stagnanTVowels

pigeon headed bird pigeon headed bird It’s as though an intemperate bird much reduced of purpose and motion by Mr. Charles Willson Peale were summoned here to gather dust. Then for want of an idle quotation some piece of very old something that has been gone from our recent moments that has been lost even to itself was again found and then bludgeoned into an unmatched stillness for our better comprehension - read aloud from this brass plaque Disruption is my memoir and it starts with a simple idea, stop. I’ve spent a world's worth of minutes putting on all of those pants and opening all of those beers. I’ve filed away entire anemic days brushing and flossing and then taming or trimming all that could be found cornered and hassled. I’ve done all that’s necessary to enjoin my cult of the serendipitous self to a world of indiscreet others and their desperate hordes of poetry. I’ve done all of this because words follow words. I've done all of this not because I could b...

fig 1.) Untitled (song for paper plate Jesus) It's as tuneful as it is plain. Hey man, hey that paper plate, the one with Jesus name taped to it. Who did that, who did that Paper Plate Jesus on the wall... This essay with all of its words and sense seems bungled in the jam of its tripped up sentences. It sits there dogeared at the tables edge. Reposant is not very easy man. It's not just any variety of old twinkle twinkle, it reads from the small pages at the back. Reposant, is some very special light indeed. It's an old sofa, it's a stained afghan, and a leaky battery all sitting in the corner of an otherwise white room. It's as though something truly wonderful has established this neat climate; trim and not so boisterous but neat as climates go. It's the final construction of this thing that's slipped the yoke of the authors authorial authority. When asked about his time in Tunis Michel Foucault is often quoted as, sensible and lean like a simple w...

Person liked to come around and see Helen Franklin's little shows at the Philanthropic. He liked the soft rattle of their wooden instruments and their plucky accouterment. He liked to tell the other Auxiliary, The chairs might be hard but the coffee's deep. He'd stopped at the Tartlette afterwards. He might have some cake or a tart and sit at the counter with his white porcelain plate his shiny fork listening to the idle talk of some foul economist and crazy astronaut. If he was lucky he might even see Helen sitting there in the back after she had changed. She liked to have a glass of red wine and watch the round clock from the end of the counter. Helen writes these lamentable vignettes that are really fragile and skittish. Yet they sing to him from tough lines like overdun roses that resonate very deeply. Sometimes in August or September when the weather's being short and he's set in a particularly dipsy mood then from his seat in the odeum with the Philan...

Despite the mess the paintings are beautiful and they're very old. They're well hung and make good use of the sturdy light from the hallway. From here in the doorway I can take them all in at once but I want to linger on each of them. I want to dote and be amazed so I move closer. It takes some time to examine even just the smaller pieces and I still feel that I'm missing something among them. An asymptomatic generational pattern of complex symmetry can appear if the tools being employed are either distinct or large enough. In this group I should be seeing regionalism and the state. The Son's of Noah with their puritanical racism and all of their hogs killing a snake. I should be seeing all of this but I'm not. You said we'd know. We'd know darling and we'd know well. You said we'd know now. That's how you put it John, We're standing in line behind a charging wave of incense and self flagellation that's behind a herd of dots and ho...

Goodnight Eileen, it's what drunk people say when they're looking for their brown coats or they're painting in the kitchen. It's what you'll overhear when suddenly it smells like soap and cigarettes in the record-shoppe. It's what I'm trying to remember while I'm cold and my pants are still wet from tripping in the snow. It's what I'm doing instead of fixating on the baroque way that your living room looks. I'd feel guilty but you insisted, so I'm sitting here by myself under a muddy looking reading lamp. It's too tall and two of its bulbs are just dim widgets sans bloom. It wasn't a very long walk but it was deep and I'm super cold now. Lets say, rather than a scrolling line that suddenly bursts into flames, let's say instead that we imagine this narrative is a singular voice of reason and it's completely composed of togetherness. It's as though it has one purpose that will be revealed in an amaz...

poor broker in the open air-a-thon The way it looks from here... Those are question marks that we'll just need to get around latter. Tall as my insignificance is it's way behind us now, She's been dipped in brown shoes with tapered trousers that look gray to the touch. They're definitely not average and they're not for a woman whose ankles are painted pugilist white. Don't you see that its your distemper that's our context Greg. It's like a shadow that calls the neighbors to share a quiet laugh Greg, She sneers keenly. It keeps buying the kids apples from the day cart and it jerks off in our bathroom at night. Don't tell me that story about pretend smoke rising in curling heaps or the meaningful dimness that settles over the room leaving it less dense less alert and more fucking honest. Don't tell me that story tonight. Their's is a genderless intercourse that's beached at the edge of pornography. She needs someone to move the pict...

