Feign. Selected Texts

Víctor Albarracín Llanos

FeignSelected Texts


FeignSelected Texts

LaParteMaldita

Institut für kleines Licht

Los Angeles, CA

7. Foreword

11. The Intrinsic Sadness of Art Careerism15. The Specter19. like21. Some Aporia on Community27. Aurea Mediocritas31. Perdonarás37. Mastication41. The Man Without Qualities45. Feign46. An Idiosyncratic Lexicon for a Crit Class47. The Power of a Smile48. Anthem for a Deprived Neighborhood49. Rap of Misfortuned Days53. Falling into the Void

65. Biography66. Image Credits68. Acknowledgements

7.

Foreword

This book is a compilation of writings from 2013 on. Most of them are school assignments, the rest, babbling. I made this book as part of a solo show. Then, it has to be considered a piece. The way you choose to approach and criticize this piece is not part of my business. It was Marcel Proust who stated that “les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère.” I wrote this book in a langue étrangère, but I can’t define it as beau. Other words come to my mind when I think about what I wrote, and those coming words are never related to the specific (lack of) qualiti(es) of my writing. Is not that I refuse to see the intrinsic mediocrity of this product, but is more that I’d rather stare at its whateverness, since only what is whatever results capable, under my consideration, to generate some form of experience, if there’d be something worthy of being designated with the word “experience” today, when the crisis of the experiential has been the topic of a myriad of the thickest unread books and treatises ever.

Unable here to write in Spanish, since I want to feel I have some sort of communication with my potential readers, and my potential readers are here, mostly, English speakers, I decided to pretend I knew how to write in the Faulkner’s mother tongue, consciously positioning myself not only as an English speaker but as an Author in English. Therefore, my broken English has to be assumed

8. VÍCTOR ALBARRACÍN LLANOS

as a stylistic element of my prose and not as the notorious handicap of a crippled migrant.

Learning the rudiments of English writing wasn’t something I did in a proper way. I just licensed myself to pretend I knew the how-to. But one thing is pretension and other, completely different, is writing. So this piece can be located somewhere in between pretension and residue.

It might be that you were upset because of this residual condition, it might be that you could, might, must, use your time reading a real jewel from a real English author, but here I am, trying to tell you that written residues aren’t quite bad, so let me bring you a quote from this Proustian French writer, Roland Barthes, who wrote, maybe you already know it, that “écrite, la merde ne sent pas.” Then, since this piece belongs to the category of written shits, any form of special protection, i.e., a mask, or an incense stick to remove the noisome condition of my writing, results excessive and probably embarrassing for you.

Without gloves, I invite you to get in touch with this piece of my shit. I invite you to consider this sterilized shit as a piece of something else, eager to have a place in the world, a little world created through the transference of my shit into your expectations of what a piece should be.

The Author

9.

For quite a while I had been good for nothing. I am forty years old... The idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind, and I set to work at once.–Marcel Broodthaers

11.

The Intrinsic Sadness of Art Careerism I

I’m escaping from ontological capture, I’m making my art career I’m collaborating with the amazed masses, I’m improving my art career I’m criticizing the capitalist lexicon, I’m fostering my art career I’m deframing the art’s temporality, I’m enhancing my art career I’m reshaping the ways of action, I’m positioning my art career I’m politicizing every discursive practice, I’m advertising my art career I’m redefining the social contexts, I’m socializing my art career So sad an artist without a career to caress So sad an artist without a career to care So sad an artist without a career So sad an artist So sad


The Intrinsic Sadness of Art Careerism II

I never wanted to make an art career; I just wanted to be an artistI didn’t expect to have an agenda; I just wanted to be an artistI’d rather never have been tempted to make art; I just wanted to be an artistI regret my own production; I just wanted to be an artistI feel insulted to be defined, to be tagged, to be accused, to be praised because of the shits I make, since I just wanted to be an artistLong ago, I became aware of my opacity, of my bias, of my compromised position; that’s why I wanted to be an artist I was told that art is freedom, therefore I wanted to be an artistNow, it’s supposed that I’m an artist, but what kind of artist did I become in order to be an artist?An artist fulfilling your whimsical ethicsAn artist illustrating your fashionable political fantasiesAn artist polishing the mediocrity of your shabby aestheticsAn artist theoricing the radicality of your bureaucratized constructionsAn artist sculpting in bronze and neon the triumphant natureof your irrelevance

