Music for a crisis. Number 1. 

Atom and Cell by David Sylvian (Nine Horses).
Beautiful video too: Shoko Ise, photographer/ video artist: epiphanyworks.net 

  "Kublai: No sé cuando has tenido tiempo de visitar todos los paises que me describes. A mí me parece que nunca te has movido de este jardín.

    Polo: Todo lo que veo y hago cobra sentido en un espacio de la mente donde reina la misma calma que aquí, la misma penumbra, el mismo silencio recorrido por crujidos de hojas. En el momento en que me concentro en la reflexión, me encuentro siempre en este jardín, a esta hora de la noche, en tu augusta presencia, mientras sigo remontando sin un instante de descanso un río verde de cocodrilos o contando las barricas de pescado salado que bajan a la bodega.

   Kublai: Tampoco estoy yo seguro de estar aquí, paseando entre las fuentes del pórfido, escuchando el eco de los surtidores y no impregnado de sudor y sangre cabalgando a la cabeza de mi ejército, conquistando los paises que tú tendrás que describir, o tronchando los dedos de los asaltantes que escalan los muros de una fortaleza asediada.

   Polo: Tal vez este jardín sólo exista a la sombra de nuestros párpados bajos y nunca hayamos cesado, tú de levantar el polvo en los campos de batalla, yo de contratar costales de pimienta en lejanos mercados, pero cada vez que entrecerramos los ojos en medio del estruendo y la muchedumbre, nos esté permitido retirarnos aquí, vestidos con quimonos de seda, para considerar lo que estamos viendo y viviendo, sacar conclusiones, contemplar desde lejos.

  Kublai: Tal vez este diálogo nuestro se desenvuelva entre dos miserables apodados Kublai Kan y Marco Polo, que revuelven en un basurero, amontonando chatarra oxidada, jirones de trapos, papeles viejos, y borrachos, con unos pocos sorbos de ma vino, ven resplandecer en torno todos los tesoros de Oriente.

  Polo: Tal vez del mundo haya quedado un terreno baldío cubierto de inmundicias y el jardín flotante del palacio del Gran Kan. Son nuestros párpados los que los separan, pero no se sabe cual está dentro y cual está fuera."

Las Ciudades Invisibles. Italo Calvino.

Tal vez somo dos, uno que sobrevive, otro que sueña.

Dos que no se conocen, sólo se intuyen, uno que despierta cuando el otro duerme.
Uno que arrastra el polvo del viaje y otro que permanece en el salón leyendo los recuerdos.
Viviendo en dos mundos rotos, separados, que hacen que ninguno sea cierto, que ninguno seamos ciertos.

Esperando La Reconciliación,

Aventuras Domésticas.

Perhaps we are two, one who survives, another who dreams.
Two that don't know each other. Only an intuition, one who wakes up when the other sleeps.
One who drags the dust from travels; other who stays in the living room, reading memories.
Living in two broken worlds, separated, so none of them seem real, none of us seem real.

Waiting for the Reconciliation,

Domestic Adventures. 

S/T Bad Godesber Series. de la serie "Aventuras Domésticas" 2000

Two hand made formulas.

Marcus's formula for a better world (yes, he can behave like a sentitive individual from time to time):

and mine (a bit of a rip off of Duchamp's artist coeficient):

"Design a formula for the 21st century’ – that was the directive from the Swiss art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist to a selection of the world’s greatest creative thinkers". Found on The Independent Magazine last Saturday. The whole article here.

One of my favourites bellow:

by Tacita Dean

I am sure Marcus has something to say about it.

I also like this one fron J.G. Ballard.

 

We went to Sun Kil Moon's gig last night at the London Scala.

Love the guy, but 2 hours of Mark Kozelec's rants proved a bit too much for my capacity of concentration and my legs.

Music-wise they are great (in small doses), Mark Kozelec is the daddy of dense and repetitive guitar arpeggios, complex song structures, beautiful unexpected chord combinations, amazing lyrics and self contained power. But after listening to the 15 minutes of Tonight in Bilbao, my favourite track of the last album, I said to Marcus that we should go to find a chinesse take away as the will of my stomach was already stronger than my passion for music.
Sadly we were too late, all I had was a muffin and a decaf coffe for dinner.

It worth it, anyway...

The Wise Man said:

"Never trust a man who gave up smoking. If he is able to give up smoking he is able of anything"

(PC PS: this quote is also applicable to women)

"...En todas las ficciones, cada vez que un hombre se enfrenta con diversas alternativas, opta por una y elimina las otras; en la del casi inextricable Ts'ui Pên, opta —simultáneamente— por todas. Crea, así, diversos porvenires, diversos tiempos, que también, proliferan y se bifurcan. De ahí las contradicciones de la novela. Fang, digamos, tiene un secreto; un desconocido llama a su puerta; Fang resuelve matarlo. Naturalmente, hay varios desenlaces posibles: Fang puede matar al intruso, el intruso puede matar a Fang, ambos pueden salvarse, ambos pueden morir, etcétera. En la obra de Ts'ui Pên, todos los desenlaces ocurren; cada uno es el punto de partida de otras bifurcaciones.Alguna vez, los senderos de ese laberinto convergen; por ejemplo, usted llega a esta casa, pero en uno de los pasados posibles usted es mi enemigo, en otro mi amigo. 

