Habbit by Thinkmule
Sylvie said in English,”Would you look at this?”
He said in French, “Quoi?”
She said in English,”This…The fucking Hearald Tribune. I don’t care if we never go home.”
“Quoi?,” he said in French, not looking up from his book.
“They are raping the Constitution. These people are claiming to be Christians and they argue for torture…?! Jesus Fucking H. Christ! End of irony my ass. I mean it wouldn’t kill someone to make them eat shit… it’s wouldn’t cause actual death. I could make you drink piss…”
“That’s a little kinky for me, dear. Even if we are on vacation.”
“… I’m saying you can make a man drink your piss and it won’t kill him…”
“Japanese swear by it,” he said. “Softens the skin, you know.”
“…Well damn it, it sure seems like an abuse of power even if it won’t cause grievous injury… I can’t believe we’re in Geneva and back home they are raping the Geneva Convention. It’s too ugly…”
“Quoi?”
“Geneva.”
“We’re not in Geneva dear. This is Interlaken…”
“Well we’re on a lake in Switzerland, aren’t we?”
“Not Lake Geneva, though.”
“I mean you can fuck someone in the ass and it won’t kill them… is that acceptable?”
“You tell me?”
“Not even on Vacation,” she said.
“I thought not…. Greeks swore by it, you know?”
“Go find a Greek then (beat)… You know that you’ve become a the new Romans, when you start crucifying bearded men in the desert and making them into martyrs…it’s just so pathetic. Didn’t Bush ever even read the God damn Bible?”
“I don’t think he reads much, dear,” he said. “Certainly not The King James… difficult syntax… Shall I open the wine?”
“Yes,” she said. “Better open two.”
Book (detail) by Me-Jade
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Monthly Archives: October 2006
Joyce And The Piano For Cats And Cogs And Typing On It Too
Here is another image from The Library posted by Battaolo a Brit living in Barcelona. You know how they say that a thousand monkeys sitting at a thousand typwriters will eventually write Ulysees and so I suppose that a thousand cats running on a thousand pianos will eventually run Bach, but Szentjoby begs the question, what if you had a thousand monkeys typing on a piano… What do you get then? I imagine you get something like The Library Project.
This is working as my favorite film transition: a slow dissolve between the Fluxus Codex and The Library Project. They, like Lolita are starting to talk at the tip of the toungue to pronounce tappingly on the teeth a T sound…like a typewriter (we are up to Yasunao Tone in the codex for aliteration fans)
The Eggheads Go To A Summer Place En Suisse To Read and Argue And Drink Various Beverages
So this is the finished (?) book collab with Driftwould. I created The Library group on Flicker today and we already have 150 members and a fairly chatty vocal bunch they are… It should be fun to watch what happens. A lot of discussion is already starting about what and how to paint on books… what about digital collabs.. and what is a book after all? In a stroke of luck (or fluke) Remyyy, one of my favorite Vimeons posted an unbelievably beautiful, French, literary pastoral… So in the name of international art games, I give you M. Remy and still winding down the Fluxus Codex: Tmas Szentjoby showing us how the cruciform creates the codex itself, or vice versa. Gutenberg might not have been a fluke afterall… or more likely a white whale in an alpine lake.
A nice side effect of the group is that I’m getting all sorts of great links to various sites where people are exploring the theme old books reworked in new technology:
www.mundofase.com./pituto_raro/index.html
www.logolalia.com/alteredbooks/
The Library Project (Drift Would)
from driftwould to be finished by me
Above you see the beginnings of a new project I’m doing with all of my favorite Flickr artists. It’s called the Library Project and the first one in the card catalogue is Driftwould from Canada… Also Thinkmule has my half, but I don’t have his yet…
Let me explain: the idea is that one artist takes a hardcover from a book, tears out the pages and draws in one half (or half draws in both halves) of the binder/diptyque. In a nod to Ray Johnson, the two books are mailed (swapped) and Each of these will be finished by the other. The results are posted in a Flicker group called (what else) The Library. From this group, hopefully a show will be currated for New York, or Paris, or Basel, or Berlin, or wherever anyone wants to show this project. It should be deliciously portable. I’ll post these again when they are finished, guess I’ve got to get to the post office… oh and the top one is our first collab… but not a book cover…I call it Falling Peace Piece. I had a leftover peace sign from the crowd drawing below… fit like a fluke.
