Irene Caesar's Essays for "Framing the Rebel" by Domenico Esposito #2
“FRAMING THE REBEL”
ESSAYS BY IRENE CAESAR FOR HER SOLO-SHOW CURATORIAL PROJECT BY DOMENICO ESPOSITO
(June 9-22, 2013)
(Continued)
5
THE ROLE GAME OF DECONSTRUCTION
IRENE CAESAR ON HER “CARTER RATCLIFF CONTRIBUTES TO DECONSTRUCTION”
From the series “People of Art as Objects of Art”
“People of Art as Objects of Art" includes conceptual portraits of art crowd, produced as absurd role games, documented by photography. This project validates the major art concepts of the 20th century from the viewpoint of human suffering by making some important artists and art critics enact some art concept via creating an art piece according to this art concept in front of my camera. I specifically targeted Abstraction and Pop Art, and staged my role games as ideological subversions to protest against the indifference to human suffering inherent in “the death of art” scenario, sanctioned by Arthur Danto. My purpose was to collide a creator with his creation to demonstrate that creator is incomparably more important than his creation. Because I was shooting the process of creating an art piece, I necessarily looked at Abstraction or Pop Art from outside of the art continuum, destroying Danto’s stipulation that the value of art is conceived and born by the Art Crowd itself for its own consumption. My every portrait in this series is my tribute to the Russian Social Realism, which equates ethics and aesthetics. I drive Social Realism to its extreme by uniting different styles as the different levels of dematerialization and materialization of energy in one and the same art piece. In opposition to Clement Greenberg, I believe that art achieves self-containment not by rejecting any telos (purpose) outside of itself, but by embracing all the teloi (purposes) of human life. This is precisely how the information-wave crystal is created. The opposing teloi are the opposite facets of the wave crystal. Their simultaneous co-existence creates the counterpoint and the refraction of energy vectors in the center of the information-wave crystal, resulting in the electrical shock of revelation. This simultaneity of meanings is absurd. That is why I call my art the Absurdist Social Realism.
My portrait of Carter Ratcliff is a triptych that shows the three stages of how Carter manipulates his face just as the artist manipulates the means of his artistic expression. He pulls his eye, so that one can see the red flesh, stretches his mouth, and pulls up his nose with his finger. Carter is the author of the essay collection "The figure of the Artist" (2000, Cambridge University Press) and "The Fate of Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art" (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996). The purpose of the triptych is to collide the ideologue of deconstruction with the very deconstruction applied to himself. Triptych would be grotesque if not for sincere expression of suffering on Carter’s face. He was really hurt when he "was broking" his face. It was all about this pain. Western artists often depict the manipulation of the human body as a means of expression - and in such a way, as if a man is raped or mauled. And the public forgets or, rather, is taught to forget, that man actually feels pain.
6
WAVEFUNCTION OF COMPASSION
IRENE CAESAR ON HER “PEOPLE OF ART AS OBJECTS OF ART”
I believe that Western Artists are most guilty in the genocidal agenda of depopulation professed by the New World Order globalists. It is next to Jackson Pollock’s abstractions that Henry Kissinger was demonstrating Brice Taylor as his own mind-slave “personal computer”. It is with Mark Rothko’s canvases as a backdrop that Satanists performed their child sacrifices. It is with Andy Warhol’s soup cans on the wall that David Rockefeller openly plotted the destruction of the United States. It is with Damien Hirst’s dead animals in formaldehyde that Peter Thiel is planning to transform humans into bio-robots. Clement Greenberg is guilty of genocide as much as Adolf Hitler. Arthur Danto is guilty in the death of art as much as Joseph Goebbels. Picasso’s depiction of female body in his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is rooted in sadism of how Picasso treated women. Pollack’s contempt for human shape in his painting Lucifer is rooted in his contempt for human life till his very end when he crashed his car, killing a woman passenger even though she pleased to let her out before he started the car. Jackson Pollock was a criminal. He was a murderer who was ready to die only by taking other human lives along with him. It is not coincidental that David Rockefeller is collecting Jackson Pollock. It is not coincidental that London Tate has the whole room filled with huge paintings of Cy Twombly’s “Bacchus,” which have nothing on them besides wide strokes of red paint going in mad rounds, implicit of Satanist (so-called “Dionysian / Bacchanalian”) human sacrifice. It is not coincidental that Damien Hirst encrusts a scull with diamonds. Individuals and nations are bought and sold like commodities in the New World Order scheme, which is nothing less than the new kind of neocolonial slavery, and the propagation of the genocidal ideology of the “Old Testament,” based on “grab and kill” principle. With the rise of the “Internet of Everything” ruled by the Artificial Intelligence, we, humans, need to take the last stand or perish. We need to purge our culture from the genocidal art. We need to return art to its status of being the special kind of communication between people - the wavefunction of compassion.