13. THE INTRINSIC SADNESS OF ART CAREERISM [I-III]

The Intrinsic Sadness of Art Careerism III

Success is waiting around the cornerto bite the neck of the perennial loserSuccess is never this shit you pursuesince it’s the hunter and not the prey

These fake sparkles deluding assholes are just the crumbles after the festsuccess is silent and never publicand it’s no matter to boast and tell

I stay alive, without ambitionmy failure’s warm and sweet at nightIt has no fangs and no expectationsbut make good jokes each time I slip

15.

The Specter

My faith is in the Specter, and there it shall remain.–Royal Trux

Everybody says “Carpe Diem, Carpe Diem, Carpe Diem.” Everybody cherishes their lives. Everybody grasps the day, expecting to be a worthy one. On a literal translation, ‘Carpe Diem’ could be interpreted as “the day within reach of the hand,” but I’d rather translate it, for the fuck of it, as “the fate in the lines of your hand.” You make your life by hand, and your hand-made days keep, in the hand that makes them, the traces and the directions of your general destination. A territory under permanent construction and, simultaneously, the map where everything in your life is done, carved in the skin of this hand that shapes your days.

You’re putting your hands to work everyday since you’re an artist, and artists are supposed to be so handy.

Work and fate... why should you work if everything’s already decided on the palm of your hand? That’s the question for an artist who thinks as an artist does. And, maybe, the answer from this artist who thinks as an artist does could be that, by working, by hand making, he or she is challenging his or her destiny; by making, the artist is throwing off some of the permanent weight he or she is carrying on his or her back. The artist, through hand making, is getting rid of the weight of his or her life, is escaping from gravity, and is making new worlds.

Art is this touch of your hand, this touch that turns everything you touch into gold. You, artist, King Midas, operating the miracle of transformation by a touch of the hand.


You, artist, can take a grain of sand, a square of land, a shovel of mud, a turd (of shit, evidently), to create something shiny and beautiful. Not only an object, you, little Manzoni... I don’t even have to say a word about art as an object, you know better than I know all these things said about the crisis of the object, but then the object of your making could be your life, the objective crisis of your life, the sculpting of this whole set of contingencies, works and efforts, relations and thoughts, relationships and exchanges making crisis and only made possible as a permanent crisis.

Not as healing. There’s no health. As a symptom. As a ghost. As a trace.

Hey, guys, Hi five everyone! Let’s make us just one from our shrapnel-like beings. Just communicate our tormented artselfs through the power of our hand-made art lives. Come here and hold our hands together to make the magic happens.

But, what a cliché this idea of people holding hands together. Such a precarious and naive notion, this golden idea of everyone holding every other’s hand. What a silly world this one of a bunch of people holding their hands as a mass of hands, mutually paralyzing their hands, disabling their hands in ‘community’. More in the fashion of a Benneton ad, this shiny communion is totally fake. A world of crippled people holding other arthritic hands, scared of anyone who’s not right by their side. A world of crippled people scared of those ones who are holding no other hands than their own.

It’s perhaps I’m not artsy enough but, even more, is just that I think about myself as an ersatz human being. I consistently dissolved my own life by the action of my hand, and my life could be described as its own hand-made dissolution. One day, a gipsy woman refused to give me a palm reading, even after I offered her a big tip to do it. She scarcely

17. THE SPECTER

muttered she was tired, but now I look at my hands and sometimes I suspect that there’s not enough humanity to read something on it.And, if I’m lacking humanity, it might be just because I used my hand to sign more contracts and agreements than punching noses or plowing the soil or caressing the faces or the hands of my beloved ones. Once signed the contract, the hand becomes sinister.

A sinister hand.

A sinister hand.

A sinister hand.

