattern with four couples.

Here's a quick video I took of the dance at the Laurel Theater.

It could be that this dance feels so different because it comes with some sense of time and nostalgia. But I don't think that it's history explains it all.

Bodies move. The legacy of cogito ergo sum has obscured the relationship between awareness, and that we are aware with/in a running, jumping, playing, stalking, manipulating machine. Our bodies are cavities, and levers and fulcrums, and electro-chemical reactions that do and reflect and resonate. There is, as of yet, no consciousness separate from this machine. [There might be soon. A lot of time, money and research in: philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and cybernetics has gone into this search for immortality. And maybe this is possible. I don't know. I am convinced that this dream to textuality is the ultimate dream of postmodern (capitalist)  life and thought. With all it's language of fluidity and transgression, narrative and rupture, and despite it's obsession with “the body,” what postmodernism wants most of all is to re-posit the old Christian dichotomy of a soul unhampered by the flesh.  This alone might make the flesh (the abject? the feminine?), with all its weakness and sickness and need, revolutionary.] 

We only exist together. There is no concept of the human without society. The cogito, the I that doubts, simply could not exist without language, culture, history...

And these two realities of our existence are brought into play in the square dance -  a simple, traditional dance.

You move differently with another body. It is mechanically impossible to create and transfer energy in the same way alone as you do moving with a partner or group. These relationships expand your sense of who you are in the world. For those moments you are connected, through the artistic output of another, to people with whom you might have very little in common in the rest of your life. The square not only emphasizes this connectivity, but makes you realize that the lust and exuberance of your life is best shared with your community. The satisfaction of consumerist want is something you do alone, that leaves you alone, that returns in perpetuity to your isolated den in your suburban home. It shares more with the individual consumption of pornography, or the random hook up, than with anything resembling mutuality.

I value individuality and particularity more than most, I think. I also value freedom of expression, assembly, and thought. I am certainly not a conformist, a Luddite, or a prude. I am not suggesting a return to the good old ways. They weren't good for most of us most of the time anyway, just ask the slave. I distrust ideological positions that emphasize our mutual responsibility and connectivity. They always seem to work for those in power. But late capital has turned this all on it's head. Notions of left and right, tyranny and liberation, not longer mean what they used to mean. The idea that we are a part of a self-stabilizing, self-aggregating system of wholly free independent actors is a kind of radical false-consciousness, which does nothing but perpetuate this one system of organization, exploitation, resistance, distribution, and consumption. Further, it keeps us isolated, and also dependent upon all the commodities we exploit daily to mitigate that deep sense of lonesomeness and  insecurity in our personal lives. This is real double-speak, where freedom and liberation are the structures of a new invisible and irresistible  tyranny.

In this context, the square dance, for all its deep tradition, is an essentially revolutionary anti-capitalist activity (please forgive my penchant for overstatement). You are not a commodity, willing or otherwise. You are not a means for someone's use. You, as one of eight dancers in a square, are not there to be mutually exploited. You are instead an integral and independent part of a pattern that simultaneously emphasizes your independence and your connectivity. This independence is key. While there is a structure to the dance as a whole, it's constitutive parts allow for as much or as little expression as you want or can do. And in its movement what you realize is that you are larger and more free in your connection with the other than you are alone in your den with the terminal screen, or alone on a crowded dance floor looking for (or becoming) one more fix.

I am convinced of two things: whatever we are looking for is already here; and the self put forward by capitalist organization is a truly reductive and empty concept.

in love and loves what vanishes: Sarah (in progress)

I don't have too much to say about this one just yet. 
It's slow going and tedious.  But I am excited about the way it's turning out. 
Seems like it will be much softer of a surface than the others in this series.  Perhaps this is because she is still a real person in my life and not a figment of my consciousness.

That it vanishes, makes it no less real.

I sat down the other night to read about Camus and Sartre. I don't recall the title of the essay or even what it was exactly about. I do remember that Camus and Sartre developed a very contentious relationship later in their friendship and that this eventually lead to a complete falling out over a scathing review in Satre's journal of one of Camus' later books. (Maybe it was La Chute. Maybe). This article I picked up was about some small detail of conflict between the theories of the two men.

I am very interested in theory and the history of ideas, and the way that they mirror us; and the way that they delineate the possible varieties of human experience; and the way they are concealed in everything we do from the meals we prepare to the ways it is acceptable to torture and kill one another. But when it comes right down to it... there is always something else on my mind.

I was in my studio chair reading. The winter sun was coming in through the window. I set my laptop aside for a second. And there,  in a magazine I was cutting up to make “paint,” beside the technical and intricate analysis I was reading, was a picture of a girl in a summer dress.  The sun was hitting everything just right...

I lost all interest in who said what on page whatever about whatever. I stared at the table and relished the warmth of the sun, and the uneasiness of longing over a chimera.  I snapped this picture.

Bataille said something like the problem of philosophy is that it is too divorced from life. And maybe also, the problem of life is that it is too divorced from philosophy.  For instance, the aesthetic pleasure of that moment isn't merely pleasure. 