Compassion is what I was seeking. All my heroes feel the fragility and finiteness of human life. And at the same time, cosmos is breathing through their lungs. Natalia Kolodzei looks entranced at a needle in her hand, with which she has sewn an abstract painting on her chest with a white thread. Dan Cameron is destroying a city, which he built from children’s construction kit on the day, when Kandinsky made his first abstract painting. In the image “Death is Free,” Tatiana Nazarenko yells her life out of her body. Andrey Tolstoy mutilates his face with a thread to make it look like a cubist painting. Dmitri Plavinsky crashes a red tomato in his hands. The tomato drips with blood.
7
ARTHUR DANTO AND THE SPOTS
IRENE CAESAR ON “ARTHUR DANTO CONTRIBUTES TO DAMIEN HIRST’S SPOT PAINTINGS”
From the series “People of Art as Objects of Art”
In my portrait “Arthur Danto Contributes to Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings,” Danto is throwing bright colored plastic eggs up to the air out of a large silver-foil pan. The idea was to let Danto help Damien Hirst to create his “Spot Paintings”. This portrait is my reaction to the development of abstract art in the direction of minimalism. The idea of Hirst’s "Spot Paintings" is as follows. The canvas has grid lines of colored round spots located in parallel rows, and when the viewer is looking at this grid, his eyes are trying to isolate at least some shape (or symbol), meaningful for a human. But this does not happen. Eyes are thrashing around the scheme, and extract the n-number of forms-symbols -- an infinite number of possible interpretations that are all simultaneously embedded in the canvas and equally acceptable. As a result, a viewer comes to the insurmountable uncertainty of interpretation, and, so, to the inaccessibility of meaning, and, therefore, to the fatal futility of existence. Thus, minimalism drives the uncertainty of meaning in abstractionism to the point of absurdity. That's a good question whether Hirst himself makes fun of minimalism, or he was so shocked, like a five-year old child, by the fatal incompleteness of spot-puzzles that he forgot his dead larvae and butterflies for a while. If you read the western art critics, it might be the latter. But, since this issue remains unresolved, I asked Arthur Danto to help Damien Hirst with spot-puzzles. It was hard to catch with the camera the moment when the plastic eggs were high in the air. So I yelled without a stop at Arthur, "Higher! Higher!" - so loud that Arthur's wife, Barbara, who was lying sick in the bedroom, went out to inquire about these screams "Higher! Higher!" Though Arthur Danto preserved his famous gravitas during the shoot, he laughed at the end of shooting. It looked like he found finally a solution to the spot-puzzle. Hirst, who commented something evasive on this portrait on Facebook, has gone around the world with his “Spot Paintings” world tour the year after.
In October 2011, I recorded a video dialogue with Arthur Danto on the End of Art. I confronted Danto with a few aporias of the contemporary art. Abstraction is absurd, because animals or machines can produce abstract pieces that are indistinguishable from abstractions made by some abstract artists. Pop Art is absurd, because if any object can become an object of art only by the fact of being placed in a gallery, then, the very art galleries are not needed any more, and any man can view any object as a piece of art and any space as an art space. Danto’s answer was: let them be, for they need to feed their families.
Will Damien Hirst be buried in the aquarium filled with formaldehyde?
8
WE ARE GODS
IRENE CAESAR ON “ALEXANDER MELAMID: ART FOR RECTAL USE ONLY”
From the series “People of Art as Objects of Art”
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).