I’m sorry, I won’t say sinister at all, it’s just that, in Spanish, ‘siniestro’ defines this thing I’m trying to define. Unfortunately, in English, ‘sinister’ is not the word I’m looking for. For the sake of our pact for standardized verbal communication, I should give up and surrender before the established English Freudian lexicon, replacing the German word ‘unheimlich’ with the English vocable ‘uncanny’: this thing which is not familiar anymore, this slight deformity that makes you hesitate to touch this life-form that used to be yours, but is not yours anymore as you resigned to it by signing a set of general and specific contracts. Uncanny, lack of belonging, unheimlich. Unfamiliar is your life in the extent that the familiar nature of human interactions was replaced by the rigidness of uncountable tacit and explicits norms, rankings and tags. Life, defined as a set of predefined agreements and concessions to keep your own life out of the reach of your hand.

Days ago, I thought about one of the last scenes from one of the Nicholas Winding Refn films starred by Ryan Gosling, Only God Forgives, where this cop who represents all bare-life and justice and brutality, cut with the clean coup of a sword both hands of Gosling’s


character, in a ritualized scene where we can see Gosling’s character’s agreement to have no hands anymore as they were evil (should I say ‘sinister’?). Amputation as a suppression of the action of fate. No hand, no destiny, no destination.

The suppression of the action of fate as an act of faith.

But I’m too weak and too lazy and specially too coward to cut my own hands, or to ask someone to cut them. As coward as humans other than Ryan Gosling are. I’m one of those humans with hands, pretending they’re making their lives by the touch of their hands; humans pretending there’s fate, pretending there’s something in the way, pretending their lives deserve to be called ‘lives’.

A faithless pretension.

This writing is my hand, it is my sword, as well as my contract. All fake.

The hand is nothing without a haunting ghost. So I’m trying to invoke one before I got forever trapped in the formality of being merely an ‘artist’.

19.

like

like a douchbag without entitlementlike an angerless Black Pantherlike an unemployed undocumented workerlike a cop without a poor to killlike an intellectual without structureslike a crippled activistlike an utopianist without hopelike a soulesss romantic dreamer like a fraternity of autistslike a monkey in the zoo

just like

21.

Some Aporia on Community

Ethics begins only when the good is revealed to consist in nothing other than a grasping of evil and when the authentic and the proper have no other content than the inauthentic and the improper. This is the meaning of the ancient philosophical adage according to which “veritas patefacit se ipsam et falsum.” Truth cannot be shown except by showing the false, which is not, however, cut off and cast aside somewhere else. On the contrary, according to the etymology of the verb patefacere, which means “to open” and is linked to spatium, truth is revealed only by giving space or giving a place to non-truth –that is, as a taking-place of the false, as an exposure of its own innermost impropriety.–Giorgio Agamben. The Coming Community

[...] A practice is not possible except where action is possible, and action is not possible except where life is.–Michael Thompson. Life and Action

One

But, what is “life”? What does it mean that something is “alive”? How can I know that something could be potentially considered an actual “living form”? Usually, I am complaining about life, about the nature of life, because I feel my life as false, false in the sense “my” life, provisionally defined as a narrative of my own “experience” –having into account that the very idea of experience implies to reach the border of death– is totally incapable to tell a tale from which I can extract any sort of reflection.

What I am trying to state here is that I complaint about my life as I consider it empty, improper, designed within the margins of a blank


page that seems to require so many formats to fit the basic conditions for a life that deserves to be called “life.” Simultaneously, in the course of past week, I have been experimenting a series of dramatic changes in the structures and beliefs on what I used to call “my life,” this warm core of affections and belongings where I used to turn back to when I felt lost. But now I have to realize that I am.

I need to learn how to surf entropy. And step aside from that sensation of permanent fall and fail. The recent re-reading of Kierkegaard’s Trembling gave me some hints on the value of ‘resignation’ and ‘faith,’ notions that I would like to relate with the Buddhist idea of ‘acceptance’. Acceptance of the general void and of the lack of sense of my living experience, in order to try a new route. In order to be responsible of any new route I am passing by.

