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        "objecthood of art"

        No color is isolated. The space between the object and the
        frame. Here half the paintings are framed and half aren't.
        "Portrait of a Girl" in a wood frame painted to look like
        leopard skin purple and yellow and pink and blue and green in
        large blocks in the Portrait of EW. Not sure of what I'm looking
        at, not sure if what I'm looking at is what is called a
        representation. EW and Noel and Christine B. all exist or once
        existed, they were people who posed, or did they pose, or were
        they painted from memory, would that account for the heightened
        yellow for the face of Christine B? What happens for example in
        the lower righthand corner of Christine B. has little if
        anything to do with designating forearm or elbow and everything
        to do with about a dozen soft circular brushstrokes in
        half-circles mixing yellow and red and black and white and it's
        not just shadow that projects a person or the thought of a
        person as in This is a Thought for that Person or This is the
        Color for what the painter thought of the person or thought
        while looking at that person why Noel's eyes are marbled in
        turquoise and Miss DiLamberto and S.G. and EW and the two
        Portrait[s] of a Girl gravitate around the thought of what are
        eyes in a face when the look in the eyes on the face is
        deflected at something or someone else, distracted--there are
        angles and ups and downs spherical and diametrical and even what
        can be juxtaposed in a color and the shape that emerges out of
        the colors meeting

        "cleaved to an understanding of its deterritorialising"

        the two girls outside the club clash the most color, blue and
        red, anachronism of a yellow doorknob, the canvas done big to
        contain their bodies in a landscape, street scene, though the
        assertion of depth at the far left a curb and street turning
        unless it's to push the two figures further toward the viewer
        and foreground them more than they already are--would they have
        fallen back against the wall if the wall ran the full length of
        the large canvas? Purple and blue bricks. How can a knowledge
        and feel for color or a certainty about the 'right' color that
        it's color and not line that impresses its expression on the
        eyes (and if you are going to paint, as soon as you think about
        painting in place of light tricks, digital or film, there's got
        to be some kind of acknowledging of subject, subjectivity, on
        your part, an interpretation that takes place in the taking of
        likeness taken from life the case of the real and the net artist
        the other day on that French list not seeing any difference
        between "virtual" and "real" and the thought that maybe that's
        what drives art and the effort to complete or completely
        stand-in for what exists and resists formulation in the area
        between object and frame and it's plain to the one (the only
        one, the gallery empty for several hours except for a passerby
        who comes in for a minute soaking wet from the rain and the
        director in the next room sewing some hangings for the next
        show) standing here and looking at these objects if that's what
        they are that the frame is found in the thought of what needs to
        be brought to the looking at for example the two girls outside
        the club

        "set of contradictions that attach to readings [. . .] imbue"

        from the angle at which the figures are painted placed in the
        position of looking at them from the angle at which their bodies
        would be presented in the life they're represented from
        projecting stockings and skirt and thighs, the two nudes
        painting in sleeping poses places the eyes in the position of
        opening a door to a room that's not the room EW invites you into
        and how to paint the expression of welcome on a face, here you
        are, here I am, here we are, that it produces a differentiated
        impression, viewing the painting of a nude closed in on itself
        in sleep, the eyes of the one looking on or at resembling a
        lens, a camera with a troubled relation to its subject, and all
        cameras have this troubled relation to their subject, especially
        when that subject is a body, and there isn't any light that can
        make up for the intervention of an apparatus in the action of
        looking that goes on between the one who is looking and the one
        who is looked at

        "mechanisms of specular power [. . .] and identity redefinition"

        to paint a face is to paint the thought of thighs a form of
        "ideation" that takes shape in the mind for the movement outside
        oneself and in the direction of another that's penetrative and
        there is that to looking, the penetrating eyes on a body are
        eyes trying to find a way to that body and that's why the
        Portrait of EW and the two girls outside the club (the largest
        painting and it has no title) could be said to be saying, if a
        painting ever says anything, to whoever looks at them to take a
        good look, that it's worth looking at, the "secret" the absence
        of any name for which is the absence of any name on it, the
        object, the thing we're made into being, and it's not anything
        anybody knows or can't say, though it's possible that the
        completion of the body in the experience of its sexuality has
        never been named, and that this is what drives art, an
        interiority that's so elusive it keeps refusing to be named or
        figured or sounded, the "it" that drives subjectivity and which
        circulates or short-circuits all around the representations for
        it, and maybe that's why someone might paint in oil and oil and
        pastel as much as to say that the body is still around, or maybe
        that's all anybody ever had and having it is to have none of the
        illusion that it can really be said with any truthfulness
        outside the art for it

        "<italic>Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers</italic>"

        You can have it. Where is what is yours is mine was found with
        yours is what was mine is mind.