“I [God] said, you are gods and all of you sons of the Most High” (Psalm 82:6).
“Jesus answered them [Pharisees], ‘Is it not written in your law [Psalm 82], “I said, ‘You are gods’”?” (John 10:34-36).
“Precious and very great promises have been granted to us, that through these you may become partakers of the divine nature [θείας κoινωνoί φύσεως]” (2 Peter 1:4).
My portrait of Alexander Melamid "Art for Rectal Use Only" was done in co-authorship with Alex at his solo show “Art Healing Ministry” in SoHo in July 2011. The show sarcastically derided post-modernism for its lack of meaning and indifference to human suffering. The objective of the show was to oppose “bad” inhumane art to “good” humane art, which had power to heal human body and soul. For Melamid, “the good art” was pre-modernist and early modernist art. The space of the show was an “art pharmacy,” where public was offered to buy pieces of art to cure diseases, and a shaman’s clinic, where Alex Melamid was seeing “patients”, and giving them “art treatments”. He sold insoles with a portrait of Van Gogh for arthritis; water charged with Botticelli; and empty vials to charge pills with a piece of art reproduced on the vial. He offered skin treatments via projecting an art piece onto “patient’s” skin.
Melamid utilized even “bad art” for the sake of healing people. For his show, Alex purchased reproductions of Jackson Pollock, and decorated them with his inscription that Pollock's paintings help in the case of diarrhea, hinting that Pollok’s artworks remind of drippings caused by diarrhea. In the center of his “Art Healing Ministry,” in a glass case, Alex exhibited a large enema, connected to a cassette with a film. The enema had an inscription “For Rectal Use Only.” My portrait of Melamid depicts how he holds this enema with his left hand. With his right hand, Melamid holds its glass case, which I asked him to put on his head. The glass case looks like a helmet of an astronaut, or as a nimbus / halo (ἅλως) on a Byzantine icon.
Melamid is known to proclaim himself a God. Once I had lunch with Arthur Danto at his home. And he told me that he refused to write an essay about Melamid, because Melamid proclaimed himself a God. Before Melamid, Allen Ginsberg proclaimed himself a God. One of my professors at the graduate school described to me how in the 1960s, at the anti-Vietnam-War demonstration, Allen Ginsberg ran into him, and shouted into his ear, "I am a God. But do not worry, you are too!" After this incident with Danto, careful Melamid did not call himself a God at his show “Art Healing Ministry.” He was now only an Art Priest.
My portrait of Melamid radicalized the idea of the show by actually returning to Melamid’s earlier idea that he is a God. Like Melamid, and Grinberg, I also believe that I am a God. I support Melamid’s idea that any man is free to become an artist and heal people with art. But I do not support his idea of turning a sacred place into a supermarket. The allusion to the “sacred” supermarket, which it was impossible to shake off at his show, made me question Melamid’s art itself on whether he was truly compassionate to human suffering during his long art career, or whether he just remained at the level of conceptual derision. The portrait is ambivalent. It is absurd, for I applied to Melamid himself his own verification by derision. But it is compassionate, for I took time and effort to see Melamid as close as one sees one’s family member, and to see him as he is: an aging sickly man in needs of compassion so much that he despairs to go against the authority of Pollack on the charge of inhumanity. I brought Melamid’s pain out. When we were shooting the portrait, I asked Melamid to squeeze the enema really hard for every shot, so that he felt pain in his hand. This pain was reflected in his face.
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do” (John 14:12).
"The Word was made man in order that we might be made gods" (St Athanasius The Great / the Confessor / the Apostolic of Alexandria, “On the Incarnation of the Word of God”, Contra Arianos I, 16 (PG 26, col. 45A); III, 40 (409A); Epist.I ad Serap. 23 (585Β); 24 (585C); Vit. Ant. 74 (945C); Epist. ad Adelph.. 4 (1077A): Cf. A.L.).
“You have inherited the kingdom of God” (Hebrews 1:4).
“The fullness of him that filleth all in all” (Ephesians 1:20-23).
“Beloved, now are we the sons of God…” (I John 3:2).