This picture is propaganda. It's selling an idea of femininity, an idea of want and consumption. It is also positing the basic and contradictiry ideological requirement of capitalism: that you are not good enough – which is to say your desire will never be satisfied; and that you deserve to satisfy all of your wants; and that you could if you were rich enough, smart enough, famous enough, beautiful enough, etc.; even worse, over time, you will require more and more to give that you that semblance of fulfillment.

But this picture is also beautiful. Not innocent. Also beautiful. It is a promise of all those things you lack – power, agency, creativity, status, freedom, etc. And that might be at the roots of all beauty/ desire. Without this lack, without The Fall, there is no desire. Without desire there is no suffering. And thus, also, there is no life resembling the life that we know; there is no art, or theory, or science, or god;  and also, no war and strife and hunger and exploitation.

In an other post I said that in the object of desire I see a tragedy waiting to happen. I also just see a tragedy.  But that tragedy brings with it everything that is meaningful about being alive.

That all of it vanishes, makes it no less real.

A few simple postulates: is there a future?

The primary function of capitalist social organization is the reduction of the human being to an alienated and unleashed id in order to perpetuate and exploit desire for the creation of wealth.

People concerned primarily with the satisfaction of want do not see the welfare of others as essential to their own welfare.

The end of all desire is death, in Western Culture.

Capitalism and Militarism are dynamic and productive forces that are ideologically and structurally linked.

We have the technological capability to destroy the world.

Can we draw a simple conclusion from this?

a very dark dark: a night of love, loss, death, and dancing

I've been considering going to church. I am completely agnostic, but something about the way others search for existential meaning intrigues me. And I recognize that a sense of belonging or connection is, for most of us, an essential part of staying alive. I haven't made it to church yet. Something always seems to come up, usually on Saturday night. Usually in search of existential redemption.

This Saturday I was working on some paintings and listening to this podcast from the BBC, over and over. These existential, theological, and cultural concerns regarding death, the tyranny of time, and loss are the concerns of my daily life. If you have any interest in understanding some of my place in the world, give it a listen . For a number of reasons I experience this existential drama in almost every moment of my life. I think it is likely the result of some combination of place, history, culture, and personal  rupture or trauma (in the sense that events can sometimes force you outside of the narratives of your culture). And as I worked late into the evening on a new painting about an estranged lover with whom I have had a contentious and troubled relationship for the last few months, something occurred to me.

If we are all lost in this world, if we are all fallen, if all desire is tragic, or if  (as a one of the speakers in the podcast said)  all desire seeks the end of desire, if the telos of all desire is death, and if it has no other satisfaction, then what the fuck are we supposed to do? Is any answer as good as any other? I guess that these days I think so. And that if there is one thing or event or person which makes life truly meaningful in glimpses, then there is no reason not to pursue it. The only caveat I can think of comes from Camus' position that a harm to another is also a harm to yourself.  Which was why I was insisting on not seeing my lover. She demonstrated that in moments our relationship made her incredibly unhappy. So I resisted and resisted.

I had late plans to meet a troubled friend for a drink that night at a gypsy-rock-jazz show, the Dirty Bourbon River Show. They were great. I went down hoping to run into my lover. I had decided that all of the things that kept us apart were less important than the way knowing her made much of my life so meaningful, nuanced, inspired, ecstatic, and yes, also tragic. I had decided that I could make small compromises to mitigate her sense of insecurity in our relationship. I felt the conflict of our desire had an answer. But she wasn't there. I danced to the band for a bit and had a couple of beers with my friend.

I find dancing with strangers to the artistic output of others to be usually very meaningful. Feeling another body's weight in your hands or against you, moving with you to the art and product of an other's longing, desire, frustration, practice, tedium, and joy is a deeply meaningful connection. But only if your bodies move together. And for some reason I couldn't find a decent dance partner most of the night, even though I must have asked a dozen people to dance. It made me long for my estranged lover all the more, whose smile and laughter and body always seemed to move in time with mine. When the band finished playing, I went to every other place she might be. I honestly felt she would be happy to see me. The night before she had sent me a late night, 3 am, text saying that she still wanted to see me. And probably because of the huge existential reality I had been considering, I had to see her. I felt the weight of all of life in that desire. I tried to contradict it, convince myself otherwise, have my friends convince me otherwise, pretend like I was over it. I looked for distraction. But to no avail. And for some reason I was happy and hopeful and willing to forgive our past mistakes. Had I been in a more anguished state, I would not have risked contacting her.

So I went to her house, very late at night. My intention was to declare my love, crawl into bed with her, watch her smile as I told her sleepy eyes what I had decided. I knocked on her window a few times to wake her up. When she came to the door I knew something was wrong. She was angry. All she said was that I had to leave. I was confused. She had always said it was okay. She had always encouraged me to stop by. I sincerely thought she would be happy. The night before she had said she wanted to be with me. Then it occurred to me. She was in bed with someone else.

Many serious tragedies and melodramas start like this. In fact the previous owner of my house shot his wife, her lover, and himself on the corner of the street I live on. But in my case nothing really happened.

