In anticipation

Before I put round 3 of the collages up, I wanted to share first a few words about them, which I wrote to a friend in a recent letter:

“I’ve been working on a series of collages, the first of which you’ve seen.  There are nine in total.  They’re all online, on my occasional blog/website.  They continue to interest me because each is a machine with slightly different properties, though with many in common as well.  They unite and divide, make familiar and make strange, simultaneously.  All attempt to regulate, contain, and accelerate.  They are machines to produce certain effects, though the effects are different.  Some are psycho-sexual hallucinations, others a sweet melancholy chemical to be sold over the counter, the perfect gift for that person “who has everything.”  Some come with some assembly required, instructions included, but others are already broken.  Many of the machines depicted produce massive amounts of waste, others will consume it, and still others are completely self-regulating, neither producing nor consuming in excess of themselves.  They each produce desire in excess of the desire they consume (that is, my own) and from that derive their exchange value.  That’s just another way of saying their value exists in exceeding my satisfaction.”

And from some recent notes of mine on Jorge Luis Borges, on the possibility of creating fantastical machines:

“. . . about the possibilities to turn the world into a great fantasy.  It would be a world of dreams, of machines that photosynthesize, bacteria that produce petroleum, worms that weave the strongest synthetic fibers.  However, to have a dream is to posit a dreamer, a guiding consciousness outside of the dream which remains dormant.  The dreamer relinquishes control, and we, the dream, take over. If God has finally begun to sleep, then we are left to our own devices.  In transforming the world into a fantasy,  we simultaneously kill God and reinscribe His existence by positioning Him as the incapacitated dreamer.  To kill God and the mystifications therein entails erasing the very position of the dreamer, a great democratization of the means to dreaming, the de-aestheticizing of the world.”

And finally, from Guy Debord’s “Report on the Construction of Situations”:

“Arising from a poetic application of Freudian psychology, surrealism extended the methods it had discovered to painting, to film, and to some aspects of everyday life — and then, in a diffuse form, it extended them much further.  Indeed, for an enterprise of this nature, it is not a question of being absolutely or relatively right, but of succeeding in catalyzing for a certain time the desires of an era.”

Also, below is a small collage, akin to the other covers I made for my friend’s mix tape.  I’m working out some issues in it that I take up more intensely in the collage-machines that I hope to post soon.

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Finally, below are some of the collages I’m going to paint on for the next round.  I thought it might be interesting to see them without the paint, but just that initial set of cut up images.

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