Why is Ray Smith revisiting Picasso?


an unfinished hodgepodge 

in long abandoned progress








Important note:  This illuminated, sometime academic essay (versus a post that roasts the previous post into post-now burnt toast) for everybody! -- from novices to experts -

novice

expert

- attempts to answer the question -- why is Ray Smith revisiting Picasso?  It has nothing to do with the art of Ray Smith. (see footnote X)  








generic warning, sometimes this blog might go against the grain to a purpose not immediately obvious. It's your own journey. You blaze your own path. Reading in the order posted could work.   Empathy is the most ecological means of communication.  WELOME TO CALLISTO'S GARDEN, A VERY RICKETY BRIDGE BETWEEN ART AND LIFE. 

Archive of other posts to the upper right in small type.



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estimated reading time: forty days in a desert

Note: Callisto's Garden does not charge for its insights or services. We do accept anonymous gifts though. Anonymity obviates any conflict of interest and meanwhile assists the giver in the relieving of karma that only giving anonymously allows.  Instructions to date: Leave cash or money order under the trash can at the entry to Coffey Park in Red Hook, Brooklyn.  If I don't get it, it will go to another sanitation worker.   We're all in this struggle together.

without further adieu, my essay in articulating the question:
               why is ray smith revisiting Picasso

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1

Of course, where there is denial, people need to get grounded, and that may be how it is in the world of theoretical physics, if you've got a wife cooking dinner, while you float into the ether of abstractions exploding into galaxies of unfathomable dimensions; but most people are grounded enough in matter of factness.  And even astrophysicists who love people and other sentient creatures are bound to give more credence to time and death than any other thing.  We live in space, but time pounds hard at our bodies and eventually kills them.  Meanwhile, though no less real than time, in fact, it's just another way to look at it, space is so unobtrusive it seems imaginary, and it takes imagination to give equal weight to space -- by which we enter spacetime,  come "to know it in the bone". (Brian Greene)

True, we seem to have mastered moral relativity, but this dubious achievement has nothing to do with, indeed defies, ontological relativity*, as moral absolutes transcend material conditions.  To rationalize moral relativity by invoking ontological relativity is just to exploit and abuse it.

5 
In delaying the replete assimilation of ontological relativity, we resemble Mort (the very Mort who with Inga begets the very Kristen who delivers the very Callisto into the arms of the very Veri also called Kerry) in a strange habit of his.  Mort is a master at getting over half way -- well something like that -- through crossword puzzles with all of the entries filled out wrong. He also once showed up at work in one each of two pairs of completely different shoes, like the tall blonde man with one black shoe.

6 
I'll hand it to Mort and everybody, you've got to be smarter than the writer of the puzzle and know ten times more words than he does to fill out half a puzzle with the wrong ones and get it to work so well that when it all starts falling apart, it's too late to repair it. Maybe by doing all those brain building games, and competing with machines, we've grown too smart for our own good.  Let's go back to when we were dumber.

7 
Early so called modern art is a bridge, a tool of assimilating relativity in the bone as much as medieval paintings are tools of prayer -- and in fact, assimilating relativity is related to meditation is related to prayer, and this accounts for some similarities between medieval and modern art.




Okay to cut to the punch, the surprisingly obvious to the point of humiliating truth -- especially for those who prefer to make a professorial salary denying it -- is that relativity is just another word for love -- yes, that's right, love.  You see, the geometry of anything, which only exists and constantly re-forms itself relative to everything else, the whole in a state of constant flux, is the oft invoked (in certain circles) Mobius strip, a band with a twist creating an endless loop that has only one side, inside and outside melt into one another like true lovers become one, awakened out of all rote, repetitive identity, constantly to be reborn and redefined only in relation to the other with whom they are dancing on air weaving through spacetime.

It's not that something is out there, and we can objectively represent it.  One two three do it. Love did it again, here we are.****   

11 
This is true of physical objects, visual objects, mental objects, but, again, not morality.  Morality (if it's done for self-interest, it's not exactly morality) is not of this world, as anybody who's been living in it a while has no doubt noticed.  And verified if they're prone to poking around and prying into things and looking inside.  However, do not despair. The otherworldly does sometimes visit this world, though where it comes from and where it goes, nobody knows.

