THE WASTED CONVENIENCE OF PLEASURE
You’ve probably all read this before, but it’s the promo so I’ll repeat it, that’s the nature of advertising…
BIO:
THE WASTED CONVENIENCE OF PLEASURE
ARTIST BIO:
ZOE M. ROBERTSON
To begin, I have no inclination to either write this in the third person or have someone else speak for me. The artist bio belongs to the bureaucratic dissemination of the arts, via institutions and galleries linked to the machinations of corporate capital underpinning culture, which must either directly justify itself as economically rationalisable or go through the university system, which is increasingly and ultimately subject to the same checks and balances. Ultimately the discussion of this is the art, as was it ever: portraits of the wealthy. This is what I make/do.
In the interest of promotion, this year I've done this at ARTSPACE, Alaska Projects, Mop Projects and as part of Serial Space's Time Machine Festival (among others).
FACEBOOK INVITE:
Facebook invite.
I wrote the last one hurriedly, I'm sorry for that, it was no good.
I had a nightmare last night about having to write an artist's bio.
It conspires that it wasn't a nightmare- only a memory.
I wrote an artist's bio:
ARTIST BIO
ZOE M. ROBERTSON
To begin, I have no inclination to either write this in the third person or have someone else speak for me. The artist bio belongs to the bureaucratic dissemination of the arts, via institutions and galleries linked to the machinations of corporate capital underpinning culture, which must either directly justify itself as economically rationalisable or go through the university system, which is increasingly and ultimately subject to the same checks and balances. Ultimately the discussion of this is the art, as was it ever: portraits of the wealthy. This is what I make/do.
...For the purposes of Peloton's Performance Month 2012 I will be making do with what I have suggested above, speaking/sounding to THE WASTED CONVENIENCE OF PLEASURE.
It will entail a one-off performance.
PORTRAITS OF THE WEALTHY:
Been reading this book called “I Love Dick” by Cris Krauss, it's not as good as it sounds, but has it's moments. There was this line in it, an idea for a book title: “Does the Epistolary Genre Mark the Advent of the Bourgeois Novel?” Natch I had to look up the word “epistolary” and almost immediately came across Aphra Behn, which was fitting...
The Wikipedia definition:
An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use. The word epistolary is derived through Latin from the Greek word ἐπιστολή epistolē, meaning a letter (see epistle).
The epistolary form can add greater realism to a story, because it mimics the workings of real life. It is thus able to demonstrate differing points of view without recourse to the device of an omniscient narrator.
It certainly marked the advent of femininity, which in turn invented feminism in support of its existence. That's why I don't want to be a woman, it's so bourgeois. To fool yourself that you could be contrived by your own love letters... How utterly abject.
...I wrote that in a love letter once...
It seemed like the only subject was itself.
For years I had astral-projected myself to a place of cold solitude, just never before was it someone else's. This, I suppose is the distance between making and being made by art. So utterly hopeless to be compulsively making, putting it all on the line, and hopeless if it's anything else. There's nothing worse than insincerity on the part of artists, except those whom never suspect it of themselves. Insincerity must be employed. As we all must be. That's the age we live in, more than we ever are.
Who can say why things are? They are very little beyond the empty fact of their existence. Portraits of the rich, art or love letters, whatever.
Past my last five shows, which came too close together I really couldn't tell if the come-down was due to... past my last five shows, past my last five dates, which came too close together, I really couldn't tell if the come-down was due to the shows or the dates. I think that's why I dress like a prostitute from the 1970s.
I wrote an excerpt from my life, unaware of the inspiration, an excerpt from a letter I emailed, projected onto someone else's solitude. I wrote:
The past few days have been like coming down off of hydro, paranoid, afraid of my own shadow, abandoned. Misplaced sleep catching me up in odd, listless fantasies, misplaced appetite answering for my appearance, with wan, adulterated serenity apparently only the more becoming for all the wasted convenience of pleasure.
I couldn't sleep or eat. I lost weight. I drank too much. I was gutted. I thought I was diseased. My symptoms were echoed within and without. Mostly without. Mostly the lack. Near to anthropomorphic analogies like some ludicrous man. That echo without. I thought I'd take –that which I had no right to- with me. Story of my life.
