'''THESIS PROPOSAL'''

TENTATIVE TITLE

MY FLESH IS FADE I DEPLOY SYMBOLS WE’RE CUT-GAP RUPTURED AND BEYOND BEING WHEN-YOU-SAY I SPEAK I TALK (IF YR INTO WHATEVER AN ECSTAIC SENSATION COULD PRODUCE FAILURE AND THE BODY DEATH AND OTHER SUBJECTS AND INFINITE EMPTINESS IS AS STANDARD AS SACRIFICE IS TO WHAT)

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Like wondering about attentiveness, how to attend to systems. The body, power. Violence as an ecstatic display of systems. Systemic sensation that could produce the failure of the body - death and other subjects - as a kind of sympathy. I am thinking that death is pure sympathy, in the sense that feeling together might be impossible, how can we sense each other through bodies - we can do it during sex, we can do it through violence - but we are still blocked by the difference between what we feel and how we are. How do we express what and how we feel? So death or pain as sympathy would be paradoxically about acknowledging that we are limited, and so we can feel together by destroying ourselves and others, that could be pure feeling together, to get destroyed. Part of my research for the thesis and graduation project will be conducted through interviews with friends who have 'alternative' sexual practices, for example spanking, tattooing, and harder S/M interests. As well as friends who feel fucked up in general. I want to know how they know they feel. I will also make certain violent practices on myself in private, I will track these through written entries translating the sensations.

How am I using the word system? Systems are ways that things work together. They are parts that form unified wholes, they are interacting bodies and they can be under the same force. Syn means together, so I mean attention to togetherness, being and the world. Violence could display this togetherness because it could tear things apart. It is ecstasy because it is exhaustive, because it drives out. Ecstasy and system share a root word, histanai, to cause to stand. Ecstasy was used by 17c. mystical writers for "a state of rapture that stupefied the body while the soul contemplated divine things." Violence is a way of alleviating the body. This could be sympathetic, feeling together, if we are discussing the feeling of the soul, or how we belong together.

Another attitude I have been working under and with is called being bent. Bent is twisted screwed or the mental condition of being deflected or turned. Altered from an originally straight or even condition. Disposition is a tendency of mind, an arrangement or an order. From the astrological usage “position of the planet as a determining influence.” So how to be disposed to unevenness. I wonder how these conditions are set up or actually how to sustain them in the context of The World. I’m listening to music on Youtube that my father used to play on vinyl in our living room. It’s really bad 90s music, but also classics from The Doors and The Beach Boys. I think Jim Morrison was his favorite musician. I felt like we were floating when my father used to play these songs. Turned up so loud I was afraid of the force coming from the speakers I would talk to him but he couldn’t hear me. Dicere is to tell digitus is finger dico is the root which means “I say I speak I talk.”

The realization of these attitudes leads me to a question: who can you speak when I-say I want to fuck me-forever and if you stop I feel-like my whole body-leaks desire on the world I-wish I believed I could talk-speak but-I-don’t-know-how-to-feel need-I-only-feel loss when I-want to-need-gut up brain is skulls we wake up-drunk we’re fuzzy skulls who woke-up drunk. This question is about ecstasy, what is the mental state that leads to the ecstasy of the body? I think a gut up brain is skulls might be my disposition. Sometimes I wonder about being desire being disposed to ecstasy, I can't help it and it's not curiosity - but alcohol helps me feel curious. Otherwise I am sensitive to the boundaries of my own body and then it feels fucked up to pull someone else into them. Someone who I might not even know, to make that experience shared, because really I it's not fucking sharing, I might just be fucking. And that feels like shit unless you wake up drunk. Or I guess when no one gets hurt. But how do you know?

This year I have also incorporated hyphens into my practice. The hyphen is a way to create compound words. In grammar verbs or words that do not exist together can be brought into relation through hyphenation. Hyphen comes from ancient Greek meaning "under one" or "in one." The terms was used by the Greeks as a symbol that could be written below two consecutive letters as a way to indicate that they belong to the same word. This was before a space (indicating 'new word') was used regularly. I am thinking here about a mark or shape that directs a reader to read things together. It seems that we imagine that all words in a sentence, and then a paragraph, and then a text are to be read as one might read a body (as a sum of parts that are identifiable but that mean something as functions only in the context of the whole that they compose), and so I am excited about a gesture of togetherness in an already unified expression. For example, when I write 'body-leaks' I want to emphasize the relationship between the two words, rather than give each individual word equal weight in the context of the entire sentence. The hyphen forms a boundary, so even though all the words belong in the sentence in order to be read and make meaning, body and leaks belong together individually, before belonging to the whole. They are together, we could say, as opposed to merely being together. The have a relationship that is prior to the formulation of the sentence. They are beyond being, if not before it.

RELATION TO PREVIOUS PRACTICE

I am currently working on a series of texts about work by other artists that I like. In order to write these texts I position myself in the pictures, behind the viewer. Here is one example:

I’m trying a little girl facing left she has short dirty blond hair that covers most of that side of her face. Must be her stomach protrudes slightly like the way kids’ stomachs tend to do, no fat only muscles that go slack and taught all at once. Her right hand sticks out slightly, fingers like a dick. It’s trippy at first. But then it’s just her hand flesh is pale white-ish except for her legs which got some sun shoulders straight and back no sign of breasts but that stomach sure does stick out behind her two big balloons – one orange, one white, like wobbly inflatable cocks and I guess that’s the point the unconscious the backside what only we can see I don’t feel like a voyeur but I keep seeing her little fingers they really form this dick shaped phantasm fuck that the chairs are orange they’re old she’s young but someone’s been sitting she’s only about a foot and a half taller than the chairs’ tops and this orange balloon hovers behind the chair it’s smaller than the white one a scuff of old paint peeks through the new stuff right along the baseboard so much for white when color washes off.

