© bellu&bellu

Untitled
Exercises in Reading, #9

postcards from the museum’s depot

Museum’s Times                    On the stove the second coffee of the day, it is 11:13. The air escapes from the machine, announcing the pressure which is going to push the water through the coffee against all forces of gravity. In my mind, there is this endless unproductive, maybe even only supposedly reflexive thinking, that seems to be rather the expression of a kind of blockade –  it’s like wearing a muzzle keeping the mouth filled with  silence.               I immerse into the idiotic speechlessness of my own paranoid, abstract discourses, that endlessly try to do nothing else than historical narrations usually do as they search to examine the past rather than to elucidate it, relying on a linearity of fantastic simplifications, that functions just as writing does, too. From this perspective, the relationship of history and hysteria might need to be thought differently, as inherently intertwined, as different modes of production – yet of time: while history means the incessant production of narrations, hysteria implies the endless production of bodies. their interdependency generates cascades of meaning switching between signifier and signified in an almost hysteric proliferation of meaning like a ponzi-scheme, in which meaning is conceived as a fluid surplus value permanently oscillating between sense and nonsense making, and in which language and thinking always fall back into each other, thereby short circuiting a surreal, irrationale reasoning that makes it impossible to think, but is itself thought from the outside as an externalised, material process, which withdraws itself from any controlled production of meaning, keeping this process in a fragile state of uncertainty, in which meaning needs to be permanently ascertained, adapted and reproduced to keep the symbolic ponzi-scheme steadily working, also in the museum.                    It is the dissociation of time into past, present, future which creates the need for language and writing, also for museums. If you lose language you lose time as a conceptual tool and you fall back into seeing, as it is the mode of perception which runs parallel to memory. Perception however is mainly informed by seeing and only in the very short moment, when this relationship is inverted, you remember before seeing and memory comes as a déjà-vue.                           Maybe the museum is also informed by the fascination for stories – primitive fascination as a form of primitive accumulation – like the idea of desire which makes a starling be part of a swarm, writing collective signs as forms and figures into the sky which only exists in the very moment of their articulation without any possibility to be fixed nor externalized. It’s the same immanence of plants, which are completely embedded in their time, without language and memory, their memory functioning as a shifting of permanent repetitions and differences, not unlike the swarm of starlings as their permanent movement chains their contacts and enables the production of collective figures based on the contingencies of their relations to each other – ambivalence being the effect of meaning, not the algorithmic precision striving for identity which conceives divergency ever as error – it only happens in the now.                The museum yet functions according to the theory of surplus value as it desires and establishes the relations of power it maintains, otherwise the ponzi-scheme of meaning would just collapse and lay bare its tricksterism. So the museum depends on the same accumulation as capital, only its value is measured in stories and bodies. That’s how capital accumulates, how power accumulates, but also how meaning accumulates – without intention, like a story without intention, like a sentence without intention, like a sign without intention which is nothing else but material. That’s why each intention needs its own temporality like a starling moving in a swarm. It is 11:21 now.

What do we need art for?

On October 12th, 2020, at 10.50 at night, the I Ching answered,

(25) Wu Wang
(Ideology &)Innocence
Perseverance furthers.
If art is not
As it should be,
It has misfortune,
And it does not further it
To undertake anything.

(53) Chien
(Opportunism &)Development
Progressing in what is right
Thus art may set
The country in order.
Its place is firm,
And it has attained the middle.
Keeping still and prevailing:
This makes the movement inexhaustible.

About my experience/contribution within the frame of Historia-Hysteria project

We dearly thank Helga, Ioana, Mihai, and Razvan for their time, care, love and patience to engage in countless and endless discussions, which all became part of our attempts to think about time in the museum.

Where I am (situated) right now (it could be artistically, geographically or both)

The snail slowly crawls up the window of the museum
And waits
It is autumn