“That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world” (Philippians 2:15).
“Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ” (Galatians 4:7).
“Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out And Jesus said unto them: Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matthew 17:14-21).
”If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you” (John 15:7).
“Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the Day of Judgment. For as He is, so are we, in this world” (John 4:17).
9
TRICKSTERISM AGAINST ABSTRACTION
IRENE CAESAR ON “VITALY KOMAR CONTRIBUTES TO TRANSHUMANISM”
From the series “People of Art as Objects of Art”
My project "Vitaly Komar Contributes to Transhumanism" was done in co-authorship with Vitaly at his studio in Dumbo. We used Komar’s artwork called "Mandala," which is an abstract-geometrical painting with a round hole in the middle. Vitaly was poking his head through the hole and making faces. I asked Vitaly to think of five major moments in his life. Portrait consists of five parts, each part showing Vitaly’s face, expressing a particular emotion of his unforgettable experience during those moments. For example, in the first part, Komar remembered how he appeared with a shriek from the womb of his mother in glaring contrast to the geometrically correct but inhumanly cold abstract shapes of the “Mandala,” that can be reproduced mechanically by a computer in endless meaningless variations. His glasses and wide-open mouth with a cry of birth, were as round as the circles of a Mandala around his face in the circular hole in the center, but they were a sure proof that so-called “sacred geometry” is like fire, that can be productive or destructive, and, so, does not have a fixed meaning. Human tricksterism against abstraction was a motif in other projects by Komar and Melamid, e.g., when they made real elephants produce abstract paintings with their trunks.
The work is called "The Contribution of Vitaly Komar in Transhumanism," because the latest development of world-view, which gave birth to abstractionism, leads to transhumanism. This trend shows that those people who irresistibly felt in abstractionism something non-human, hostile to humanity, were, in the end, right. Transhumanists believe that man is the lowest form of intelligence compared with DNA computer, because man is a subject to pain and suffering, while bio-computer is devoid of pain. Transhumanists believe that sentient beings will become vibrations in the computer system (technocratic Matrix), like the color vectors of energy hypothesized by Kandinsky. But if Kandinsky still preserved the possibility of a balance between matter (representation) and energy (abstraction), there is only the virtual representation in Transhumanism.
It is obvious that transhumanists do not realize that pain is the foundation of individuation. A small child bumps against things, this hurts him, and, in this way, he discovers that he is separated from the world around him, and is individual. But to deny the pain is the foundation of the consumer society. Therefore, the consumer society is essentially totalitarian. It is based on the denial of individuality, and on the “Vogue-fascism”. It is clear that the paradigm of Transhumanism leads to the destruction of intelligence, because it leads to the destruction of individuality.
The shoot stirred Vitaly so much, that after we were done, he shared with me his most intimate pain: that, recently in Moscow, his young son, his only child, died on his hands.
10
ANDROGYNE
IRENE CAESAR ON “SAMY”
From the series “People of Art as Objects of Art”
In my project “People of Art as Objects of Art”, my artwork “Samy" stands alone, because the hero of this portrait preferred to remain anonymous and be called just "Samy." This work depicts a New York artist who mainly paints androgynes (hermaphrodites), and who himself evidently made steps towards sex change. Samy hesitated whether to bare his body for the shoot. When he is dressed, he looks quite masculine, but when he is undressed, one can see his clearly outlined feminine breasts, as if his body image is confused, alike the entire confusion over homosexuality in Western society. Our culture is torn between homophobia and homosexual pedophilia. Homosexuality is seen by one as the ultimate tool of depopulation, or as the pure pleasure for the sake of pleasure by others. Gender change can be interpreted as the only mode of freedom, or as the national betrayal in the form of an escape from the responsibility to keep your nation in existence. I expressed this confusion, this twist in the unnatural, abnormal twist of Samy’s torso, in his twisted legs and arms. He holds his arms behind his back, as if he is a prisoner and his arms are tied up. The strain of his twisted legs and arms helped him to bring out the anxiety of his mind.