fig. a) image appropriate for scale use only The following selections were submitted for an open call for exhibitions at the UICA in Grand Rapids Michigan. The spaces within the building that were considered for these programs included ramps windows and dead short hallways. Their should be 10 selections in the list below but sadly one of them was lost before it could be properly archived. These are only sketches of programs and as such they're brief. Still they would have had essays and other didactic texts as support for performance or media related elements once they were completed. Not all of these programs were going to exhibit objects but a playlist of my favorite songs from 1987 was still going to accompany them all. I've included that playlist below. An exhibition with an installation that includes a door that leads to another door named, Tomato. A place for two telephones (ON-HIGH/on-low) A place to screen that really dull video titled, A Title For Everything K...

pickets of trash and muck farmed from the absurdity of our abundance  Stiff bindle to handsome d reams as scaled with maybe With gout as broad as any field I'd lift to the heavens daily dear There's no absenting this lingered staph of need Only truth baled as it is Taut with every depth of string Ideal as bottom seed Below the grain of this dead field Not for any prim ejaculate we But trees endless and amazing trees Beyond this league of days Here to alternate our lonely and our cordial apathy or any other alternate to wit wrung ears. Wake, work, sleep but never reinvigorating the state of our social understanding for one another, it should be greater than the sum that it now represents. It should be greater than just myself alone. My family and my neighbors are part of my organism as my organism is a part of this much bigger vessel. This vessel that includes garbage pickup and public transportation followed by a light entertainment and time for reflection. So it should b...

team of the answer, over there with the leisure team of the port, Hampton and Burns, now that's topical. Seven qualities distinguish the picaresque narrative form: talk about replacing our doors talk about replacing our basement windows talk about replacing our garage's overhead doors talk about leveling our garage floor. talk about removing our concrete  talk about terracing our back yard. Mostly they talk about, Let's turn off the burning lights please...

1.) interstitial cultural covalence We've only ever ever aftered and never ever before that. In the bathroom by the bed the light has a bulb and the radiator smells like bleach sitting on sweet varnish. Your personal angel stopped by like a dried up horse with awesomed teeth and a very sad apple. I was almost sixteen. It was autumn, same as now. It was cloudy, same as now. I saw the poem you scratched into the sink Here is the rose of this day Here is its stalk tethered to the sky Each petal yawns at its own profundity Its nip of dirt Its spray of tongue The pig of my arm is a demon with a single bright tooth and a broad flat smile It easily finds the loam of my length in the passions of this clay Where is this rose of plenty so like your promises Like promises if they were pennies H...

as if from on high (1892) Standing right there on the Boulevard of Michigan's fancy like it's the point on a shiny brass compass or a the setting on a smart dial. Right there facing the grubby city is the Auxiliary Building of the World's Congress. To the west of it lay Chicago brimming over with pride and watery beer and to it's right are the autumnal waters of Lake Michigan. On the Boulevard 400 seekers in their long robes or their homespun leggings or their looped trains of shells gathered from the south sea's wet atolls gather like princely teeth. These are the mariners of the soul, the worlds holiest of holy's and they're being ushered into the grand plaster and lath concourse of the white building. On September 11 the Parliament of Religions opened itself to the worlds most and least curious eyeballs. The dirty mop hands the drovers and foul letter-carriers from the foul offices of government are all in attendance. Sitting in rows under the stain...

my lasting super power... Measure time and number are nothing but modes of thought or rather imagination -  Spinoza Quotes Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza (1634) Wikipedia suggests that diverse fields such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems. This can also be turned around to suggest that functioning systems of its measurement are as diverse as the performing arts, the sciences, sports, industry, and business. When its illusions are cast aside then a thing twice right through all of the spaces and all of the times is so much more than just broken. When all earthly realms are thrown down and their neck is bent then the corpse of this thing will throw open its mouth to purpose and set free the gentle lamb from its fiery thought and from its torrid rejoinders. So much so that the saved will then have a true light for following twice on this, a good day of saving. So much so th...

Gone Fishing, installed in a Marshall Blvd residence on Chicago's west side GONE FISHING, Eric Ehmert, Meg Duguid, Diego Bobby (2003) Latex Paint, Wood, Wire, and Nails with accompanying Text* This work is boring. It includes boring with its white paint and its singular neutral observation. Its ironically misplaced sense of optimism is intended as humorous. While its efforts are too narrow by far and its gestures seem labored or boring rather than shrewd or concise. The degree to which candles were necessary has also never been examined at length. It's generally agreed that EE did exercise restraint during his graduate exhibition, instead of installing his own work he contracted his allotted space to MD and DB. Rather than reinforce EE's initial gesture this resulted in a puerile charm school prank that infantilized the striking tensions that persist within an institutional structure that is further and further displaced from its cultural/visual arts context. Furthe...

