File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1996/96-11-03.013, message 45


Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 10:39:26 +0100
From: jnech-AT-imaginet.fr (NECHVATAL Joseph)
Subject: "Man Created God In His Own Image, Woman Had Nothing To Do With It"	                               -David Greiner-


>Immendorff, one of the more important german painters...........

>One of the "new wildes" from the 70s.


I much prefer the old wilds, i.e.:


MANIFESTO IN CLEAR LANGUAGE
by Antonin Artaud

for Roger Vitrac

If I believe neither in Evil nor in Good, if I feel such a strong
inclination to destroy, if there is nothing in the order of principles to
which I can reasonably accede, the underlying reason is in my flesh.

I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is
untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not
in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason. I have found levels
in the realm of the nerve.

I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There is for me an evidence
in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of
reason. The eternal conflict between reason and the heart is decided in my
very flesh, but in my flesh irrigated by nerves. In the realm of the
affective imponderable, the image provided by my nerves takes the form of
the highest intellectuality, which I refuse to strip of its quality of
intellectuality. And so it is that I watch the formation of a concept which
carries within it the actual fulguration of things, a concept which arrives
upon me with a sound of creation. No image satisfies me unless it is at the
same time Knowledge, unless it carries with it its substance as well as its
lucidity. My mind, exausted by discursive reason, wants to be caught up in
the wheels of a new, an absolute gravitation. For me it is like a supreme
reorganization in which only the laws of illogic participate, and in which
there triumphs the discovery of a new Meaning. This Meaning which has been
lost in the disorder of drugs and which presents the appearance of a
profound intelligence to the contradictory phantasms of the sleep. This
Meaning is a victory of the mind over itself, and although it is irreducible
by reason, it exists, but only inside the mind. It is order, it is
intelligence, it is the signification of chaos. But it does not accept this
chaos as such, it interprets it, and because it interprets it, it loses it.
It is the logic of illogic. And this is all one can say. My lucid unreason
is not afraid of chaos.

I renounce nothing of that which is the Mind. I want only to transport my
mind elsewhere with its laws and organs. I do not surrender myself to the
sexual mechanism of the mind, but on the contrary within this mechanism I
seek to isolate those discoveries which lucid reason does not provide. I
surrender to the fever of dreams, but only in order to derive from them new
laws. I seek multiplication, subtlety, the intellectual eye in delirium, not
rash vaticination. There is a knife which I do not forget.

But it is a knife which is halfway into dreams, which I keep inside myself,
which I do not allow to come to the frontier of the lucid senses.

That which belongs to the realm of the image is irreducible by reason and
must remain within the image or be annihilated.

Nevertheless, there is a reason in images, there are images which are
clearer in the world of image-filled vitality.

There is in the immediate teeming of the mind a multiform and dazzling
insinuation of animals. This insensible and thinking dust is organized
according to laws which it derives from within itself, outside the domain of
clear reason or of thwarted consciousness or reason.

In the exalted realm of images, illusion properly speaking, or material
error, does not exist, much less the illusion of knowledge: but this is all
the more reason why the meaning of a new knowledge can and must descend into
the reality of life.

The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has
been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be
calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really
calm.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
 Joseph Nechvatal -AT- Paris
http://www.dom.de/arts/artists/jnech/
http://www.cybertheque.fr/galerie/jnech
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
 




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