11
IRENE CAESAR ON HER “PALM SUNDAY OF ALEXEY GUINTOVT”
From the series “People of Art as Objects of Art”
My portrait of Alexey Beliayev-Guintovt is the central piece for my series “People of Art as Objects of Art”, because Alexey is an artist who was able to get out of an Art Zoo cages for artists, built by Clement Greenberg and Arthur Danto. I made the portrait on Palm Sunday, in Guintovt’s studio in Moscow against a newly gilded canvas, ready for his next painting. The portrait is a diptych. In the left part, Alexey is holding wheat spikes, colored bright red. In the right part, he is holding willow twigs, which were given to him by Alexander Dugin earlier in that day in the church. He is holding them with the same grip and gesture as one holds a sword. The left and right parts of the diptych are almost identical save for the striking change of the expression in his eyes - from the militant fury to the state of the grace.
In a perverted twist, a Moscow art critic Ekaterina Degot proclaimed Guintovt a “nazi” and “fascist” for his painting “Brothers and Sisters” (Kandinsky Prize 2008), which depicted Soviet people listening to the speech by Joseph Stalin on the day on July 3, 1941 - Stalin’s first speech at the onset of the Great Patriotic War (WWII), when real fascists attacked Russia. In the same trend, in 2011, Degot and the extremist art group “Voina” with its off-shoot “Pussy Riot” proclaimed Dmitry Mishenin (“Doping-Pong” group) a “nazi” and “fascist” for his advertizing images for the Sochi Olympics only because athletes were depicted as blue-eyed and blond. How fast Degot, a Jew herself, forgot how our blond blue-eyed fathers and grandfathers were freeing Jews from the concentration camps. Degot exemplifies a new trend of russophobia, which brands the national self-identification of Russians as “fascism” and “nazism”, and which camouflages as “internationalism” and “globalism”, though the Zionist state of Israel is founded as a colony, and built as a genocidally nationalistic state. The recent support of “Pussy Riot” by “Globalists” exemplifies their determination to destroy Russian Orthodox Church, while the State of Israel is preparing to rebuild the Third Temple of Solomon, to renew blood sacrifice, and to make the Temple of Solomon into the major Temple of the world.
Alexey Beliayev-Guintovt paints heroic figures, resisting degradation imposed upon Russia through the pillage of its national assets by mostly Zionist oligarchs. His heroism is needed more now than ever, when “Globalists” are very close to complete the implementation of their plan to ruin the world (all national states and all national currencies) and build the world “anew” as the One World Zion, as it was promised by “God” to “his chosen people” in the “Old Testament”. Philip Rothschild revealed this plan to his mistress Ayn Rand, and she exalted it in her genocidal novel “Atlas Shrugged” (1957), which sanctioned the worldwide looting, killing and sabotage by a well-organized criminal group of predators. This plan was to be literally implemented later by Ayn Rand’s faithful student Henry Kissinger, the “Master-Mind” of the world-wide mind-control and depopulation, in comparison with which Hitler looks like a teenage bully.
The “Globalist” New World Order is a one-world pyramid ruled by the Zionist Bankers with Judaism as the one-world religion (in its various forms from the Hasidic Judaism to the Luciferian Jahbulon as the unity of Yahweh, Baal and Osiris, with Yahweh occupying the central position and wearing the crown of the world domination). Notwithstanding Ayn Rand’s pretences to “objectivism” and “scientific method”, the one-pyramid model violates the holographic principle in geopolitics. The holographic principle in quantum physics posits that if the universe is entirely in its every [matrix] point, then, every [matrix] point is not simply different, but is unique from any other [matrix] point. When applied to geopolitics, the holographic principle implies the multi-polar world, consisting of self-sufficient or “matrix” states. That is why David Rockefeller’s plan to build the One World Zion via destroying national states, including the US itself, is nothing less than the ultimate genocide in the style of the “Old Testament.”
Because the Zionist claims to the One World Zion, as well as the entire Luciferian and Satanic ideological framework are based upon the Old Testament, it is time to rebut the claims of “the chosen people” for the world domination justified by “the most ancient heritage” and, so, the exclusive access to the most sacred knowledge. Importantly, the major ideological confrontation in the US at the moment is not the confrontation between Christian fundamentalists and Satanists, but between the Vedic tradition and the Cabbalistic (Zionist) tradition.