I want to be multiple in my intentions. I can imagine that this feels possible when you work with other people. I work alone, and I struggle to know who I am when I am writing. I think about writing that I want to receive from others and often I reply to this. So in the context of this proposal we'll call these texts that I reply to 'fictional,' or they're more than that, because they 'do not exist.' But I'm sure that my desire produces them. This is a question for me almost always - how to articulate desire - it seems easier in the body/text/work, but in terms of writing a proposal I have trouble starting. I don't think about viewers when I make work but recently I have realized that this is what I will learn this year, because I am starting to understand that this is art. I want my art to scare me because of same kind of clarity with which my desire for a text message could scare me. Communication is scary when you want it, because when you want it you might get it, or not. I think this is like being alive.

The mixed-media sculpture I made called ‘SEE THE WORLD (SUCK A DICK)’ is about that, how to be productive and involved and engaged because you want to, but also because someone wants you to too. This is where boundaries might come in, I think.

RELATION TO A LARGER CONTEXT

Go fuck yourself

To cause to stand

Set forth as things (or persons) or the world. The world means the age of man, whereas the cosmos means the delicate arrangement of making order out of chaos. Chaotic man moves earth and dirt Moves history Regions (Bodies) And heavenly bodies are not the earth Are not in contact with what is. Immoveable mighty chains are cast Without beginning and without end Are passing far The self-same place (Abiding in what is). Habitually resistant habits wait, they fall behind We fall behind resistant parts are static states Ecstatic states When time is slower still.

PRACTICAL STEPS

A gather-practice. I will make a porn film in relation to a sculpture-installation text. This will be about how to get fucked up in an already fucked up world, like the example of sympathy I refereed to previously, rather than trying to heal the wounded you get wounded too. And then maybe it becomes harder to tell who was sick in the first place, or how you got it. So the idea of the proposal is honing in on sculptural/textual/filmic practice that actively develops boundaries that can blur distinctions between sickness and health, life and death, hot and not, being fucked up on power and being fucked up because you don't have any. So like maybe these positions are all sympathetic to each other but we cannot be sympathetic in our occupation of them. I will write in part about violence in my thesis, explaining or articulating why someone, someone like myself, as Vivian pointed out to me I am a woman, I don't think these terms are useful but fuck it I will use them. So being a 'woman' I will write about the desire to die, or to be reduced, obliterated. I don't think this is fucked up, I don't think it is a fucked up position to take. It's a sensation and it is very real. I'm gonna write about that.

This kind of productive ecstasy is something I want to know more about - how can I work with representation as a by product of a different (prior) process. I have been working on accumulative texts and sculptures for some time, and actively neglecting distinction, but I want to practice boundaries in order to make particular strands of thought and practice more (and less) explicit. Like where to make the wounds.

The sculpture-installation text will establish several formal strategies - for example bagging, floor paintings, reading, and signs (please note that these descriptions are both provisional and in progress). Bagging, for instance, is the process of placing shit in bags (shit here refers to sculptures of a certain size; I am using the word shit in order to express a colloquial, casual sense of value - which is to say things that are made or produced but that are also easily re-produced, in terms of their ideas but not in terms of their forms - which is to say they can be substituted by different works - their value coming not from their individuality as objects but rather from the processes that they result from and to). The other process or strategies will be examined in depth in the written thesis document. In addition to the extended porn video I will install several shorter videos that have been and are currently in production, for example the HI DAD GO FUCK YOURSELF animation that I made this year. These shorter videos will incorporate both found footage and originally composed video segments. This is something major to work towards - how to install all of these things together, making sense across media and the space of the gallery itself. This relates back to my new idea to consider how viewers feel invited or repelled by different formal and conceptual boundaries, to use this interaction as another medium or form to work with and at.

Deep fast fortify sinners before the law exceedingly the lord is law is a loaf eater is overfed and unconcerned. Let me tell-you. Crushed (like obliterated).

Very active or intense belonging to life is:

When all my sensation are a sky, I'd reach for the world between your legs. Is co-existing, becoming darker can search up-skirt photos of Demi Moore or other sites (for selves).

Following the world could lead to bigger tits Because you can upgrade to plus size boobs if you want to.

You can see the world on Google maps But some countries don't have street view yet So it's harder to know what they look like.

But you can for sure watch a group of men jerk each other off, or fuck pumpkins, and that's all access you don't even need a subscription.

You told me you haven't done it already and I believe you because it's pretty awkward but I don't want to hurt your feelings, so I really don't know what to say. And I guess the weird thing is that that's why you want to do it again, 'cause I was nice.

“That’s right baby, just like that.”

REFERENCES

Kathy Acker - Blood and Guts in High School, Giorgio Agamben - Means Without Ends; Infancy and History, Georges Bataille - Visions of Excess, Laura Riding Jackson - Anarchism is Not Enough, Tiqqun - Sonogram of a Potential, Brad Phillips - Consensual Violence