There is no way to explain how it felt. I wasn't jealous. I was instead looking into an abyss where I once saw love. For those few moments that night, it felt worse than looking into my dieing father's eyes. It was all of the sadness and grief of a death (in this case a symbolic loss of a future we would never have), mixed in with guilt (for being there), and shame (for wanting to feel loved and connected, for hoping to mitigate existential anxiety through the eyes of another, for desiring someone who wasn't right for me, for being stupid (or self-destructive) enough to trust someone so troubled and lost in their own desires)... There's more. But it's hard to describe. Mostly it was an all encompassing despair for the ways that all of life seems to always find this moment.

All I did was go home. And send her a message. Sadly, in my grief, I told her what I thought of what she had done and how she acted towards me, of what it meant to invite her estranged lover into her arms one night and be with another body the next. Sadly, I expressed that she didn't deserve my love.

There is no right or wrong to this situation. There is no real harm here. And there is no victim or perpetrator. Our desire for one another was complicated and driven by the depth of our individual struggles. I wonder if it could have ended any other way? In just about every respect this little tragedy was the only potential outcome.  Perhaps that's why I still desire her so much.

She found, in the body of that man, an answer to the difficulties and conflicts of her desire for me. I certainly don't fault her for that. I was seeking the same answer in her body.  And, God knows, I have sought solace in the body of another, many times before. I likely would have done the same thing had my life been just a little different that night. And she probably saved us both from continuing something that would likely have persisted in the way it had always persisted. The basic problem of our contentious and conflicted desire would likely have continued despite my intention to do things differently.

I didn't really sleep that night. I couldn't eat. Couldn't think of anything else. I remembered how it felt last year when I didn't sleep for months, when I struggled not to pull the trigger of the shotgun in my mouth. And I remembered, too, that even then there was a kind of pleasure in all of it. I see why now. The end of desire is to see that all desire ends.

There is an academic argument, maybe not so current, about whether not dramatic tragedy (as in on the stage) is actually cathartic, as Aristotle suggested. I think instead of catharsis, that the real pleasure in telling or watching a tragedy is in the fact of its narrative structure. The form of the play makes it pleasurable, just as the form of these words make light of what was a very dark, dark night.

[Of course: since I wrote this a couple of days ago, we have gotten together again. Our funny conflicted  story continues.  The "why of it" strikes me as a very compelling truth. Next time maybe.]

in love and loves what vanishes: here somewhere

The title of this series comes from these lines of a poem by William Butler Yeats:

[...] 

But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say?

[...] 

New Painting: in love and loves what vanishes: Melissa...

Here are a few photos of a new painting in a series. I am exploring what is the most basic motivation of human cultural endeavor - the desire for continuity and the awareness that we end. This series is a conceptual kind of self-portraiture. In another post (with less brainy language) I called this a fuck-list of consciousness.  And while I don't think that erotic relations are the only relations humans have, I do think they are the ones that reveal the rest of our world to us.  In  no other sphere of human life, except perhaps war, do we act with such conviction, abandon, idiocy, and tragedy. 

 The title of this series comes from these lines of a poem by William Butler Yeats:

[...] 

But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say?

[...] 

New Painting: in love and loves what vanishes

Here are a few photos of a new painting in a series. I am exploring what is the most basic motivation of human cultural endeavor - the desire for continuity and the awareness that we end. This series is a conceptual kind of self-portraiture. In another post (with less brainy language) I called this a fuck-list of consciousness.  And while I don't think that erotic relations are the only relations humans have, I do think they are the ones that reveal the rest of our world to us.  In  no other sphere of human life, except perhaps war, do we act with such conviction, abandon, idiocy, and tragedy. 

The title of this series comes from these lines of a poem by William Butler Yeats:

[...] 

But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say?

[...] 

stop_taking_your_medications Part_2: I am happy; I want die. I am sad; I want to die.

Part 1

When I am (briefly) happy, I believe it will never end, that life has finally turned away from some dark corner. These moments are unusually creative and expressive. They are sometimes ecstatic or mixed in with ecstatic moments, but only because of a sense that everything will be okay. This allows me to take the risks that can create the kinds of events that take me beyond myself.

Happiness is not really the right word here. What I am talking about here is more of a negative state: a state not filled with hopelessness, alienation, self-loathing and anxiety. 

Just as quickly and for no reason I become exhausted. I can't really think straight. Something or nothing happens to cause a shift in my consciousness. I can't undo it and I fall quietly into something resembling despair. This is always more or less the case in my life. And while this may or may not be real from any outside point of view, it feels like this existential anxiety, this dysphoria, is the basis of life. And it too feels like it will last forever. And in some respects it does. Even in the most exuberant moments in my life, there is the hint of this shroud weighing me down. I am happy; I want die. I am sad; I want to die. 

