To me the most personal creation is the most universal. Simply writing words is not enough. Books are a way culture preserves it's history but often times books are used to control the ideas and politics of society to restrict information. I seek to make books to liberate that defy control, censorship and simple definition and depict life in its totality. I see my hand made books as political reclamation of the natural world in its fecundity. I paint oil over acrylic over collage over anything I can find. I embellish the paintings with glass beads and organic material from the world around me literally putting the landscape and my DNA into the books. I have used dirt, coffee, hair, leafs, molasses, blood, urine, insects and anything I feel can give the book life from life. We are so used to having the synthetic and technological global culture define how we perceive ourselves, our bodies, our biology, and who we are, that when someone has a different point of view of the human experience and makes the commitment to put it in a book forever, it can be frightening and challenging yet very alive.
I embrace the reverence of the natural world that my Apache ancestors celebrated, one that focuses on the micro and macrocosms, nature, the reclaiming of forgotten and challenging symbols and all aspects of a life put into a book the moment it is happening.
...In spiritually volatile times such as this we, as a species, need to ask ourselves some searching and uncomfortable, even disturbing questions. The miraculous unfolding and ongoing survival of humanity against incredible environmental and climatic odds throughout the ages has been preserved, catalyzed, directed, inspired, mirrored and sanctified on our species’ behalf by the shamans, soothsayers, storytellers, sorcerers, wise ones, alchemical healers and (once upon a time) by the Artists of each age. These oracular beings fearlessly explore additional dimensions to those of mundane nonsensus everyday “reality”. They push the boundary of established social protocols, using the discipline of brutal self questioning to carry out an independent cultural autopsy on the often putrefying body of humanity during any given age. These courageous and often vilified individuals are essential to the psychic hygiene and mental health of the social order or civilization of their time.
As our ways of life have separated further and further from a balance with Nature, the role and prestige of these visionary gestalt therapists working on behalf of their community after an, often involuntary, initiation by near death experience, has been in decline. For around 2000 years these “creators” evolved from obsessed, possessed, magical shamans chosen by circumstance (not by self will) to artists still serving the Divine and the transcendental through the Church in the West and bureaucratic religions in general...
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long. - Source
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| Because you can't not reblog a joey in a diaper. |
It's time to face facts
– technology advances by harnessing human drives, and the most
primal are sex and death.
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| Where is your attention? |
“The richest 1 percent has increased its income by 60 percent in the last 20 years with the financial crisis accelerating rather than slowing the process,” while the income of the top 0.01 percent has seen even greater growth, a new Oxfam report said.
What sense does wealth have in the long run, if we think of ourselves as a species in an enormous cosmos, rather than Americans and Saudi Arabians, or rich and poor? "There are not yet obvious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, and this makes us wonder whether civilizations like ours rush inevitably into self-destruction. I dream about it . . . and sometimes they are bad dreams."
"How is food a perfect road map of myth? In the same way that it tells the story of history. It tells of interbreeding, it tells of times of peace, it tells of rape and pillaging, of occupation, of diaspora and exodus.""You are what you eat." Maybe so. But what led us to decide what we should eat, and what we should avoid? What level of responsibility do we have as individuals for the cultural and global repercussions of our food choices?
For those uninitiated into its history, conceptual art can often seem like a trick — is that really a urinal in an art gallery? Is sticking yogurt caps on gallery walls really great art? Unfortunately for Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, the stars and creators of the sketch TV show Portlandia, it turns out that conceptual art can actually trap you, even outside of a gallery opening ...
The danger of anything being art, as we are wont to argue these days, is that everything can be art if you want it to — and no one else has to agree with you to make it so. The Portlandia folks are living in a world in which postmodernism has run amok, sparing nothing, not even the coffee shop.
What results from Warwick’s footage is a “gonzomentary,” a mix of fourth-wall busting filmmaking, mockumentary, Gonzo journalism and whatever else can be added into the mix, which includes: Uncle Binky the pedophile clown; a Christian producer/investor who wants the film to contain no swearing, no drinking and no drugs, right before she has a crisis of faith and becomes a mime; a silent film; Tito the drug dealer, who is actually a British actor (David Proch) stuck in a Method acting Hell and Warwick’s own descent into madness while chronicling the adventures of Clark and J.C. And penises. Lots of penises.
"I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art." -Anaïs Nin.
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| Add sleeping, dreaming, and waking to the list of our existential uncertainty. |
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| six-three-eight who do we appreciate |
Many people think of Taoism as being restricted to Lao Tzu, the Tao Teh Ching, and possibly some hand-wavy interpretation of the yin-yang symbol. However, it is a very old shamanistic tradition that, in its explicit origins, came into being both to expound upon and also contradict the Confucian idea of order in celestial bureaucracy. Taoism confuses many Westerners as it is a religion that is not a religion, a philosophy that is not a philosophy, and the practices and beliefs that have followed from its sources are as divergent as Catholicism and Satanism. (Which is to say, opposed and yet tied -- much like Taoism and Confucianism.)
There are so many ways for speakers of English to see the world. We can glimpse, glance, visualize, view, look, spy, or ogle. Stare, gawk, or gape. Peek, watch, or scrutinize. Each word suggests some subtly different quality: looking implies volition; spying suggests furtiveness; gawking carries an element of social judgment and a sense of surprise. When we try to describe an act of vision, we consider a constellation of available meanings. But if thoughts and words exist on different planes, then expression must always be an act of compromise.
Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.
“Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimal,” John Quijada, a fifty-four-year-old former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, told me. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.
In his preface, Quijada wrote that his “greater goal” was “to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious intellectual effort: an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language.”
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