12 
Moral relativity has nothing to do with actual relativity, but rather, as the latter materializes in the Mobius strip described above, it binds all relatively defined subjects and objects in the geometry of love.  So outside of love you don't exist, find all this in the arguments of Augustine, again affirming the bond between the medieval and modern, but Augustine is actually more like a Renaissance man.  Post-amorous is post-existential  -- which must be pre-amorous and pre-existential, because once you exist, there's no exit.

13 
Actual relativity is no way limited to subatomic particles or over-arching ideas.  And this is no surprise since the things we see with the naked eye are made of subatomic particles and over-arching ideas, and if the subatomic particles and over-arching ideas do weird things, so do things we see with the naked eye; when you believe it, you'll see it -- as Paul Auster's character stumbled into noticing in wise Brooklynese.  Meanwhile, the entire visible world presents itself in relativistic terms, where the visual projections that appear in perspective all around us change size according to how we frame them.

14 
If you measure an object as you see it before you with a caliper, and you move the caliper closer to your eye, the size of the object as you see it changes.  This visual phantom isn't the thing it represents, but it's a visible object, you see it with your eyes, but still, it has no size of its own.  How can a thing that appears not possess a size, a thing you see before your eyes, a thing remaining quite stable before you?  If someone said, imagine a thing of no size, you would think you could not do it, that a thing of no size could not appear.   Moreover, relativity says the things themselves behave just like the visual phantoms.  If you doubt it, read this:

15-20
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html

3

21  
Ray is a New York artist who moonlights and sometimes daylights on his ranch straddling Texas and Mexico.  Presently in his studio hangs an exhibit of work he made with G.T. Pelizzi three years ago.  The two guys down in Texmexico painted canvases white and lay them, still wet, face down on the dirt of the border. The land painted the paintings, as when an artisan applies plaster to it, and a face in a coffin molds its own death mask. Why did these artists in the role of poets, three years prior to a presidential candidate's proposal to build a wall that traverses this very spot, fall on their knees to gaze at this scarred stained land and listen to its story so intently, then play artisans, hooking up a microphone so it could speak to the whole world in its own words?  With relativity in the bone, will we all become seers?  Will artists again, as in ancient times, play whatever role being demands to be heard and heeded?  Will everybody become artists?  Will we need the name, "artist"?  Yes, yes, no, respectively, but only if everybody suffers to rejoice (see parenthetical remark following) in receiving relativity in the bone.   (Empathy increases suffering, but suppressing the function of that region of the brain also diminishes joy.  See research on the empathy and joy numbing effects of Tylenol.  I know a recovered Tylenol addict for whom learning of these effects and responding in a timely manner turned out to be a better pain reliever than Tylenol.) 

Ray Smith and G.T. Pelizzi, Border Paintings, 2013

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One suffers to rejoice in empathy, but often one must simply suffer to face the facts.  This is hard to sell, however, and a therapist must make a living.  To this end, post-modern cognitive therapy regresses to a Newtonian world in which we are assured that there is something well-proportioned and unthreatening out there, all we need to do is deconstruct our exaggerated, "neurotic" feelings and intuitions.   "C'mon," said a cognitive therapy coach in a tape I was listening to the week before 9/11.  "It's not like something is going to fall out of the sky on your head."

Section 2

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The relative phenomenal world is actual, experienced, felt, loved, lived, the artist who represents it is not just jamming and mashing up meaningless colors and forms drained of evocations to look different from what's ever been seen before, so as to dangle this eye popping glitter before happy crowds of infantile art groupies and guided collector/investors whose high cost higher degrees do little to conceal that they are even dumber than we are -- except when it comes to business.  When the babies get used to the shapes, they'll get bored and start crying for something different, and that means business.  

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Actual relative phenomena are also not post-structural, they are upheld by common laws, and all that is why Ray Smith, a brute who will let all the big babies cry their eyes out and sleep right through it, is revisiting Picasso, who is so pre-post-erously modern he is ancient, of the era before art became a thing.  His works aren't autonomous works of art, they have nothing to do with art for art's sake.  They are tools of conscious unity with the unified field in the thick of life, when you rise up, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, that ye may remember and love the bigger thing you're a part of no less than you love yourself, where a god who took a bath is still the same god, especially if this god is just the word, or word, meaning -- well put!  You can't trust the labels, but you can trust the sound and fury running all through it are signifying something of some significance. Of course, you can also trust these iconoclastic word lovers who love the whole as they love themselves or any part, are bad to the bone until our cash runs out.  But c'mon, it's almost impossible to be green, to be occupied by everything, whose ways are not our ways -- and always shatter all the idols we turn things into so naturally, and so easily naturalize.  Who would ever do it without a gun pointed to her head?