I think about why this is all the time. I try and look for things we all share, for the ways in which everyone's life is like this. And I have a lot ideas about the persistence of tragedy, the persistence of violence, that civilization demands this anguish from our consciousness, that authenticity demands it... Mostly, I think we are wired this way. That humans are endeavoring machines. That we are made to struggle. Every (almost?) major spiritual tradition has us in some state of fallen-ness, or alienation from the divine. Every political organization has the individual in tension with the state or king. Our liberal democracy insists, ad nauseum, on our discontinuity. We are striving and incomplete in everything we do, from science and philosophy to shopping and war. The ground of our being I think is best understood in these terms: the absurd (the tension between the desire for the world to mean something in itself and that it doesn't), original sin, alienation, throwness, the will to power, the unconscious ... etc.

I wake every day and look at the world and struggle to make it meaningful. That's not quite right.  I struggle to make it  not feel  alien and cruel and alienating.  The irony, of course, is that it is in fact all of those things.  My conversations, dance parties, work,  exercise, food, clothes, music, reading, writing...  all have a seed of this overwhelming despair.  It isn't even a question of running from myself.  I'm always there, no matter what I do.  I know how to live with me. And I have become more and more at peace with this. But there is also a nagging, persistent  message that's hard to ignore. Maybe this anguished ground of being is only my problem. Maybe I should talk to my doctor about Abilify

It's infuriating to think that our culture's solution to a philosophical and existential problem is a cynical ad campaign for a pill that suggests in its name and in its advertising narrative that it will: enable you, give you ability, transform you. [Oh, and it might make you nauseous, sweaty, nervous, and dead. Maybe.  They must think we're idiots. Maybe we should stop acting like idiots.]  The message in this ad is that psychological suffering isn't real. It literally  isn't you. All you have to do is take this little pill and you can shrug off the weight of the world. Because there isn't anything wrong with world. The world is all fertile green and sky-blue and filled with happy suburban couples, parks,  families and playgrounds. The only problem is in  your head.  And it's a little problem – a cartoon blob or blanket, causing you to feel down.   You can get over it.  Spend time with your family.  Be free.

"Jorge Gomez Del Campo — Reconstituted Media" By: Denise Sanabria

[Below is an artist profile of me that appeared in the Knoxville Voice.  I'm reprinting it because it's  very thoughtful and complimentary and it isn't archived on-line anywhere.  Thanks Denise for that great conversation and your kind words.]

Knoxville Voice September, 17, 2008
Jorge Gomez Del Campo — Reconstituted Media
September 17, 2008
By: Denise Sanabria

JORGE GOMEZ DEL CAMPO is probably one of Knoxville’s most elusive artists, but he
deserves a good deal of attention. Gomez del Campo’s eclectic background has forged
an artist whose work is informed both regionally and internationally. Born of
Mexican parents, he has spent part of each year visiting relatives in Mexico,
absorbing the cultural differences between the two countries.

He will be showing two works in the Knoxville Museum of Art’s “Hola Hispanic
Heritage Month Exhibition” from Sept. 16 to Oct, 16, and will also have an exhibit
at Ironwood Studios in October, with an opening reception during October’s First
Friday. Though he has divided his work in the past between photography, video and
painting, only recently has Gomez del Campo slowly abandoned paint entirely,
replacing the traditional media with shredded segments of magazines. The shreds are
divided into tones and colors to substitute for paint. His surface remains
stretched canvas, often quite large in scale — an important feature because there
is an optimum viewing distance from which the work is to be seen. If the viewer is
too close, the representational imagery is lost in the conglomeration of paper
details and text. From a distance, the full impact of the work is revealed.
The first piece he produced in this fashion was inspired by imagery of a 13-yearold
model posing for a fashion advertisement with obvious sadomasochistic
overtones. Disturbed by the commercial exploitation of a female that age, he set
out to convey the underlying violence and sexual fetishism in the ad. An
enthusiastic collector of print media, he had on hand a pile of “Mexican murder
magazines,” our neighboring country’s version of American magazines such as True
Crime. He shredded the magazines and used them, along with paint, to create the
first in a multi-year series of works pursuing the theme of violence and depravity
in the world of fashion. There is an endless supply of raw material in glamour
magazines to portray an unattractive world where females are merely decorative
objects used to sell goods, with marketers stooping to repugnant levels to get
attention.

Gomez del Campo’s canvases are intense and disturbing. The dark backgrounds merge
with flesh tones and large amounts of striking red hues. The jagged edges of the
torn strips of paper lend a rhythm of discord and the clarity of the
representational imagery is often lost in the abstraction of the application — not
unlike British painter Cecily Brown’s erotic work masked by the heavy application
of smeared paint.Part of the way through this series of paintings, Gomez del Campo
abandoned paint altogether. He had been dumpster-diving behind a décor shop and
found a large cache of multicolor tissue paper. He discovered that by applying the
translucent material in a coating of glue over segments of his partially completed
compositions, the papers worked exactly as a transparent glaze of paint. All of the
paper pieces are applied with glue and a final coat of varnish protects the work.
It was not lost on the artist that his work was evolving to construction from
mostly recycled materials. His canvas stretcher frames were made from wood taken
from dumpsters on construction sites. All the new magazine strips came from
recycling bins or were “rescued” from doctor’s and dentist’s offices and gyms.
Using discarded material once produced to market overt consumerism became the
perfect methodology to communicate his observations of third world living
conditions contrasted with affluence.