Speaking of which, something earlier and unreleased:
Soothed by the strains of another's snoring unconscious conversation. You uttered dull puppy sounds of reinforced masculinity. We never needed to touch, we filled the whole room like weak candlelight. And when the sun came up, we were alarmed in exactly the same way. Alarmed by church bells, turning off and dropping out and sleeping through the few present moments of winter daylight, that there might be a time to turn over to you, turn it all over and lay it on down, down the line. Nightside, rudely awakened by enlightenment. We were alarmed in exactly the same way. You wore a watch and couldn't tell the time. And in embodiment I left time behind. And you made sense of the space between us. And we were alarmed in exactly the same way. Don't let it get away.
Lately, I've been working in Fischer until my laptop battery runs out, so fully integrated... from 3am writing on my iPhone, cutting and pasting to the FB where I reckoned some dude need be told that he were “consciously manipulative” and that I thought that it was great... not witless enough to look for an objective moral reality. Later I had to email the notes to myself that I might edit them more thoroughly. I sat in the stacks at Fischer in a lament for their closure, so ironically tuned in, unplugged enough without power points. People used to make out up there, but now the whole place will go the way of computer rooms with their meat-smell human air conditioning, bizarre how reminders of actual humanity are that much less attractive sexually then dusty old thoughts. It was that thing again: the indiscriminate.
Allow me to elaborate by way of another excerpt:
In the renewed spirit of clarification, I always found that the walking fucking quadriplegics were the ones having the most sex, more liable to comport themselves in a manner befitting the needs of the mass rather than an individual. Promiscuity is a condition imposed by the conservative logic of the democratic state, virtue is in pleasing everyone. It's why women conform to the aesthetic of pornography (which is incidentally diametrically opposed to my aforementioned mammalian oils).
…And there were things I never described… waiting like it was the 19th century. The sounds of soft torment that I might offer in a lilting hooked and baited breath, not as actress, but finally, directorial debutante, brief static feedback to a rather more rhythmic masculinity, his or your fruitless systemization, in heady tension with the predatory grace of the birds.
You know these things are really a drafting process, this performance of things/life.
I wrote that the following was a soft copy once. I like the idea of that- soft copy… I should really be reading this from my iPhone, but I needed the physicality, amounting to some comfort. Thesis excerpt:
I had to abandon such bourgeois attempts at externality like the 20th century fashions that they are: consumer culture. When it first occurred to me to become fully integrated, I remember I managed to shock someone by talking about how all decisions are inherently aesthetic and there- fore political, even the decision of who to love. It never occurred to me that I might not have seen the full picture, only that my increasing objectivity was making me increasingly ruthless. I found someone that understood for a little while, and, by existing somewhere in the eighteenth century, he reminded me that what I was talking about, all of this, was only literature. After all, it was only a disparity of perception, like to that between my own two eyes, the perception of depth, the performance of life and literature. It occurs to me that my taxes are a work of art. I want nothing that I can’t use. I am nothing beyond political. There is not a single part of me that does not belong to the capitalist imperative. I am a primary producer, I am the means and end of my own production. Every conversation belongs to a drafting process that is the entirety of this process-based work. I am certain. I am nothing. I am certain I am nothing.
It came out of this:
I suppose that you happened upon me during the Scandinavian summer of my soul, disorienting, nauseating, utterly exhausting illumination. Came to me like the disparity of perspective through my own two eyes, without which there would be no way to perceive depth. I think we both knew enough to see what we wanted in the world and then create it, and in that way we became our own manifest destiny. And you knew more than me to have reminded me that it was literature. I'm hardly the first poet to have taken exacting and calculating care in dressing up (art) to go courting, as though it were a way to collect souls. Reeling and knowing less of you, less of myself in the name of keeping things interesting, a kind of entrapment without which there is no reason for capitalism and it's scientific theories of the universe that would find it finite: expansion and contractions, operations of scarcity that are much easier overcome than come over. I learnt this while losing sight of a star through one eye behind the windowsill, while to the two of them it hadn't moved at all. All things can come into your life for a reason if you so choose it, and it does seem to be the only way to break the routine, the cycle of lust. The only way to break the cycle, one eye open, one eye shut, the stars depending upon the visions of another 3am writing to you. The lone star that managed to penetrate the fluorescent dome of the sky in the finite world of enlightenment, in the city I can't leave.
Finally, and in actual terms, to begin with there was circular logic, and to begin with there was this:
Abandon yourself to the limits of structures that impose control. Abandon yourself to lust and to grief and to the kind of resilience that will see you vilified like the counterpart of the insane. For the changing definitions of insanity, evolving with humanity, will have that spending time in the furtherance of a belief and not to self-promote is contained as the prerogative of the socially marginalised. The capitalist nightmare, the night- mare of a consciousness independent of humanity is nothing if not the nightmare of a humanity independent of consciousness.