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You see, there were some earlier dark ages when nobody could think of anything positive to say, they only knew that they were post-ancient, and probably soon would be post-everything, as the apocalypse was nigh.   But then in the high Middle Ages some artists and thinkers took the preposterous leap into pre-post-erousness.  We're not just not ancient, we're also ancient, like a river flowing always different always the same, said some, stressing the sameness, but others stressed the difference, the monstrously modern, gothic novelty of the present, and others wove the sameness and difference to create something modern but maintaining classical principles, and the world has been modern ever since -- if it ever isn't modern; even the dark ages are something novel, something other than just post-ancient, they just lack the imagination and vocabulary, or maybe the guts to define it.  Alas, at the detonation of the atomic bomb, we entered another yet darker age, when it really feels like this time we could pull off being post-everything.  Although their ranks are many and myriad, they all resemble zombies, by which it's pretty easy to see through those who pretend to be optimistic.  

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I quite agree with the savvy that to claim a direct connection to the preposterous high medieval moderns who defy the last dark age to affirm belief in teleological progress not just in science, but in ethical life and everything, just because a guy from a tribe of nomads who talks to bushes that catch  fire out of the blue says the universe has given the okay, and a lot of people take the ball and run with it until they figure out who threw it -- could not be more preposterous.  But that's why they call it preposterous! So long as you're being preposterous, and you know it, you're doing it, even if it's preposterous, you're pulling it off.  And so it has been since the fall of man into the discontents of civilization and the first of his preposterous redemptions. 


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Btw observe it carefully and you will find that language is quite alarmingly lucid when we let it lie (I mean don't poke it, twist it, use it, just let it lie there and watch it, but of course it also has to lie a little; if it perfectly represented the thing it points to, it would be that thing, not some language describing it) instead of twisting it and misusing it and not paying attention to a word it says.   Forgive me for repeating myself.  Relativity is a sea that folds back on itself and swirls around itself, and never seems to get anywhere, but that's only the wheel that's going around in circles, not the wagon.  

5

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Freudian analysis, based on a relative phenomenal world in which truth always emerges newly from the present context is a can of worms, kind of like life.  It takes mettle, faith, hope, charity, and every other virtue to enter and navigate a relative world.  No wonder it was abandoned, first by the analysts themselves, who generally could not stay awake, so deep was their resistance.  And when it's not abandoned, does it ever work?  It works if you work it, but who ever works as hard as a pill?  

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Well, I know at least two big pills who work as hard as pills.  One is Ray (who by the way popped into the world on Valentine's Day), and the other is yours truly.  We're bonded to grandparent Balzac and Zola pills while rebelling against parent prozac and zoloft pills courtesy Beth McGroarty inspired by me, which only treat the symptoms.   All the big pills are all as dumb as we are, which is not too dumb, but dumb enough, so as not to go to hell in a hand basket, to do what we're told by what tells us what we're told by what tells us we're told etc. etc.... which is to work our arses off.*****  (We worked our arses off to crack that code, you'll have to trust us or do it yourself.)  Well put! word. 

For those who are wrongly
 trying to read this in less than forty days.

Recommended break --

 if you haven't yet taken one.

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Imagine if everybody worked as hard as we big pills do, not just because she loves her work as much as we do, but because she's as scared of hellfire as we are quite possibly dumb enough to be, whether or not we're dumb enough to admit it to ourselves, let alone anybody else.  Or maybe I am dumb enough, because when my dad on his last stretch in the ICU caught up with science and lost his grip on the Newtonian universe, he must have got stuck where he was in his head forever.  I pray he made it back to Arizona holding me on his lap with my doll in his cowboy hat.  But just in case he's roaming around in circles in the wrong desert -- knowing Harry, it could happen -- as our brain waves are all connected, and time is just a space, as even Nietzsche notes, I do my best to think him home.  (Now shake hands with Thomas, Friedrich, and admit you too enjoy watching the avaricious, envious, retaliating resentful writhe in hell.)