Manufactured desire is the theme presented in the two works at the KMA, “Guerilla
1” and “Guerilla 2.” The works muse on the nature of economic transactions,
prodding us to reflect on whether there’s an erotic component to advertising and
products built upon the desire for things we don’t need but merely wish to have.
Snake-like forms with bird heads embrace and seem to threaten nude or partially
dressed reclining female figures while the background is an explosion of jagged red
and yellow lines that could represent fire or blood. In keeping with this theme,
the work that will be shown at Ironwood Studios is similar, though much larger in
scale. This mural-sized work will be built of tiled canvases.

When asked about future plans, Gomez del Campo reveals that he has been planning a
traveling exhibition with a large selection of his work, in the manner of a band
tour. On the road, he would have a list of locations where work would be shown for
maybe two days at a time before moving to the next stop. The ultimate destination
would be Mexico City and its vibrant art scene. The sudden hike in gas prices and
the need to build a trailer to transport the work has put a temporary halt to these
plans, and he’s now researching the idea of finding a regular gallery in which to
show his work. It could be just the right thing to facilitate his traveling exhibit
— a few gallery sales would pay for the trailer and transportation, then the road
trip could commence.

Gomez del Campo attended Oak Ridge public schools and went on to receive a Bachelor
of Arts degree from Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky., with a stint at the
University of Paris, Sorbonne and the Academie du Port Royal, also in Paris. He
later attended the graduate program at the San Francisco Art Institute.

stop taking your medications_Part_1: Thus my face in the carpet.

The first thing I felt was my father's arms wrapping around me. And then I saw the cops at the door. And my mother looked on from another room. Then five cops rushed in. At some point one of them pulls a cork screw/ bottle opener out of my back pocket and announces that I “have a weapon.” I don't know exactly what happens. Or how. Eventually I am on the ground. Four cops are on my four extremities. Another has his knee in my back and his hands around my throat. He drags my face across the carpet as he chokes me. I don't really feel what they are doing to me. I am enraged.

I am screaming at them. I am telling them to shoot me. That I know it will get them off. I am calling them a bunch of repressed faggots. I imagine my mom and brother and sister huddled in fear in one of the back bedrooms. That is in fact were they were. I'm pretty sure my dad was crying.

Eventually I loose consciousness. It took minutes for that fucker-cop's hands to cut off enough air and blood for me to pass out. My ribs are bruised. All the soft connective tissue in my shoulders and wrists are strained and torn. A dream of a new life fades in front of me as I pass out.

How I ended up on the floor being choked by a cop in my parents den is a bit of a long story. It comes with a burning house, adventures on Mexican highways and US interstates, a love affair in Texas, and lots of sex and drugs and music and hippies and punks. Mostly though, I ended up there, with my face in the carpet, because of a questionnaire at a hospital and the logic of game theory.

My parents and I were in a kind of detente after I (accidentally, and thankfully) burnt their house down. We were negotiating for a life that would be meaningful for me and tolerable for them. We were, in every respect, trying to negotiate an armistice. Our family was a war, through no fault of theirs or mine. We were each simply responding as best we could to intolerable situations. Sadly, we came at each other from an absolute inability to comprehend one another.

My parents were Franco-era falangists. If not fascistic (Franco was a fascist of opportunity, not of ideology, in my mind), they were at the very least supporters of the authoritarian right in Mexico: pro Catholic, pro Franco, anti Communist, etc. They believed in the goodness of authority, of God and the State. They belonged to a right wing militant group, El Muro (the wall) that was known for disrupting hippie gatherings or theater performances, with pipes. I don't know that either of them ever held the pipe in their hand, but does that matter? Their families, though, were politically mixed and made up of: hippies, authoritarian communists, soldiers, political dissidents exiled from their home countries after right-wing US backed coups, cops, generals, priests on both the left and right,  and etc. ... The violence everyone talked about and feared was real violence. The tensions and fears were real… And I grew up with a mix of all of these values in addition to the self-actualized consumerism, individualism, and fake rebellion of America in the 70s and 80s. Imagine the clash of ideologies that played out in the microcosm of our linoleum floored kitchen.

So we tried to negotiate a peace, mostly in vain. A mediator tried to hammer out a deal. He was my dad's brother, an existential psychologist. His solution granted me dignity, autonomy, agency. And for a brief moment it seemed that there was hope. But then the rumors of my drug use, of my promiscuity, of my general irresponsibility began to plague my parents' sense of middle class propriety, which I rejected outright and defiantly.  For instance when my mom said that people were warning their daughters to stay away from me, that I would fuck anything in a skirt, my response was "they don't have to wear skirts."  What finally pushed my parents  over the edge was the accusation from a friend of mine that I was not only a drug addict, but that I was also a drug dealer (this I think played into their fears of being seen as one of those Mexicans, the dirty, lazy, violent, drug dealing kind. Or something).