...La explicación es obvia:El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan es una imágen incompleta, pero no falsa, del universo tal como lo concebía Ts'ui Pên. A diferencia de Newton y de Schopenhauer, su antepasado no creía en un tiempo uniforme, absoluto. Creía en infinitas series de tiempos, en una red creciente y vertiginosa de tiempos divergentes, convergentes y paralelos. Esa trama de tiempos que se aproximan, se bifurcan, se cortan o que secularmente se ignoran, abarca todas la posibilidades. No existimos en la mayoría de esos tiempos; en algunos existe usted y no yo; en otros, yo, no usted; en otros, los dos. En éste, que un favorable azar me depara, usted ha llegado a mi casa; en otro, usted, al atravesar el jardín, me ha encontrado muerto; en otro, yo digo estas mismas palabras, pero soy un error, un fantasma. "

José Luis Borges, El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan.

Siguiendo con las vagas disquisiciones metafísicas del post anterior, creo que Borges explica mejor que yo la(s) conclusión(es) de la historia(s) de los varios porvenires. 

"Untitled, from the serie "Domestic Adventures", 2000, Translucent print on mirror glass, 70 x 50 cm

With the help of a couple of beers and an unusual nice temperature, Marcus and I spent some time this evening in a terrace enjoying an amateur pseudo-metaphysical chat.
He was making the point of the determinist nature of life and nature: randomness doesn’t exist, it just that we are unable to calculate the complex equations that rule the events., which make sense.
In the other hand, maybe biased by my catholic education, I cannot avoid the feeling that some things just make sense, some events seem to be meaningful and part of some kind of narrative.
Humans are experts on the creation of narratives, we are symbolic beings and we need to create the “illusion of sense” in order to simplify the complexity of the world. We are good at taking random events and add them to a coherent narrative, after they happen.

It seems difficult to find a unify theory that takes Marcus point: things happens one after another in the only way that can happen, with no purpose, just because a huge algorithm start running millions of years ago and keeps pushing things to occur; and the “intuition” of meaning that I cannot avoid.
Based on Marcus’s point of view, taking it to an extreme, all events in the universe were there in the very moment of the Big Bang, all what we see is just the consequence of it. You must agree that is fucking luck that the Big Bang, a chaotic explosion of matter included in it’s formula the infinitesimal small chance that you and I exist and that we are in this very moment writing or reading this amateur text. But we are here, we can think on this, so it’s true, it happened, we are the miraculous result of a huge equation.
Think on the Big Bang explosion as a huge dice with infinite sides which is continuously rolling. It felt in one side, which is where we are. But there’s no reason to think that there’s only one result. Why one and not 3, or 875943 universes? Does “God” have a preference for the number 1?  Why one and not infinite?
Let’s imagine those infinite universes that overlap and exist simultaneously, one per each possible permutation of the “Big Marcus Equation”. In this very moment “every” possibility is actually happening. Everything is happening.

How does it tie with the idea of a narrative and meaning?
The 99.999….. percent of those infinite universes are probably random and chaotic.
Let’s think now on human consciousness as a very adapted entity able to survive the chaos of the infinite universes.
How does it help us to survive?: by creating a narrative. The consciousness drives each of us through a coherent sequence of possible universes. It’s constantly selecting the paths that keep us in a coherent world.
The theory is a bit solipsist, but I am glad it chose to drive me in the path were Spain won the Eurocup.

 PS (morning after update):

This is an obscure artwork I made for my first solo exhibition in 1995, or so, I can't remember, it came to my mind this morning. It's composed of 3 broken pieces of glass hanged perpendicularly to the wall, one next to the other. Basically the idea was to present, as a transparent and simultaneous event, three random possible stages of the same thing (a square glass broken in three different ways). Three different possible paths (fates) that exist in alternatives “universes” that do not exclude each other. This is more or less what I was trying to say above.

The plastic solution wasn't very affortunate and nobody understood what I was trying to talk about, but it was fun. I am reusing this idea for my next art works (this time I will need Marcus's help)

THE CREATIVE ACT
by Marcel Duchamp


"Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity.
To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing".

"If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out."


"I know that this statement will not meet with the approval of many artists who refuse this mediumistic role and insist on the validity of their awareness in the creative act - yet, art history has consistently decided upon the virtues of a work of art thorough considerations completely divorced from the rationalized explanations of the artist."

"This phenomenon is comparable to a transference from the artist to the spectator in the form of an esthetic osmosis taking place through the inert matter, such as pigment, piano or marble."

"What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion".

"The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of. Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap, representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal 'art coefficient' contained in the work".

In other works, the personal 'art coefficient' is like a arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed".

"To avoid a misunderstanding, we must remember that this 'art coefficient' is a personal expression of art a` l'e`tat brut, that is, still in a raw state, which must be 'refined' as pure sugar from molasses by the spectator; the digit of this coefficient has no bearing whatsoever on his verdict. The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation: through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubtantiation has taken place, and the role of the spectator is to determine the weight of the work on the esthetic scale."

"All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists."

(From Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957)

Another note following the topic that is bugging me lately. Another example, maybe my favourite, of this two ideas:

1- The idea of the artist as a medium at the service of some kind of "labyrinth beyond time and space", very similar in definition to Jung's "cosmogonic entity", Paz's "real world" or Bill Hick's "True Reality". Different names for the same intuition.

2- The impossibility of language to describe the above.

more to come...