A is for Aga
Aga Ousseinov Art in a Hermes Window Display,
February 9 - May 2, 2016
February 9 - May 2, 2016
what being can do,a revery concluding in an exhortation
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In a classical drawing exercise, the artist (a perpetual student) scribbles speedily to leave the chattering mind behind, as she flies frantically forward to find, lunge on, and for a split second and another and another...seize the slippery essence of the form. Aga sticks stuff to the scribbles, so they hang in the air -- ideas in the instant they find a blind hand to touch them, as it gropes in the dark, following the instructions from the eye and mind -- the hand elated to find the thing there, just where the eye and mind told the hand it would be.
The hand then cobbling up a kind of butterfly net machine to go in quest of other obstacles that might shed light on this phenomenon of running up against something. Proud of the hand, the eye and mind then get it to cobble up an easel and lift a board they stamp with their favorite ways and things — ways and things they think the hand might like, like birds peeping through holes, or vegetal patterns, elsewhere a kite lifted on a rudimentary scaffold -- but the hand does not yet understand, can only trace and pull out the wandering lines still frantically pursuing the form.
The hand has no idea, but must like birds too, because without being able to read or see the mind's eye's bird, out of the blue, and also out of some kind of blue stuff, or maybe it went back for the blue later, it molds and carves out of the same gunk of the 3-D scribbles a being the size and shape of a hand with a curled finger projecting like a beak to grasp a tool, and attached find those itchy alien avian accoutrements the mind and eye had the hand feel like it grew to set it in flight -- followed by, as one thing leads to another when you open this kind of Pandora's box, an almost but not yet out of the blue panther.
Where space coming to be intersects with time's starting to happen too, the scribbles grow flowery and almost geometric, pointing through time to becoming stars, maybe bicycles, seaweed, scrap iron, sunken treasure, and the bizarre designs of vessels of sentience. No big bang, just the gentle surprise of a faintly glowing radiance nicely nudged out of nothingness. Hand eye and mind playing, just imagining themselves and each other as separate beings, ignorant of life beyond rigorous Russian formalist art school,* as the scribbles wind and unwind into this slow motion poetic explosion mingling metaphors of making and mapping with the things themselves, including those that are given and refuse to be mapped, though they hover harmoniously in the knitting of the net for the minimal ballast a ballet demands.
A refusenik of any other form of life.
Fleeing when not shunned by such unthinkably prosaic life, such ultra-warm, innocently hopeful forms, warbling, sidle up to placid smooth mannequins clothed in ultra-cool Hermes fashion, in part because opposites in similar flight attract like black & white in a hot fudge sundae. Once pulled into the same sphere, they bond molecularly, as fashion too is just language made visible.
Nothing here is more real than the sky, or less high. Because nothing really is more real than that. The beautiful truth in a song by The Smiths alighted briefly, and now it's gone again. Elsewhere, the higher life piles up on top of us, the more its hot fudge sundae side passes us by.
* where Aga was called Michelangelo, whom he uncannily physically resembles to judge by the (Andre Malraux) purported portrait on the skinned visage of Saint Lawrence, hovering between heaven and hell in The Last Judgment — a metaphor for the thick of life? Oh the unbearable lightness and heaviness of being, oh the agony and the ecstasy. I'll take a perfume and a suit, charge it to the art world that marginalizes its greatest competitors; but well, indeed invincibly, heeled history, slowly sipping a cognac and sniffing the most refined cocaine or, in the eras when it's allergic, the most refined opiate of the masses, is a Sherlock who always gets her man, as Troy's trinkets and rationalized trash are buried in the dust.
Don't moralize politically correctly and leave your enemy with all the legs and the eyes, for beauty is truth and truth beauty, and that is all there is and all you need to know -- to find the nectar, bees (so, among other things, let the shadows be). We don't need to live, we want to live. We pop out screaming bloody murder for what we're born believing is our just deserts -- just desserts -- MMMMIIIILLK!!!!, honey, and delicious delicacies, and to magnify ourselves to magnificent magnanimity, as we grow into glorified gluttons for getting to give, the ultimate in frou frou froths for fops, from all of which merely follows the need for raw crudities to give us the strength to scream loud enough finally to get what we bothered to be born for.
Therefore when the cabin pressure drops, the nerves catch fire, the deadly droning drilling doing damage to your drums, grab just enough laughing gas, ye gods, then attend the weak and small, including sickly necessity biting the irrepressibly bulging breast of desire. I have inside information that leads me strongly to suspect that if you would for once first be, then do, then by many such carefully placed Trojan horses, all our dreams for all of us would quite strangely come true. Whoever has dared to test what being can do, I speak to you.
Don't moralize politically correctly and leave your enemy with all the legs and the eyes, for beauty is truth and truth beauty, and that is all there is and all you need to know -- to find the nectar, bees (so, among other things, let the shadows be). We don't need to live, we want to live. We pop out screaming bloody murder for what we're born believing is our just deserts -- just desserts -- MMMMIIIILLK!!!!, honey, and delicious delicacies, and to magnify ourselves to magnificent magnanimity, as we grow into glorified gluttons for getting to give, the ultimate in frou frou froths for fops, from all of which merely follows the need for raw crudities to give us the strength to scream loud enough finally to get what we bothered to be born for.
Therefore when the cabin pressure drops, the nerves catch fire, the deadly droning drilling doing damage to your drums, grab just enough laughing gas, ye gods, then attend the weak and small, including sickly necessity biting the irrepressibly bulging breast of desire. I have inside information that leads me strongly to suspect that if you would for once first be, then do, then by many such carefully placed Trojan horses, all our dreams for all of us would quite strangely come true. Whoever has dared to test what being can do, I speak to you.
photos by IRINA RYJAK
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photo by MOISES SAMAN
contact: krvs at me.com