Usually, I can see the formats of life everywhere –basically intended as a set of disciplinary actions taken over individuals in order to efficiently incorporate them in the most general social structure– but, because of the formats, I miss the forms –and, as form, I am referring to the specific modes or modalities of every particular being as well as their circumstances. Thus, I consider form as an affirmation on the impossibility to predefine or categorize subjectivities and ethics–. I don’t know how to live but living, so I just don’t know how to say something alive or vivid under the format of a 500 to 2000 words paper about (i.e.) “the experience of entering a community as a social practitioner,” since the form of my life is not susceptible to fit any format. I can’t express in 500 or 2000 words what I really think when some thoughts about my relation with the word “community” randomly sound inside of my head. Nevertheless, we can produce and draw ourselves out by using metaphors and fictions; we can introduce as many narratives as we want, without any single pretension to be truth.

23. SOME APORIA ON COMMUNITY

I am currently stretching myself on the permanent tension between my own subjectivity and some intuitions about the possibilities of a public life, about community and the conditions under we frame our experiences. I have been talking repeatedly about these specific concerns, receiving different feedbacks and opinions, even having into account the dispersive and elusive nature of my ideas.

The reason for my preference to talk, to speak and deriving in the midst or the borders –or perhaps inside of the permanent vortex originated by the chaotic interaction of those ideas about life and community, colliding against the walls of my fake living narratives, unlike the average situation of writing, even when I am not committed to comply with any academic or professional purpose– is that, by saying, talking, and speaking, it’s easier to feel my own voice cracking and dissolving into the surrounding noises. There is no thesis neither argument in my usual speech since I prefer –knowing beforehand the negative connotations that my preference has in an academic context– the pure performative dimension of that dissolution.

It is well known, as it is part of the John Cage’s readings for Indeterminacy included in Silence, an anecdote about Daisetz Teitaru Suzuki’s classes on Zen Buddhism at Columbia University:

Suzuki never spoke loudly. When the weather was good the windows were open, and the airplanes leaving La Guardia flew directly overhead from time to time, drowning out whatever he had to say. He never repeated what had been said during the passage of the airplane. Three lectures I remember in particular. While he was giving them I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he was saying. It was a week or so later, while I was walking in the woods looking for mushrooms, that it all dawned on me.


Perhaps the reason I would rather talk than write right now, in a foreign language that increase the sensation of my own fakeness and improperness, is that I am giving space and time to the sudden dawn of action, an action beyond the words that I am trying to let go with the wind. I am not stating any privilege of the voice over the written sign, this is not about the metaphysics of enunciation, it is, simply, a matter of pure operative comfort.

Two

I am wrong. It is supposed that the main reasons to be here, enrolled on a Public Practice MFA program are to understand the notions, and to apply strategically the methodologies (to, about and with) the Public sphere and the Social Practices. I am wrong as I pretend to find my own way to approach these notions and to generate absurd techniques to face the Public Practice as a professional. Despite I am capable to understand the general scheme of socially engaged art as a set of historicized gestures –based both on contingencies that have been raised to the status of valid methods, and on theories taken and implemented from extrinsic contexts, in general related to the humanities that developed a critical narrative for the correct consideration and evaluation of those methods– I have to declare myself completely incapable to embody this notions and gestures as the only way to produce forms of practice.

I am pretty aware of the notions of “constitutive outside,” “otherness,” “community,” “dialogical practices,” “relationship,” and other instrumental concepts developed in order to skill and professionalize the social practitioner by creating a specialized language that frames and outlines the desirable outcomes from Social Engaged Art endeavors. Nevertheless, my experience to this constitutive outside, to otherness and alterity, to community, to relationships, and to dialogical

25. SOME APORIA ON COMMUNITY

performatives is one of permanent dependence to a more confuse set of questions, namely as Michel Thompson listed: “what is to be done, how to live and how to live together.” I firmly believe that the answer to these questions is impossible as I believe that a permanent reflection on these aporetical structures results fundamental to formalize any possibility of real life.

