How smooth it all is!
In other words:
1.
The manifesto, “To Clarify the Non-Visible,” for the Museum of Non-Visible Art (MoNA) begins as follows: “Art itself is nothing. All that matters is what is left. The afterglow. The ambition is to produce this. We strive for an afterglow with no thing preceding. A glow. Phosphenes.”
One of the two comments on the Facebook page for this museum (whose rating is .5/5) reads: “Pretentious douchebags with too much time and money that have no clue about art being a stain on the community have always been a cancer to the creative world. You arent about art, you are about money. Disgusting.”
The other reads: “sus ‘obras’, qui ni siquiera existe … todo es invisible. menudo timo”
The manifesto ends: “You must increase the world behind the eyes. The wreck of the Medusa. It left us with phosphenes. You must conjure them and sell them. Only when you have done this are you one of us.”
Phosphenes.
Likewise, Eugolosine’s album Coriolis ends with the “World Behind the Eyes.” But, unlike the non-works of art in the non-museum, this world isn’t invisible. Like the Medusa (and its wreck), it smooths, but not in stone.
In 2011, the “museum” “scandalized” “the art world” when a woman bought a non-visible work of “art” entitled “Fresh Air” for $10,000. It helped that James Franco contributed his name to the venture. It also helped that the air in the painting (or rather, in the frame) was fresh and clean, at least to the imagination, which wherever it can will breathe.
2.
There’s something grotesque about how surely smoothness saturates space.
Stretching the face poreless.
Here’s Bahktin on Rabelais:
As conceived by these [modern] canons, the body was first of all a strictly completed, finished product. Furthermore, it was isolated, alone, fenced off from all other bodies. All signs of its unfinished character, of its growth and proliferation were eliminated; its protuberances and offshoots were removed, its convexities (signs of new sprouts and buds) smoothed out, its apertures closed.
///
Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the point where they enter into each other.
3.
It could be very fresh and clean. It could be a balloon. All these are the days, my friends. And these are the days, my friends.
Right channel: It could be Franky
Left channel: Do you remember Hans, the Bus Driver?
4.
Easy-listening, adult-contemporary artist Claudine Longet (see also: the JFK assassination) was formerly married to “Moon River” Andy Williams murdered skier Vladimir “Spider” Sabich, then married her defense attorney.
Maggie Thatcher’s (whose grave was the first gender-neutral bathroom, may she RIP) favorite song was “Telstar.”
Joe Meek (of Joe Meek and the Blue Boys) murdered his landlady before murdering himself.
5.
City Pop. Lounge. Exotica. Dixieland. ECM Style Jazz. Kmart Realism. Future Funk. Nu Jazz. Smooth Jazz. Cool Jazz. Easy Listening. Chillwave. New Age. Dinner Theater. Neoclassical Crossover. Miami Vice. Celtic New Age. New Romantic. Blue-Eyed Soul. Spaghetti Western. Surf Rock. Post-Punk Baptist Revival Hymns. Sophistipop. Pajamapop pour vous.
6.
The French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez introduced the terms “smooth” and “striated” to describe a spacetime “one occupies without counting” and a spacetime “one counts in order to occupy.” He also conducted Zappa.
Deleuze and Guatarri write, “the striated is that which intertwines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of distinct forms, and organizes horizontal melodic lines and vertical harmonic planes. The smooth is the continuous variation, continuous development of form; it is the fusion of harmony and melody in favor of the production of properly rhythmic values, the pure act of the drawing of a diagonal across the vertical and the horizontal.”
7.
Hear how smothering the smoothness is in Rilke’s description of the birth of Venus:
dim awakening, like an early morning wind.
In the tenderest branches of the vein-trees
to murmur over its deep places.
And this wind grew on: now it threw itself
with all its breath into the new breasts
and filled them and crowded into them,—
so that like sails full of distance
they drove the light girl to the shore.
as she strode swiftly past the youthful shores,
all morning flowers and grasses
sprang up, warm and confused,
as from embraces. And she walked and ran.
But, where the body is sewn up, sown shut, tongue swallowed, and sealed tight, something still escapes, grotesque. In this case, it’s a dolphin, the sea’s bloody placental afterbirth.
the sea rose up once more and threw
a dolphin on that selfsame spot.
Dead, red, and open.
8.
9.
The orchid-bee and the bee-orchid.
Aphrodite and testicles.
Linnaeus.
10.
Pat Metheny.
11.
“exotica.”
12.
When D&G wrote A Thousand Plateaus, they were thinking, not of Euglossini (the only kind of bee, incidentally, without a queen), but of a different bee-orchid and a different orchid-bee. They were thinking of a cat and a baboon, not an eternal mouse. (The bees also mate with perfume)!
Deleuze’s son is an investment banker, or some shit.
Orchids.
Phosphenes.
13.
From the bed of my birth to the bed of my death and beyond, I would have to travel with the bees to find the person who I was meant to kill on a planet inside the earth. The Mesopotamian bees of my grandfather were waiting on this planet; they would show me my victim at the moment of the kill. At the end of the story, I was still dead.
More about: Euglossine