        "the double lack at the heart of language, the absence of
        signifieds as things-in-themselves and . . . and as an
        ungraspable flow beneath a network of signifiers [. . .] markers
        that embody it"

        and that's where looking at these paintings again on November
        26, mid afternoon, a month after first looking at them on the 22
        and 24 of October (stopping by a couple of times each week and
        the gallery's always closed, it's that "private" or maybe that's
        what it takes to be "Independent") after writing for the
        Fiction-of-Philosophy list "a limine," "aperçu," "agencement,"
        "chiffre," "coup d'oeil," "coupure," "dunamis," "échiffre,"
        "linge sal," "non-su," "recherche," "rivetage," "stile
        rappresentivo," "usager," "vel," "verriers," and "voix pour voir
        / voiture" somewhere at the paintings so far, somewhere "at"
        that void between object and frame, really wanting to write a
        series of poems that wouldn't pretend to be able to co-exist
        alongside them, a set of poems that would project rather what it
        is to be a viewer and how trying to think about and find a
        language for what you've looked at brackets off the viewed
        objects (the director agreeing with me as I was leaving the
        gallery that you could never put these paintings on the 'net,')
        a series of poems that would materialize around the thought that
        one of my co-workers gave to me at the plant, in a fit of
        laughter over the expression "clean my house," and the thought
        came to me that the face that turns its expression to the
        painter is saying "paint my house," the intensity of seeing
        being of that nature where the exchange of looking has already
        looked past the act of looking in the search for that area
        between object and frame which is touching

        "uncoupling of identity from its material substrate (the human
        body, physical space, being in time etc.)"

        and no web site I've clicked across since beginning to explore
        the internet at the beginning of this year has impressed me as
        being much more than a screen or set of screens for this
        difficulty, which remains a verbal difficulty, and whether or
        not it's any less or more of a screen for physicality than ink
        or paint would seem a little early to speculate about apart from
        the effort to think about how composition and the 'finishing
        touch' differs from the problem of manipulating image and
        thought and impulse and the powerlessness a viewer can
        experience especially if that viewer is one that has been
        constructed for subaltern if not subhuman mental and manual
        tasks, and there will never be enough thought about this,

        "flux and mobility . . . to flit the viewer in and out of . . .
        an indeterminate relationship to the author . . . and to a point
        of origin"

        that there's a discourse already developed around the new
        technology and all the info/waste it puts at one's fingertips as
        part of the abolition of traditional time and space frames, not
        that it didn't know how to think or couldn't think for itself
        but that the thinking that's done by a subjectivity that's been
        constructed to do the dirty work, as the saying goes, whether
        it's cotton or cardboard or any other product that can't be
        automatized and won't be anytime soon and the vigilance that's
        needed to foreground in a consumer-driven economy that's global
        now that the availability of even the most innocuous products
        depend on destroying a layer of the population, driving the
        standard of what is considered living to the lowest possible
        threshold where consciousness is still physical and looks and
        tastes and touches and it's in the specificity of this context
        that Zizek's footnote in The Indivisible Remainder about Lenin
        and the "Cause" reads way off base, and Edward Maroli's
        portraits are about this, and how they're about it in a way
        that's hard to put into a thought is that it's about art and
        time and the lags or lapses in history and that's what
        consciousness and class and the phenomenon of someone standing
        here in a room Cézanne would not have immediately turned around
        in and stomped out of and looking at a set of takes on The
        Portrait of a Lady neo-old style and obdurately working class
        because women still get called that in all seriousness on the
        shopfloor and outside the club. "The forming of the senses is a
        labor of the entire history of the world." One differentiation
        that might be located among the thought of class and sexuality,
        virtuality and the social real could have something to do with
        that comment from Marx about just how long a time history really
        is and that art has been and keeps being about the senses and
        their development

        "'mechanisation' [. . .] uncoupled from the notion of the
        artist's touch"

        and here the problem of what is an art object and what is the
        work it does and who does it do it for and how does it do what
        it does for you if it does something for me that it doesn't do
        for you and it gets caught up in a discourse about technology
        and consciousness and new and old forms of looking and thinking
        and again these 20 paintings by Edward Maroli in a room called
        Independent Art represent to me more than the durability or even
        the obstinacy of a work in oil, but the coinciding within
        postmodernity of a world where the way of looking at it and
        thinking about it has everything to do with the way the people
        who are painting are looking at you and thinking about you in
        turn, it's that reciprocal, or dialectical, a relation, these
        people who appear out of nowhere and enter your life in the
        flesh resonating a subjectivity that can only be shown in a
        medium that history still hasn't had enough of. This is a
        history that will be lived and written and painted by and for a
        class next to invisible in the previous century apart from
        relatively brief eruptions that only seem to arrive out of no
        where, what Gramsci in a letter to Tania Schucht on October 19,
        1931, thinking about peasant uprisings, compared to "the
        elementary forces of nature, and they awaken the same panic as
        earthquakes and cyclones," and Luxemberg used much the same
        language in her mass strike pamphlet. It's not about starting
        over or starting from scratch and it's not about forgetting or
        worse, ignoring technology. It's about whatever exists somewhere
        between object and frame, the art that would still make
        something from someone so that somebody else can look at it and
        think with it about what kind of act is this looking at how the
        paint has been put on the wood or canvas and what is a portrait,
        and why does all that is human and fragile and marred about
        representation keep getting painted? Dismiss or just look past
        an artist who insists on doing it neo old-style, making objects
        out of people and painting them from life, and you move with
        that dismissive act into an area that can't be articulated
        outside any discussion of social class where somewhere among it
        the thought ought to be able to be proposed that what internet
        subjectivity makes available and how it does that can't somehow
        be disassociated from Giorgio Agamben's most Trotskyist moment
        in the Coming Community where he writes about the professional
        classes, the educated classes--and it doesn't have anything to
        do with income, or access to material goods, or quality of life,
        it's the relation to production, and cultural production in
        particular--and the indeterminacy of their continued existence
        between what might be called the object and frame of history,
        the irreconcilable conflict between labor and capital

        "the boundaries separating art [. . .] and life."

        Note: The quotes are from Josephine Berry's "Information as Muse
        [part 1]" posted to this list on 25.10.99



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