By living the fake, by saying the wrong, by using theoretical shrapnel to enunciate my rejection to the fake and the wrong as part of my real, irreparable living experience, I am trying to deploy a space to guard and care the other side of a social practice in which I am more interested as I announced repeatedly during my life as a student of the program: the intimate spaces of general exchange for ourselves, members of a community, school, experimental platform, space of indoctrination or whatever has to be the best motto to designate this or any other MFA program. Perhaps, what I am trying to do, in a desperate and not so clever way, is forcing us to reconsider our positions, aspirations and commitments within this small society of the Otis Public Practice MFA, in order to move a couple of steps backwards to think about our particular interactions as a group, before pretending to insert our practices in the life of others –who are living under really complex and vulnerable conditions, showing an outstanding panache as practitioners of their own lives– who don’t deserve a professional intromission in their lives just for the sake of art.

Three

This writing emerged as a permanent failed attempt to produce some form of reflection on the specific situation of entering community for the first time, as an aspirant to social practitioner, and, afterwards, as a being who is trying to configure a new space for learning and living. By assuming I am surfing the void, I consider passivity an important ally


in the production of sense (in spanish, the word ‘sentido’ designates at the same time the meaning and direction of a gesture, thought or circumstance. Unfortunately, I think the english word resonates a little weakly). In this sense, I have to say, this call to passivity is not intended as indifference but as the slow and pervasive effect of the passions grown within a specific relationship with others. Passionate passivity implies more time than ability, implies to be able to do nothing or almost nothing, implies small gestures continued one day after the other. I know I failed, and my failure assumed the form of the lack of these passionate interactions with the community, but I think it is because I am on a different situation now: confronting the void and the fakeness of my own experience, reducing my expectations to the vital basics and building acceptance or ‘resignation’ in the way Kierkegaard defines it as a previous requirement for something that really deserves to be called ‘Faith.’

27.

Aurea Mediocritas

The mediocre result of a mediocre structure

The mediocre evidence of a mediocre existence

The mediocre manifestation of a mediocre ambition

The mediocre judgement of a mediocre judge

The mediocre villain of a mediocre village

The mediocre but pervasive erosion of a mediocre individual

The mediocre style of a mediocre story

The mediocre narrative of a mediocre soap opera

The mediocre modernism of a mediocre post-modern

The mediocre palliative of a mediocre catastrophe

The mediocre commitment of a mediocre conviction

The mediocre antagonism of a mediocre struggle

The mediocre success of a mediocre aspirant

The mediocre capabilities of a mediocre device

The mediocre awareness of a mediocre believer


The mediocre veredict of a mediocre specialist

The mediocre correction of a mediocre mistake

The mediocre routine of a mediocre adventurer

The mediocre ruin of a mediocre monument

The mediocre division of mediocre unity

The mediocre misconception of a mediocre intelligentsia

The mediocre trajectory of a mediocre projectile

The mediocre resolution of a mediocre conflict

The mediocre symptoms of a mediocre disease

The mediocre misunderstandings of a mediocre conversation

The mediocre imposition of a mediocre regime

The mediocre panorama of a mediocre screen

The mediocre inspiration of a mediocre muse

The mediocre charm of a mediocre bourgeoisie

The mediocre indefension of a mediocre proletariat

The mediocre members of a mediocre community

29. AUREA MEDIOCRITAS

The mediocre abuse of a mediocre authority

The mediocre radicality of a mediocre conformist

The mediocre consideration of a mediocre circumstance

The mediocre limitation of a mediocre emanation

The mediocre conjunctions of a mediocre sentence

The mediocre opposition of a mediocre resistance

The mediocre agreement of a mediocre subaltern

The mediocre proliferation of a mediocre variety

The mediocre liability of a mediocre decider

The mediocre bleakness of a mediocre house

The mediocre solidarity of a mediocre coexistence

The mediocre liberation of a mediocre captive

The mediocre agnosticism of a mediocre skeptic

The mediocre probability of a mediocre resurrection

The mediocre expectation of a mediocre success

The mediocre mediocrity of a mediocre mediocre

31.