My friend and I had both been caught with some small amount of pot. It was the classic prisoners dilemma from game theory. Our parents and teachers new nothing. But they questioned us separately. He did the thing that game theory said everyone would do. He said: “Jorge is the one with the problem. He is actually a dealer. I only use a little bit. I got this from him.”   I of course kept quiet. (More on game theory later, because it matters).

So the five cops eventually get the hand cuffs on me. I am bleeding and bruised, but more or less fine. They lift me up by the hand cuffs, for spite or fun because at that point I was trying to walk. And that's when it occurs to me that I am right there because of a game that's rigged. And it's a game that's been rigged for a very long time. And the stupidity is that we all know it's rigged. And we can't help but play along anyway.

This is a long story too. But the highlights are good enough. In the early 70s the psychiatric establishment, along with all the “old” institution in society, came under assault from just about everywhere. From the academy, from the emerging counter culture, from the military, from business. Everything was changing from within and from without. Part of this assault was a steady decline of confidence in traditional forms of authority that began in the post war period (or earlier depending on how you like to count). In 1972, in Psychiatry, the biggest challenge to the established order came from a psychiatrist named David Rosenhan.

His study, “On being sane in insane places,” cast serious doubt onto the legitimacy of psychiatric diagnosis. Rosenhan got 8 healthy people, himself included, to present at 8 different psychiatric hospitals with a complaint of a single symptom. They were to pretend to hear the word “thud” or “hollow” or “empty” (because of the words' existential timbre and their absence from existing psychiatric literature) and to tell the truth about everything else. If they were admitted they were supposed to act normal in every respect. All 8 of them were admitted. And in terrifying twist, none of them were allowed to leave until they agreed that they were sick (with various diagnosises), and agreed to take strong anti-psychotic medication. Rosenhan himself was detained for two months. There's a lot more to this story, but you get the point. If psychiatrists can't tell the difference between the obviously sane and the insane, then what the fuck of science (whatever the limitations of that kind on knowledge might be) is there to the whole enterprise?

There's a lot to unpack here. But this is only a story about how I ended up in the back of a squad car. As part of the detante with my family, I agreed to an interview with a pair of drug counselors. My thinking went something like this: I am clearly smart and articulate and in control of my behavior, why shouldn't I meet with educated health professionals (parts of this might have been slightly delusional, more on that later maybe). But as soon as the interview started, I knew I was fucked. They had a list of multiple choice and true/ false questions about my behavior, thoughts, and feelings. None of these questions looked towards the content of my thoughts, or the motivations behind my actions, or the dilemmas they presented, or what I wanted for my life, or what I thought about the world.

I answered honestly, which often times meant an option they didn't offer. “None of the above,” didn't fit in their diagnostic criteria. 

So they said “just answer the questions as closely as possible.” 

I said “I am trying to.” 

They said: “You have to answer with a, b, c, or d.” 

I said “I will when one of those is the truthful answer.” 

And so on. They became frustrated. I became intransigent. And so on.

I was reminded a little of the scene at the beginning of blade runner. I was being treated like a robot – a (simple desire) machine that had gone haywire and needed fixing. All they were trying to do was figure what kind of wrench was in the works, or more accurately what circuits were crossed in the hardware or what bugs were running amok in the software. The blade runner reference isn't that accurate really. I didn't have a gun. And they didn't have an eye scanner. But they did have a computer to aid in their diagnosis.

The thing about these counselors was that they legitimately meant well. I believe they wanted to help people, probably even intransigent drug dealers. They were young and enthusiastic. And smart enough. Their problem though was a really big insurmountable problem: history.

A few years earlier, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was revised, in part to answer the critiques of Psychiatry from radical thinkers like R.D. Laing in Britain and David Rosenhan in the U.S.. Prior to this revision, the third formal revision, the influence of psychodynamic psychology was much more prevelant in diagnostic criteria. Psychodynamics is, roughly speaking, a post Freudian approach to psychology that looks at conscious and unconscious motivations to behavior. At its best it treats people like nuanced, complicated individuals who have their own particular psychological path to healing. The main problem with it, the critique, was that it was also somewhat arbitrary and unscientific. And when arbitrary or unscientific principles become codified in institutions then you end up with fiascoes like those revealed by Rosenhan's experiment. And so the DSM III was written in such a way that a computer could make the diagnosis. Motivation, complexity, individuality was taken out of the process. In other words, the DSM III replaced the Freudian model of human motivation and behavior with a much more rational, mechanized view of human nature. There was no ghost in the machine, just a machine, an incredibly complex computational/ desire machine, but a machine nonetheless. This had been a current in Psychiatry since the 50s (at least) with the birth of the CIA funded work in Cognitive Science. What this all meant for me was that when I went to speak to those counselors, they had no interest in me whatsoever. They weren't supposed to have an interest in me. According to their training I was no longer a person, but a computer.

The counselor's computer spit out my diagnosis a few days after my interview. I have no idea what it was. They didn't tell me. They told my parents. And they counseled my parents that if I refused to seek professional help, they should call the police to take me to a hospital. Armed with objective, scientific data, and backed up by the power (the threat of violence) of the state, my parents discarded the messy humanism of my Uncle's arbitration. Detante had failed. And so I gathered my things to hit the road... My parents called the police to prevent me from leaving. Thus my face in the carpet.