"Hindu" Vedas clearly state that Hindu Gods came to India not from the skies, but from the North -- from the territory of Russia. Rig Veda says that the most ancient "Hindu" god was Indra and he had blond hair. We, Russians, brought Vedas and Yoga to India. "Veda" is a Russian word. The old Russian is almost identical to the old Sanskrit. In the east if Russia, we have rivers and locations still called in old Sanskrit, and artifacts covered with swastikas, six-angled star and sun symbol. Blue-eyed and blond people are still born in the North of India, in Kashmir. Our main Russian river Volga (the city of Stalingrad, now Volgograd, is located on river Volga) was called Ra in the ancient times. Our blond Ra-ma brought Vedas and Yoga to India, and the sun worship to Egypt (the worship of "Ra"). Our military leader of Cossacks is still called "Ataman". The main divinity in India is called Atman. And the main divinity in Egypt is called Atum. In Edda, the Scandinavian Epic, it is said that the "Old or Great Sweden" was located on the territory of Russia, and the Swedes learnt their knowledge from the Slavic tribe (“Slav” is derived from the Russian word “glory”). The main Scandinavian god "Odin" means "one", and it is the exact word for "one" in Russian language.
The oldest Egyptian pyramid, so-called "The Step Pyramid" is dated c. 2687-2668 BC. Our ancient Russian city Arkaim (in Urals) is dated in conservative estimates 3500 BC, and is called "Swastika City". It is believed that Arkaim was used as the most sophisticated ancient aerospace observatory. Russian Sun-symbol is called "Kolovrat", which means "near the gate", and likely refers to the teleportation portals and Vimanas described in Vedas. Because our Vedas have technical drawings of Vimanas, which are pre-deluvian, the Vedic culture of Arkaim is older than Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations, which are post-deluvian, for more than 10 thousand years. We, The Russians, were the Gods of Sumer. The Old Testament is a much more recent record, and is just an abridged version of the Sumerian records.
Iezekiel speaks of our Russian / Aryan Vimanas, coming from the North: “I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north-an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal.” Noah’s Arc was a Vimana, and not a wooden ship. Our ancient Russian / Aryan sacred symbols, such as Sun-symbol Kolovrat and Swastika-symbol for the Milky Way designated cosmic wave crystals, and have nothing to do with the Templar Hitler's misusage of our sacred knowledge. Six-angled star is not "the Star of David". Both Six-Angled Star and Swastika are our most ancient Russian / Aryan symbols, which co-exist side by side in our Vedic Temples. They have nothing to do with racial and religious genocide of Hitler and the "Old Testament". Russians were never genocidal, because Russians possessed the mastery of the information-wave crystals, and followed the law of Karma from the beginning of times in this dimension. That is why more than 100 nationalities still live on the territory of Russia. The image of the all-seeing eye on the US one dollar bill is not an eye of Horus. It is the all-seeing eye of Mahatma, which was suggested to the Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace by his Russian spiritual guru Nicholas Roerich, and Wallace then convinced Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau to place it on the dollar (1934-35).
We still keep the secrets of the information-wave crystals and curing “incurable” diseases via the “live” water or the remote transmission of wave matrices, described in our ancient legends. Russia is the only nation that has Special Forces in possession of skills for the non-contact "energy" combat (preserved through centuries precisely by our Cossacks).
We built pyramids in the north of China. The Chinese Wall has fire openings that face China, not vice versa. Up to the 18th century, the European maps show the country of Grand Tartary (Tartaria Magna), which stretched over the Eurasian continent to the Pacific Ocean and Arctic, and included North China and North India. Grand Tartary was inhabited by mostly Russian Cossacks. This can be easily proven by the detailed names of geographical locations in Russian on the maps. These geographical names exist till the present day.
Barbarians thought that our Vimanas are "dragons", and so the foolish cult of the dragon was born. They depicted us, the light beings, as stars. But later, the barbarians started depicting us as reptilians. Enough of Nonsense! And give your respects to your mother Russia!