Perdonarás

Perdonarás... “perdonarás” is a word used in my country (in “my country,” huh) since decades ago, in so many different contexts and situations; a word used since decades ago in so many different contexts and situations, in my country, especially in the South West regions of it, just in the zone where the three huge mountain systems that cross and divide and define the territory violently emerge breaking the land in a series of diverse cultural, human and natural landscapes. A place depicted by the Spaniards, centuries ago, as ferocious and dangerous. Ferocious because it was packed of savage groups of warriors that, after long and horrible battles, lost the war, and dangerous because it was also packed of amenable aborigines that, in the end, won the war by not offering resistance, by accepting the invader, by giving their gold and trusting this faith thrown to them from Europe as a pest. This submissive indians won the war by incorporating the Other, the White, the Christian, the Noble, the Civilized, so they are, today, mixed and invisible, kneeling and saying “perdonarás” each time they start talking to anyone. The uses and ethical implications of this simple word has been studied and established by professor Bruno Mazzoldi, probably the most important, complex, baroque, schizo and exquisite philosopher in the whole history of my not so philosophy-driven country and, well, perdonarás that I didn’t tell you before, but “perdonarás” means “You’re gonna pardon me.”

It’s curious, following professor Mazzoldi’s teachings, teachings that I unfortunately lack in the form of a printed article, neither a series of seminar notes nor even an audio recording, but only in my elusive memory brought to the present from 15 years ago, when I was working on my undergrad’s thesis project with him. It’s curious, I say, what “perdonarás” means and the way it means what it means. Well, I apologize for drifting away from my tale to follow absurd pathways


as I apologize as well for making complex something as easy as it is… ok, what I wanted to say since the beginning, this thing that since the beginning I wanted to say is that “perdonarás” means, once again, “You’re gonna pardon me.”

It doesn’t means “pardon me,” it doesn’t means “I beg you pardon,” it doesn’t means “I apologize.” What “perdonarás” means is, exactly, “you’re gonna pardon me.”

It is really challenging this way to perform an ethical relation built on the basis of the permanent fault addressed by this word. That’s to say, if I remember, as if I don’t, the teachings by professor Mazzoldi, that:

– I recognize myself as subject of permanent fault, so I introduce my speech by throwing the word before any defined topic emerges to the surface of the conversation. I am guilty beforehand and I recognize my guilt in every situation. Guilt is what I’m made of. My guilt is not defined, it’s not contextual, and it’s not derived from specific actions. Guilt defines the structure of my own being, so I say “perdonarás” even when I have nothing, apparently, to be forgiven for.

– I say “perdonarás” and, not so usually, “perdonará,” because the first of these forms in Spanish implies a conversation between two individuals in a similar power position… I assume you’re not someone above me in the social hierarchy. You’re someone like me so, even when I’m willing your pardon, I know you’re as guilty as I am, then,

– I’m not begging you pardon. Instead, I’m creating a common base for communion, for this communion on guilt, this communion between all of you and I. I’m not saying either “perdonará” neither “perdonarán,” (in the plural) as I don’t want to talk to you as a grey and predefined mass, but as a conjunction of individuals, as a school of particularities,

33. PERDONARÁS

as a pack of separations, as a bunch of faults, as a flock of reasons, as a gang of hesitations, as a murmuration of virtues, as a flamboyance of subjectivities. I’m facing you all as a collective, non-resolved tension in which I’m already included as an agent or as an organ (can I be your bowel?)

– But, at the same time, I recognize you, the other part in the conversation, as a fair judge. I characterize you as this empowered entity allowed to concede forgiveness since you are the better part of us. The better and the best part in this exchange in which I am always the weak, the faulty and the bad. You’re not just the liver nor the kidney, but the heart or the brain of this bodiless body in which I’m the clumsy, dysfunctional bowel.

– I don’t say you already forgave me; I’m not taking your absolution as something given. I’m not expecting that just by stating, your always-coming forgiveness will be handed here and now. Your forgiveness is always in the way, is a certainty in the future, in the future of every present, possible as a constantly renovated promise of itself. Never materialized, never commoditized. Your forgiveness only exists in the haunting future of my perennial faults. My faults are the continued disaster of this path I called “my life,” so your forgiveness is my only possibility of a future.