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Three Meals and Three Drawings
B L D 1 2 3 Mit Spoerri
I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner with Danial Spoerri…or atleast his flux pages. I used them as place mats and the food as an art medium to draw on paper.
I first encountered the work of Danial Spoerri in Allan Stone’s kitchen in Purchase. Going to the Stones as a child, was a little like going to a culture carnival: fantastically exciting with a little touch of fear and trepidation. The place made Kane’s Xanadu seem uncluttered and bourgeois. The Stone Mansion was more humble on the outside for sure, but right at the porch you were greeted by enormous naked bodies and monster-like heads and the inside was piled with thirty foot fighting statues and faces and tits and dicks and abstract craziness…. shrunken heads and skullls and bones and The kitchen was all Spoerri’s table tops as I recall… Danniel would take a whole setting after some debauched philosophical (symposium) meal with chicken bones and bits of bread and spilled wine and bottles and glasses and plates (Julian! We all know where you got the idea… but hell you did your own rif) and cigarrtte butts put out in a steak and he had some magic technique of perserving all these scraps like in a wax works and the whole thing got cut off at the legs and hung up on the wall like a painting. It didn’t seem like art to me at that age, it seemed more like archeology and fortunately I loved anything archeological. I didn’t get DeKooning untill I was painting in oil in College (you don’t know how hard it is to paint like that, untill you try it… it’s bloody worse than trying to paint like Ingres)… Spoerri I got right off the bat. I was a fat kid, I liked to eat… what’s not to get about Spoerri.
I’ve been banging my head against Spoerri’s radical game of reality vs. art since that childhood Christmas party revelation. Really, reality is so interesting, how can art compete? People like Rauchenberg and Christo and even Jackson Pollock have all given me answers and more questions. One interesting note is that when I had my first show of paintings in Switzerland (Zurich in 1991) Spoerri’s sister came to the opening and stayed the whole night. I hadn’t heard boo in New York about Spoerri in years and so had imagined him dead, but she assured me, he was alive and working and that he would’ve enjoyed my paintings. Anyways, he’s one of my five heavies and the first fluxus artist I ever encountered.
My DInner Mit Daniel
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Paikage Delivery
Pax Cerveza (or The Yale Years)
Laughing It All Away (or Elegy for the Spanish Republic)
The whole thing ended in dancing and Sophy went to dip and Tom dropped her on the floor with the cat and she started sneezing like a bell chiming right at midnight and we were all laughing untill it stopped at twenty one… and we had one more Guiness and Tom sat down on the couch and closed his eyes and whispered to me, “Could you get these people out of my apartment please… I want to sleep” and Sophy blew her nose and crawled up the loft ladder and lay down, but Tom stayed on the couch where Sylvie kissed him once goodnight on his smiling bald head and then I started hearding the hangers on like cats out the “Get Smart” labyrinth of doors and stairs and more doors and more stairs, till the unruly crowd hit the sidewalks and burst like a breaking beer bottle – going off in all directions. A few of us climbed up the hill past the Gothic arches of the great bridge towards the 2 and 3 and you could hear all of New York like the white noise buzz after the bells have all rung.
The other Tom was talking about Italy and the wine and the Italians in California and how they’d brought all that Viticulture with them and I went off on the German Barbarians and their Beer and how the fithy drunken hoard had brought down the whole fucking empire with all it’s arches and aquaducts and roads. ..so we went off on the merits of wine and beer and the other Tom walked by yelling, “UP THE IRISH!”
I was thinking about George Macuinas and all his Atlases and I thought it would be interesting to see one that traced the flow of wine and beer and hempf and I thought of all those Nazis fighting in the Spanish Civil War and painting Guernica with chordite and iron. Did they bring their own beer? I’ve never tried Spanish Cervesa…only some from their colonies in Mexico and Peru, etc. Did the Spanish have hashish with all those Muslims there? Some one should draw a map.