End Part 1
Part 2

little bits of Alison

Alison Oakes

I don't really know much about the field of aesthetics, which is weird for an artist who is also completely obsessed with philosophy and criticism. I don't even know where exactly my own pastiche of ideas about beauty come from. And there are way too many branches and sub-branches of the field to really attempt to casually figure it out on the weekend. And part of me thinks that this is something that as an artist I need to consciously avoid thinking about too much, lest I turn into an illustrator for some idea or another about art. I still like to imagine that the act of artistic production is also an act of (unconscious, automatic) analytic thinking, and so I tend to let that part of my life think about art and beauty. Or something like that.

I can say of aesthetics, however, that at some point in the past we tended to think of beauty as a thing or a virtue unto itself. It had certain characteristics (symmetry, balance, divinity, whatever) and artists found or articulated them in various ways.  I had a very old art history teacher when I studied in Paris who would take us around the Louvre and teach us about art, mostly painting. Art in her view was a soap opera about who was hanging out with, and sleeping with, and influencing whom, and how that changed the character of their work. While there was an awareness of the King and the Cross in all of her stories, mostly the narratives dealt with artists and art and beauty. [I might have hated the class if it hadn't been for the fact that it meant I could go to the Louvre whenever I wanted and sit in front of El Caravaggio's paintings for hours.]

David with the Head of Goliath, El Caravaggio

. 

Galleria Borghese, Rome.

At some point, probably because of or alongside of the activities of artists themselves, the question of beauty shifted. It became not so much about what is the nature of beauty, but more about what counts as beautiful, to whom, and for what political reason. And then also, is it different than erotic desire; is it different than commodification.  And also...  who knows what else contemporary aesthetics is concerned with.

[…]

Sometimes I hate art so much. I am horrified by its relationship to power and privilege. I am horrified by what we become in its mirror. And often it seems no different (or even worse) than any other product for the filthy rich to fuck each other about while they fuck the rest of us over. In the Global South what this “fuck over” means is: kill, torture, disappear, work to death, poison, exploit, etc. And while you certainly can't blame individual artists for this, it's awful to be at a party or an opening or a happening and consider the consequences of the “cool” we are creating. And often times that is all artists make - an aesthetic and ideological corollary to the structures of capital and empire.

And so, I go out to galleries alone, with cynicism and sadness. Every now and then some work does just a little more than what the artist wishes it did.

Alison Oakes

I've written about Alison Oakes before. And I really like her and her work, not only because I find her compelling as a person/ object of desire, but also because she makes good and terrifying and nuanced work.   Mostly, I like her because she is everything that a traditional painter could be, but isn't.

In her words, she is “a painter's painter.” She pays obsessive attention to craft. I doubt that when she started painting, she even understood what else she was painting about. In other words, her concerns are artistic, and aesthetic (driven by some personal (hidden) need or longing perhaps). And her thoughts on her subjects are revealed (to herself?) only through the process of making beautiful paintings. The result is a formally very compelling body of work that, by an accident of Oakes' consciousness, struggles to problematize: the beautiful, the feminine, the abject, the commodity, and the sublime.

Her work has none of the decadence of the conceptual art of recent years, none of its cynicism, cool veneer, or alienated value. Her work is primarily about an aesthetic experience of color, surface, texture, and luminosity. But it is not reactionary or conservative.   It uses this aesthetic experience to bring you in and open you up, so that it can call you and itself and into question.

I don't want to say too much more about her work. Go here if you want to read more about my thoughts on her work. Or, visit her website here.  In general her work tugs at the sublime, deconstructs desire and the beauty myth, toys with horror and taboo, all in the context of perfectly rendered oils on porcelain, painted with painstaking patience with a traditional Renaissance technique. If you're in Knoxville this month, go see her paintings. Buy one if you can. I bet she won't be around here too long, and that a collector-market is eventually going to find her work.

Alison Oakes

The_Year_of_the_Break-Up: or what I think about when I think about love

I was at dinner with my mom and my aunt last week. They are both exceptionally intellectual people. One teaches history and the other philosophy. And we like to bat ideas around, especially in a playfully aggressive sort of way. So my aunt, the philosopher, decided to say to me that all the women I have ever dated look just like my mother, and how this is some kind of unresolved Oedipal conflict in my life.

Despite the fact that she had just suggested that I wanted to fuck my mom and kill my dad while at dinner with my mother, I decided to just go along with it. I said: there's no conflict. My mother is a smart, beautiful, intelligent, generous, thoughtful woman. Why wouldn't I want to find someone like her as a partner?

This worked. The fact that she failed to embarrass me, and that I said something more or less sensible (how are you supposed react to that accusation, except with horror), ended the fun to be had in this line of reasoning. So she said, “that's very nice of you to say,” and we moved on to other topics.

At that very moment though, the girl I was (sort of) dating walked up. And I looked at her beautiful smile; her funny, conflicted personality; and her bright and sad eyes; and I realized that in one respect the Oedipal conflict is anything but solved...