I could keep talking about the shades of this idea as it has been nested in my head for years, even before I had the honor to meet Bruno Mazzoldi, even before I was able to communicate the subtleties of the word “perdonarás.” Even before I was able to conjugate my guilt in different tenses. When I say I’m made of guilt is because I honestly think this way. Excuse me, I know I bug you with my secondhand existentialism and I’m totally aware that most of my sentences here could be easily transformed onto a mime line.


But, what are you gonna forgive me for? What are the reasons and the matter of my willing confidence in your unavoidable forgiveness? I have to say there’s not a what, there’s nothing defined, there’s not a cornerstone of my guilty consciousness, as fault comes as natural as breath.

I’m guilty, therefore I’m alive.

37.

Mastication

I don’t have to tell you what is this. You know perfectly what I’m showing you here. I have not to say alot about this modest pile of gum. I know you remember those days, when I used to bring gum to the class. You don’t have to masticate this story as you already chewed it. Nevertheless, it could be possible that the general plot for each one of you have a different order or another sense. That’s totally acceptable here, but let me tell you what’s the sense of this story when I think about it.

Every time I see this pile, I think about our conversations, I remember our shared time around the table, talking about our projects, digressing about our points of view on life, on art, on social practice, on community. I remember how irrelevant the topics resulted to me, but I remember as well my disposition to talk with all of you for hours, surfing the whateverness of the conversations. By that time, I still could feel the warmth of your thoughts and your voices. I remember how I felt the passion of your arguments and the inflections of every single interaction between us. I remember the chewed gum on the table, growing as a little mountain from week to week. Under my perspective, this gesture was good enough as a humble monument of our shared time. I used to repeat: “Useless teeth thrown over the useless time,” quoting José Lezama Lima’s sentence about the irrelevant rumination of the students. And, as the students we were, we had such a colorful rumination, rich in artificial flavors.

I was never interested on the additional layers of value that this pile of gum started to incorporate. But the pile, in the middle of the general discussion, began to be taken as a work of art, as a piece, as a project in itself. The discussions about whatever, around the pile of gum, started to loose its privileged whateverness. I’m not gonna say that I wasn’t pleased because of the many colors and the forms of this collective interaction.


But my pleasure, my real pleasure, relied on the fact that the colors of those pieces of gum reflected the colorful discussions we had about whatever else that wasn’t necessarily the pile of gum in itself.

The most I declared the pile extrinsic to my general ‘art practice,’ the most it was accused to be a piece of art, a piece of white/evil art, a conspiracy on our conversations, since then deprived of the possibility to be considered sincere. I couldn’t consider anymore the pile as a collective French kiss of our grouped subjectivities. To me, every single piece of that sweet, chewed, colored gum referred to some particular moments of specific individuals under determined circumstances, adjacent to the specific circumstances of other subjectivities during this long, shared timeline. An interaction between subjectivities never co-opted by the illusion of homogeneity. Yes, I loved the idea of those pure subjectivities, of those individualities, adjacent to each other and never reduced to the simple idea of being something as primary as a ‘community.’

Let me tell you how fascinated I was then, when I started learning the animal collective nouns. I already mentioned it somewhere else, but I found meaningful all those names, customized for each group of animals, as if all of them deserved a richer name than the dry and limited words we use to refer to human groups. Those fascinating names include troops of apes, cultures of bacteria, dissimulations of birds, destructions of cats, flamboyances of flamingos, towers of giraffes, strings of ponies, rhumbas of rattlesnakes, generations of vipers, wisdoms of wombats and cohorts of zebras, among so, so many others.

Let me tell you how obsessed I was with the flight of birds, with the way starlings fly together in these humongous masses of flying little things conforming a collectivity called ‘murmuration’ and defined more by the action of the shared flight than by the mere condition of

39. MASTICATION

being a group of poor stupid birds. Why we cannot define ourselves as a murmuration, or as a flamboyance, or as a destruction? It’s known that the Inuit have dozens of words to give names to all the different forms and circumstances of the snow, but us, the Inuit of social engagement, look honestly crippled and mute every time we say “community this” and “community that.”