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Imagine somebody stuck in, or maybe for him it's an even better heaven than heaven to keep spiraling around hell, purgatory, and heaven.  Except when harrowing a hell of horrific chimera writhing in the just reward for their avarice, pride, gluttony, envy, fraud, etc., our happily horrified observer comes on a dear friend and mentor kept down there for an infraction of the rules, as this observer discerned them at the instant of his crossing out of time, but in truth the observer never could see any deadly sin in this infraction.  As our observer exits this old friend's circle, he beholds the friend's naked body, skinny legs and all, sprinting off defiantly "like one who wins instead of loses" until he disappears into the distance, then dissolves into another disjointed chimera, in this case trying to resolve itself into a noble centaur, but despairing integration, fallen on its knees in dismay. 

33
Meanwhile the visitor has departed hell and is spiraling up through purgatory, quite content to identify with sinners like himself flagellating themselves to purge themselves of all their harmfully flawed ideations.  When he finally arrives again at the pinnacle of paradise, that self-conflicted centaur aforementioned has melted into a yet unknown phenomenon with no size in an eleven-dimensional space so luminous and joyous words cannot describe it. Imagine. It's easy if you stop trying so hard, and just get to it and keep at it, baby steps -- tortoise wins the race.  

34
Meanwhile, back on the ranch, bring on them Newtonian constructs. We got the weapons to shoot them full of holes, and I know a guy who can turn on a dime and take on a gang of ten in a single spray. And then the harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all.

Images throughout from 
Ray Smith, Unguernica, at Stux Gallery  
April 27 – May 28, 2016.

Newtonian dream inoculated by self-knowledge

Only their gazes are loaded, but you get the picture,
unGuernica wants YOU.


and rest assured Papa Ray won't slack off
with three such loaded gazes pointing right between his two bull's eyes.

for catalogue of all the tools in the Ray Smith Unguernica toolbox for assimilating relativity and preventing another Guernica, see

http://www.raysmithstudio.com/gallery_un/

note: the image of the tool, while somewhat numinous and purveying a few of the qualities of the original, is not the tool itself.

Ray Smith Studio has neither sponsored this ad 

nor officially approved it.

footnotes

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(The original statement to which the footnote was appended reappears here, though it might not still exist in the text above.)




1.  Our mission impossible is to restore the function of language (involving a surgical operation that makes mincemeat of all the categories in which everybody's invested, violating the current rules of what goes where and when and with what)*

*  by zapping those rotten to the core, and otherwise pruning all the bird-like word calls back to their proper, original usages in order to restore the roots, their connections, and the root feeding network (mycorrhizae) of all words, in whose decayed or refreshed state you can read the decay or refreshment of all of language.  I prune words by using them as originally intended, either through research, but more often by simply noticing how the word defines itself in gathering the constituents of which it is made - as with the word "preposterous".  When you attend carefully to one word, the other words also begin to grow more transparent, as is more evident when writing, perhaps, than reading. Still, you can immediately notice, in the careful attention to and the removal of the brown rot clinging to just one word, the lively response of the whole, already greening plant.

Language is the root (and flower) of human being,
a way of playing that can work if you practice and plan.

Maintain the roots and the plant will flourish.

Language is a subterranean network
of continuous sounds meanings and memories
that process the nutrients of collective life.
And so it is critical to sustain 
the viability and vitality of every word 
in common usage and that of all of language, 
as all of human and human affected life is filtered
 through, if not imagined into existence, by language.

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2.   You don't want to get this essay over with, you want to get stuck in this essay forever.**

**this essay being the two thousandth, and so far best failed version -- that's how many tries it typically takes to invent the light bulb -- of my art history dissertation on the origins of perspective in a fresco by Giotto -- the one that long ago melted into the first version of this interdisciplinary thesis in creative (I prefer to call it receptive) writing, art history, and philosophy.  You don't recognize the fresco, reader? 

continued (after you arrive at the promised land in forty days) at

http://callistosgarden.blogspot.com/p/complete-second-footnote-to-previous.html

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3.  Or more precisely, of a Mobius strip, a band with a twist, in which inside and outside melt into one another like true lovers become one, awakened out of all rote, repetitive identity, constantly to be reborn and redefined only in relation to the other with whom they are dancing on air weaving through space -- like you and me, reader!*** 

*** Such visual constructs are much more articulate than verbal language, as you can move onto the next proposal without leaving the one before it behind.  Moreover, the visual merely suggests itself, and cannot overstate the case.  Verbal language that tracks and shadows visual language is no less articulate, just more compact, as all the amorphous, color smudged pieces that long seemed gratuitously humped and valleyed start to lock together -- it's a puzzle!, the more they collect, the more saturated the qualities.  As the poet Robert Kelly writes -- color asks, are you me yet?  But wait, do you want to fall into a pool of colored light projected by James Turrell, and never go home again, or is that just a restorative vacation?  I propose that the best visual meals aren't raw, they're just cooked to bring out the taste instead of drown it.  You always denigrate what you idealize.  Art is a practice, leave it at that. Yoga is practice, leave it at that.  Relativity is a practice, leave it at that. Painting is a practice, leave it at that. This essay has nothing to do with the art of Ray Smith.