Sister’s had these stacks under eyeball since the first Tuesday they appeared on her list. I open the door to the room behind the fire extinguisher. It’s a pretty room with pretty things settled inside of it. Some of them are hung on the walls with a quiet and dreamy weight but there are others that are tethered to the floor like sad pets. Buster is behind us in the corridor. He was going on about something Chair had told him, something that sounded like this, The shape of our language is a vagrant’s bone. Engraved in the stern hip of our trousers lay the slick hormone of our chance to call it… When Finch gets lucky he points at it and he calls it, Finch. When I get drunk I get confused. I get to blinking and I sit down fast. It’s almost always Buster that’s in the cheap seat beside the case of soft melons after a hard day. But I can still see what it as it is. I can still call it Finch if it gets lucky enough to dance. That’s right, dance… On the dias in the back, it’s the folding ...

support constructed from folded cardboard and transparent plastic (ca.2007) Color after all is a brittle host for our content. It can serve to overwhelm but it has no hope in winning. Or an often quoted phrase from Greenberg, You're never as hopeless as authority will be. It's as though they've suggested that a large enough head will slow the ascent of these questionable actions. Abyssal, Dimebag, and Tea (chronology) is a rustic framework of spirited dance (ebullient and exuberant motion) indiscriminately constructed from the slow and the tall. On three of its sides the edges are soft and brown. They sit on a low table assembled from rough hewn planks. The didactic text in the yellow room suggests that the thick whitewash uses a binder of milk, It has been thinned with warm tap water before the requisite amount of potash was added. This wash contains no sweet molasses. This bramble of text may have been appropriate before but now it's largely considered false if n...

a gushing endorsement.. RAH RAH Regarding: Chicago: examining spaces, examining community, examining the loss of complex symmetry (1970-2004) This article will include: Beer at it's beginning This article will include: JPEG's (but it will not accept slides) This article will include: A dedication to the work and commitment of Lynne Warren (it will say after great length, Thank you Lynne) This article will include: Analysis of the narrative surrounding the network of interchanging cultural spaces that were active in Chicago from, 1970 until May, 2004. This article will examine the motivations of these spaces social, economic, and aesthetic developments. It will be argued within that while formal concerns in the visual arts were somewhat flexible during this period the motivations for starting and maintaining spaces such as these remained somewhat fixed throughout. That the aesthetic, and sociological positions within an increasingly decentralized international art comm...

fig. a) mise en abyme, after which an appropriation and new purpose   Friar Laurence:  While corners keep an open mouth to news Nearer now and nearer thee effuse So lurking in the birds Sharp as Tuesday, with purpose, and with smith I've often, for many For many more, I've often too. Guiled this rattle wit. Again... this witless side's abuse Yes yes, Romeo might be fair in Verona. But its the props and their significance that creates this false narrative. As for documentation, that's the real matter of this work. Its the star crossed lovers part of this story. Creating work that actively engages the audience's ability to dismantle the subject-object narrative. Its the dismantling of inertia through the agency of ubiquity with documentation in any form that might take, to wit... Friar Laurence:  Be plain, good son, and homely in thy drift; Riddling confession finds but riddling shrift. Superhero 1: Couple that stately table's service with a parlor...

farm of our hope is sweet from disease Daycare's list, Slow's inimical post-machine sings, The Girth of Gender and The Sour in the Wine's Away. The text above the door is attributed to Virgil, sweet Virgil. Procedural blooms have impacted the practice of textual analysis just ask the kids with the paper bags, they'll know. Or ask the kids with the sponges because they'll know too. The paste pot is as big as a head, it has an enormously intricate lid on top. The knotted wooden spoon for it is laying on the floor. Dead skin, lost hair, plastic beads and paperclips are all sorted according to some slack plan as it's happening. The description of a list should always include: list, industrial shelving unit, white wash, marker, potted flower, shoe box, a sturdy indent with clamp. This is the way of the room that's sitting inside the school beside the tangled blue entertainment complex of cancer glass and grim lit steel.

ed, S. Dot - show 2 for the box (example/estuary) A stout grey mansion with many floors and a wide view of the Lac-du-Platz at the edge of Wabansia and it’s most grand park is Green's Philanthropic. After years of neglect this stern building is now stuffed with patchwork gallerinas, old paint, and elbow grease. The Tartlette is nestled here into the quiet half story just below the promenade that passes in front. Turpsy tiny pioneers gather here and grumble about their coffee burns and ostrich feathers. It’s late in the year and the bakery feels like it can’t get warm enough ever. Monstre Luza sits on her stool at the back of the long counter with it’s pitted chrome and Formica. She’s well away from the other’s chatter and their mulch. A union spigot drips onto the treads of a black mat under the stairs beside her. Next to the spigot is a cold mop hiding its mildewed mopping cheek. A little girl jumps for its handle and misses. A little girl jumps for the mop handle and knoc...

