These are the very small cigarettes that Mark Wallenger fashioned at Cabanas in Sheffield when I tried to blag a fag from him. At art school we used to call these prison rollys - when we tried to role the dust from the bottom of a number of packets of Golden Virginia found deep in draws and pockets. I wrote about meeting Wallenger in the first proper piece of writing for my PhD. The first bit I thought was getting somewhere. The somewhere it got was to land in the middle of practice and research and hold a space for a glimpse, I say this rather than a moment as it fits in sideways better.
Sharing was difficult, critique was easy. Is this a lesson that when something is put forward for critique there needs to be a level of investment that allows for water to flow from a ducks back? people who live in ponds should not throw stones at ducks. The mixing of metaphors is always a problem and often useful as they stir up meaning and juxtaposepose thoughts and don't make a sense.
I think I had been having a good period of reading and thinking and writing. Today I watched Zizeck give one of his post Hegelian tyraids . I wondered why he had to be so difficult, clearly he is clever enough not to be so offensive to so many people with a valid position on what in civil society is acceptable behavior. Then I wondered if it was a test, is he saying to hear what I am saying you have to get past what I have said. I can only tell you this thing that is hard if you listen to a story about a fat young woman on the bus who would always lack the perfect body even if she had it, and then detailed description of images of his colon. I snapped back into listening to him when he said that true disgust is when what is on the inside comes to the outside- the inner body, the contents of the stomach - the unconscious and the subconscious on the pavement. This made sense of his objectionable behavior- not the showing of what is inside his filthy stories that he tells repeatedly but what is in the potential of knowing what disgusts us and where it lives in discussion.
The writing that I mention is in many ways disgusting - bringing the inside to the outside. It is more like a puking than a confession and holds a key problem. The problem is a wrenching up of a partially digested meal that nobody really wants to see; even if it does always contain carrots. Perhaps though this is the actual thing that needs to come up in the text acknowledging a as Zizeck says that making what is on the inside appear on the outside is disgusting.
My writing was an attempt to try and think about the idea of the artist within the research projects I have worked on. Not generally artists working in the myriad of ways artists work but me myself in the projects I work on. The disgusting bit is that a number of truths I have inplicitly being aware of are put on the outside. In the text they are guilded like the ghetto with a layer of gold but as a great man said you cannot polish a turd yet you can sprinkle a bit of glitter on it. The writing then in simple terms says -
Academics you have your research but you have your terrible legacies that you cannot bare to speak of. You have a disgusting need on the inside past down through your disciplines to not infect the places you work with your evil. You kill your fathers and rape your mothers and put out your eyes yet still you feel no relief. You cannot redeem yourselves yet there is still a compulsion to know. I suppose in a veiled way I was writing about artists doing the academics dirty work, bringing in a subjective and personal attentive affect - an apparatus of the event clearly desired but never spoken of - the discreet object petit a that always speaks to lack. The stitched on bollocks and ball sack as performative ritual after the castration. That is what Zizeck might say and then sniff and apologies. Educational research is a place where monkeys perform yet art is a place where they masturbate it is an inconvenient truth and personal joke with myself.
I am angry for no reason today. I am angry because I am stupid and thought that within the philosophy there is a quest for finding the meaning of everything "why are we here?" . But actually I am not reading or supposed to be reading to find the meaning of life or how to live without god or the nature of a speculative or material or constructed reality. I'm also not reading to disgust people with my insides I am reading for altogether more pragmatic reasons that I don't care about. This is a truth - perhaps not the truth.
I will cheer up but it is good to write something down - not cathartic but good to get something disgusting out.
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