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4.  As Saint Thomas Aquinas puts it -- the whole world is emerging out of nothing in each present instant.****

****Intuition and instant application of relativity with the visual thinker, Thomas Aquinas -- he would dictate six arguments to six scribes simultaneously, and periodically fall on his knees and weep -- is born in a night to perish in a night, as Saint Augustine, who separated sign and signified, setting the terms of what we call modern science, returns to the fore in the Renaissance.  In the infinitely misguided genius of the West, we fill out full half of the puzzle based on this error -- that objectivity is possible, that we can know everything (or anything), that the sign can really be divided from the signified -- until it all falls apart in the illusion that codifying, rationalizing, and experimentally validating relativity helps at all in assimilating it in the bone -- unless you're a magus (if you made it this far, you're in! welcome to freshman flying for warlocks and witches...oh no, looks like we've got some bad eggs, sigh, well at least they're exceptional (which only means good everywhere else))  -- and now we all live under the sign of the bitten apple.  

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5.  This test of sentience, though, is infallible; if you see yourself in the mirror of this text, you're still alive, not just a ghost!*****

*****If not, seek immediate help from a verified resurrection practitioner. Witness the state of Polyanni, professional resurrectionee. It is common knowledge that at least three separate resurrection practitioners have resurrected him.     


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6.  All the big pills are all as dumb as we are, which is not too dumb, but dumb enough, so as not to go to hell in a hand basket, to do what we're told by what tells us what we're told by what tells us we're told etc. etc.... which is to work our arses off.***** 

******One day Ray, who used to have a studio on the other side of the wall from mine -- all my friends are the greatest artists -- told me he bumped into the Deways, a long lost branch of the big pill family including Chip, Sally, Sly, Shy, Skip, Slip, Skid, Slid, Wonk, Hurl, Wen, Flip, Stow, Sen, Zap, Bong, Bop, Shrivel, Swivel, Swerve, Bash, Sneak, Rob, Bob, Sob, Bear, Jenny,  Trot, Gallop, Saunter, Shuffle, Mary, Fritter, Peter, Dribble,  Bounce, Boing, Limp, Jimmy, Tow, Drag, Lurch, Swep, Yank, Tug, Kick, Fay, Kerry, and Veri Kerry, sometimes called Tiptoe.

footnote X.  (Please read whole essay before reading.) If the paradox marked for this footnote (still) seems puzzling to anybody, that's because the relative world is a puzzle.  Each and every part is unique, anomalously cut, but fits into adjacent parts that humans call lovers (which are hard to find, as there are many false ones, but when you find the real one, it sticks).  Science stares at the chaotic pile of strangely cut stuff and starts to sort the pieces by color or other traits.  Some faithful scientists, like Einstein, are artists who take the next step and start to put parts of the puzzle together, but such scientists are few, and fewer and fewer.  Today most people, especially scientists, are specialists in, and highly invested in, the categories used to sort the pieces.  Despite the resemblance -- in their anomalousness and in their way of fitting into their lovers --  of the pieces to puzzle pieces, these specialists -- today even art is a specialty -- deny it's a puzzle that when assembled creates a shared image of the world, the image of love as being, the vision of a visual order, where language serves sensed truth rather than fragmenting truth to serve the categories of language.  Here cognition locks into sensation, having found its long lost mate in pieces of rare color and texture that defy the categories. By microscopic observation and careful tracking of the provenance of the pieces, I found the very image and begin to elucidate it in the unfinished, not yet published blogs referred to below, though the task is difficult -- as to understand how it works is one thing, but to see seeing itself you must acquire a seventh sense. 

welcome to the promised land








(some of the arguments here are reiterated in other posts.)

Callisto and me, by Moises Saman

krvs@me.com

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