Latin for, repeat me This document is incomplete, it contains descriptions gathered from passages that were examined in the previous section. With some effort they can be abutted and read with a similar intention. It's not difficult to imagine the potential of these techniques when they are applied to the plastic arts. Their visual component also serves to highlight and inform our individual experience. However they can have unintended and deleterious side effects such as prurience. Skepticism by necessity is the consequence of experience and not included here. It's marginal to quote directly from popular culture or from the actual source. Don (Helvetica): True to purpose, the liver of my cup is only a sample that aches. Comma (Texas): Then let us gather around this green tree and pass our warm energy in a comfort circle of joy and bliss. me repetere as transition This isn't a baseball or some other machine for nostalgia it's a master plan with s...

it apostrophy is...  Statement of Intent: I'm tired of working for my gravy. I'm going to do another thing. I'm going to stop keeping notes and pictures. I'm going to open up my room instead. I'm going to hide my bed in the corner. I'm going to harness this big big power of my look. I'll be evident, I'll be the sad misanthrope last seen standing on the dusty floor below the music. The lights will be grim. They will be cold and unflinching lights, blinking at me like a gut knife in the panic.  This is not a chemistry that will be measured for accuracy. Alternately the beach, it's also a service to the function of memory's use of the plastic arts that are stored within. Experimentation and reaction can be engaged with clear eyes to boot but it's important to respect the enormity of our experience. It's only ever sometimes seen with both of these eyes through polished lens or frail mirror. It can only ever be translated very poorly b...

facing south, come what clouds do once they might The drovers and the porters, a couple dukes and a few round cousins are in shift blues. They're usually at the bar but not today because the long counter is a deck for greasy glasses and pork smelling beer in briny jugs. I got Agatha's for a song and some beads this morning. Betta still made out like invincible. I watch as the blue men in the their short suits reach over one another. The beers free and still they rub each others tufted heads to ward off the bad pints. I’ve had about 8 full days to rub my eyes, yawn, and watch my mother bleed out. This morning I was at Standard Manor and I’ve had The Old Potter’s Tree stuck in my head for hours. I blink back some floppy tears and think, It's only the beer. It could be the beer, I tell myself. Really, it's the really awful beer, I turn and say to Betta. Then Monstre Frango walks by. He steps up and taps the microphone resolutely. He tells the blues, Frango is too...

Facing west, also habit under with... In the middle of it's lot sharing time with some loose gravel sits the apex of all squandered pretenses further squandering itself. In the 20's Agatha Bean's was a white shuttered shack with false lanterns tacked up beside it's front door. Ever since Agatha's lost it's lanterns the cubby brick shack has been painted not-white about as often as any not-white could be had. But it's front door has remained as black as pitch-drizzle. Betta, the old lady that owns the place also owns the filling station a few blocks away. Bud and LU live there when the weather gets sticky. On morning's like that Betta comes into the bar and pours a shot for the dusty tinkers on the rim of their day. Agatha's never closes, meaning that it's been open every day for decades. The place is shaped like a calendar so the mixed blessings that wander in won't get lost. Agatha's is warm and mellow with it's variations on...

facing west, added to empty and left for bruised Ding, Ding, Dang, goes the train. All the way to Narnia it's banner rippled in the wind. While they laughed to laugh. They laughed and laughed again in the limned blue shadows. After that was the long pause when they saw the old hickory cupboard half in it's sweet bed of straw. Then the lamp with it's camphor bulb slumped onto it's side in a pile of wanton forb and hemp twine. The tackle, the bell, and the hook smoldered, puffing mightily. Then there was the deafening clap of old timber cracking, of spontaneity happening while all of the horses screamed at once. It was a blinding blitz of orange profundity. Safely down the road the 2 men held each others hands. They enjoyed the soft idleness of the others slim fingers. Liquor warmed their insides as they swapped fortunes. The coach bounced along the ruts, bang. Bang, it's leaf springs squeaked. The driver shouted her fevered thoughts out into the pines. ...