December 1, 2022
Diamonds
Intuition. The Muse. Presentiment. Hunch.
As I listened and half watched the Jimmy Dore Show featuring guest host Aaron Maté, my passing glances were arrested by the shape of the paintings behind the interviewee. I can't recover the name of the correspondent, my search fruitless. I think that he was located in Ukraine at the time, or at least in that region. I thought about how Malevich hung his Black Square into the upper corner of his exhibition The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting 0:10, recalling the traditional Russian Prayer Corner.
Diamond shapes, this is what I had fixated upon. Something, someone, I said somewhere in my mind: "THIS." You have to pay attention when this happens. You have to stop what you are doing and take heed.
Also, I had made hexagonal paintings not too long ago. Really enjoyed the experience. Didn't want to do so again just to do so, an artist needs the gears to bite in a little harder than that. But a hunch... A handful of small but robust diamonds. Yeah, that'll work.
***
Giles Deleuze wrote in the first chapter of his book Bergsonism, describing the philosopher's approach to intuition, pushing back on the idea that intuition is something that happens out of the blue. First, he says that intuition happens within Duration, the human experience in time. He, like Bergson wants to render intuition methodical:Bergson distinguishes essentially three distinct sorts of acts that in turn determine the rules of the method: The fist concerns the stating and creating of problems; the second, the discovery of genuine differences in kind; the third, the apprehension of real time."
To nod to Deleuze, I have to admit that I was building panels at the time, and I was not too happy to expend extra material into the same dimensions of the proportions of the paintings I was already making. Part of my mind was casting about for alternatives.
But then there are quotes like this from the translator's introduction that put me on guard regarding our éminence grise:My way of getting out of it at the time [the "it" being, the history of philosophy], was, I really think, to conceive of the history of philosophy as a kind of buggery or, what comes to the same thing, immaculate conception. I imagined myself getting onto the back of an author, and giving him a child, which would be his and which would at the same time be a monster. It is very important that it should be his child. because the author actually had to say everything that I made him say. But it also had to be a monster because but was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slips, break ins, secret emissions, which I really enjoyed. My book on Bergson seems to be a classic case of this.
I mean, really? This makes me want to fluoresce A Thousand Plateaus with a UV light.
That was 1966. Transgression has broken nearly all... or maybe all... of the china in the shop by now. Today's problem: how to transgress transgression without resorting to the reactionary? From the headlines of the past 24 hours, Ye is either trying to do this, or is trying to break more chinaware, with questionable success.
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Colonel Kurtz's monologue in Apocalypse Now: *And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead.
* By the way: When I was a young sailor on leave in the Philippines, I had a chance to ride up to Pagsagjan Falls in a canoe with my cousin. Along there way, we floated past a surreal scene. Abandoned patrol boats, remnants of a village, scarred signs of battle. It was the spent set of Apocalypse Now.
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