Intro to Visual Practice / Fall 2010

A book's cover is spray painted, its pages removed.

An explanatory Hegel text is nailed shut, its covered obscured by the tools or the irrational artist after the end of art.

FIVE POINTS

INSCRIPTION: Inscription can be material and immaterial, visible and invisible. In its erasure, it loses its visual function yet maintains its presence in memory.

MACHINES: Bodies are machines, this notion is not new. It is a series of machines functioning collective and individually. Machinic function occurs cognitively and prehensively, functioning differently in different milieus, with different intentionalites (though not all machines, bodily or not, are intentional). In the realm of the intellectual, the cognitive machine produces rational discourse circulated as language – often in books.

BOOKS are machines of ideas. Books are drawings of letters. Books inscribe ideas. (Though books can function as other machines.)

THE ARTIST, in a romantic western narrative and in certain practices, is an affective machine. The artist exists before and after the intellectual discourse, gesturing toward the cosmos. The artist is rationally irrational. The artist, in a western narrative, ruptures and breaks from the intellectual discourse, seeking that which is beyond reason, seeking originality, breaking and appropriating forms, destroying to create.

DESTROYING books creates a wound on the image of the text as machine idea, yet its immaterial inscription endures. The legacy of Enlightenment thought endures in spite of these chinks in its armor. But destruction reevaluates and reformulates. What is Kant without Kant’s writing? What is political philosophy without material content? The artist as destructive machines opens itself to the guilt of destroying but enables in this destruction new textual machines, rebirths of these books, and most of all, new (re)inscriptions.