In the last year and change I have split up with way too many women, seven maybe eight. In most of those relationships, we would break-up with one another once every couple of weeks, or every few days. And it was just as traumatic every time.  At one (fortunately brief) point, I was in two open relationships with two women with whom the relationship would end weekly. That's a lot of heartbreak. And it isn't like you get better at it through practice. It still feels like confronting a mini-death –  a future which is missing.

Seems like too many.  Also like not enough. In moments I see a Don Giovanni in me. And there were certainly moments this year  where I was compulsed to seek companionship, love, inspiration, and distraction in another's body.   But unlike Don Giovanni it wasn't an economic lust. I wasn't driven to acquire, certainly not at the cost of my ethical self, like Don Giovanni whose lust was not even tempered by rape and murder. I was, rather, driven to fall - in love perhaps, but also just to fall.

In some ways this is unfortunate. Life would be much simpler if I fucked more like a sociopath (or a bro) and less like lapsed Catholic. I don't want to suppress the horror or monstrosity of desire the way a liberated protestant might; I want the opposite: meaning, ritual, struggle, fall and redemption. In short, I can't see, in my object of desire, a mere piece of ass walking down the street. Instead, I see a complicated, nuanced, tragedy waiting to happen.  And I see a weapon to use against myself. It's a cliche to say that you always fall in love with the wrong person.  But everyone who has ever elicited that exciting vertiginous feeling of longing, joy, and alienation we call falling in love, has always also hated me, on some level.

Something about me (and them) has always insisted that the relationship end in tears and anguish, over and over. Many of these relationships this last year, the ones that lasted any amount of time, required weeks or months of separations, midnight phone calls, threats, intentional cruelty, barely comprehensible levels of love and violence. In one, that has lasted six months, I think we have spent just as much time apart as together (It might still be going on, it's unclear). We miss each other so much we forget how painful last night or last week was. Or how monstrously we acted. We try and not call. We try and not suggest promises we can't keep... and so on. It's becoming absurd. It's a labyrinth we know doesn't exist, with no exit, where Joy Division and Lucinda Williams are always playing, and where we dance with The Nuremberg Amateur Dance Society at every other turn. This desire is obviously irrational. Beyond control.  It's stronger than me. And it's stronger than her.  Significantly, all desire follows this careful manufacture. You could suppress it (why would you want to).  But it would get away from you, anyway. 

Any specific object of desire pulls at something in us that resists rationalization. Meaning, you can give it a name, a structure, a meaningful story; you can make lists and spread sheets and flow charts; you can model it mathematically and statistically; you can even identity it's physiological processes and codes;  but, then it slips out of it, reappears elsewhere, in another body, in another place.

We have tried over and over to simplify and model and rationalize human desire. The Soviets in the 50s and 60s tried to plan an economy (based on rational and scientific ideas about human need/ desire) that would only produce what they predicted their citizens would want, which was never what they actually wanted.  Here in the U.S. we tried to rationalize our enemies and predict how they would react based on how many deaths or losses they could tolerate. And through these scientific analyses we produced the most absurd, irrational and barbaric policies imaginable. Just like our Soviet counterparts maintaining their economic plan through the gulag, assassination and ordinary terror, we razed civilizations in the name of modeling our little human desires..

And just like my maybe-girlfriend and I who engage in whatever level of violence we can live with (not very violent), all of desire always seems to slip towards horror and brutality.  The story behind anything is like the Nuremberg trials, a narrative of a good and just war against obvious evil that conceals the experience of barbarity; that conceals a citizen-soldier - the baker, the tinker, the banker - willing to smash a kid's face with the butt of his rifle. And when he goes home, he is no longer human the way he was before.

Desire, even conflicted shameful desire, always feels right. The thing you want is without morality. Until you have it. And then in regret you might see yourself for what you are. Or not. Desire is not a mirror. You probably don't know what came over you. You reach for straws to explain what you have done or felt. But the explanations rarely ring true.

Desire is a ghost. You glimpse it and name it and it's gone. It can be objectified, forced outward into the commodity fetish-object. But then just as quickly it disappears from there as well.

Desire is always tragic. It ends in the dissolution of itself. And in the dissolution of the lover. And sometimes even the beloved object.

And in this is the truth of the Oedipal conflict my aunt was wielding at me. All desire is basically Oedipal. Outside of psychoanalysis the story of Oedipus is primarily a story of fate, of an irresistible force. And however you conceptualize it, the irresistible force for us humans is that we each end. Awareness of that ending is the burden of recognizing yourself in the mirror. The details of the Oedipus narrative which so obsess the psychoanalyst – blindness, incest, patricide  – merely tell the story of symbolic castration, of alienation from the human (through the breaking of the incest taboo), and of the end of authority; all of which are the story of our horror at the confrontation with our own death.

And so we're in a (not) funny situation where an irresistible force (that we end) meets an immovable object of desire  (continuity). Thus: we act like idiots; we act like tyrants;  we are shocked when nothing works out the way we planned.