I like chewed gum because is rich and futile. Those are the reasons I also love language. I don’t want any community, I don’t consider that any human organization deserve such a shallow name; instead, I want a gang, or a troop, or an order, or a squad, or a horde, or a bunch, a destruction, a murmuration, a flamboyance, a school. I want you to destroy the world constructs all together and each one by their own, to drop bombs of new sense, to demolish the social structures of our alienation, not to produce any false expectation to redeem ourselves. I want you for the last supper, for the afterhours, for the fireworks in Versailles. I would like to see you, whoever you are, all alone and all together as an archipelago.

‘Archipelago’ is, indeed, a much better word than ‘community.’

41.

The Man Without QualitiesA Never Produced Thesis Project

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I: If This Is a Man

Having the story of our elusive hero as an excuse to produce an art project, some clarifications are necessary to catch the ball. These clarifications come from the tales of a shy, Ritalin-driven, cassette-recording maniac, Communist Youths affiliate, Sonic Youth’s handmade t-shirt owner in 1987, perpetually looking for something cooler than his life, but constantly finding that cool was always slippery because of his own excess of anxiety and his seductivelessness working class condition in a social context of middle-high class misfits pretending they were the most radical thing any city ever had seen. Deceptive piece by piece, the story of our hero is one about a kid who built his identity on the basis of mimicking every other’s, resulting in an unresolved pastiche of cultural mismatch and emotional precariousness. A shattered image, identical to every other from a person of his generation. If this is a man, then our hero is.

CHAPTER II: “I Made Him Know His Name Should Be” Sunday

Always before Monday, our hero has important assets as a procrastinator. Day after day, his life occurs as a continuum of things to be done ASAP but never concluded –I should say “started” in order to be honest–


on time. Always guilty, as a man resting on a permanent Day of the Lord should be, he’s always freaked out because of the imminent coming of a labor day. By living in a never-ending “I would prefer not to” cliché, this guy experiments what is like to do so many things on such a mediocre way, not only because he’s always stressed and appalled for the irreparable situation of his always expired deadlines, but because he spent years to build his only solid construction: a baroque fortress, never receptive to the bullets of uncountable enemies, namely “production”, “discipline”, “ambition”, “talent”, an so on. To him, everything has been done, and, if not, there always has been someone else capable to make it on a better way.

CHAPTER III: A Magic Mountain Made Of Golden Mediocrity

“You know what?” he utters with conviction: “It comes from the Old Greeks, so it has to be good.” The Aristotelian doctrine of the “Middle Mean” (Aurea Mediocritas) claims for critical distance both from excess and deficiency. Keeping a healthy distance from the neurosis of reasoning, but never colliding against the schizophrenia of passions, this mellow possibility of austerity sounds ideal for this guy, trapped, since the beginning of Time, in circles of never-ending arguments and always-fragile emotions. “In a world where every single ambition results in a mediocre production”, he says, “the assumption of mediocrity as a desirable way results fundamental to generate a space available for action, practice and life.” A life without project, but open to experience.

43. A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES

CHAPTER IV: The Man Without Qualities

It was Giorgio Agamben who spoke about being in disregard of its modalities. Far from the idea of being good, or fat, or communist, or grumpy, or a good cook, Agamben considers being as a permanent whateverness. Being without qualities implies that it is no longer important, or he thinks so, for our hero, to worry about the standardized notions of quality, creativity, coherence, originality, production, technique, etcetera, as it’s not important anymore, or that’s what he wants to make us believe, the qualities of the mass and the mess of this or that specific entity, but the fact that it is here and there, reproducing, growing, palpitating, one besides the other, different to every other, undifferentiated from every other’s other. Irreparable and irreplaceable but, at the same time, open to be absorbed, transformed, remodulated, interpreted, misunderstood and, why not, destroyed with the efficacy that creates specters.

45.

Feign

Feign I was making music to make musicFeign I was making art to make artFeign I was a writer to write this writing

Feign makes

Fakes

Fake

Fake exists as not fake doesits existence is not necessarily different than the one of what is said legit

Feign the fake to make it double fakeand then reveal its utmost truth

veritas patefacit se ipsam et falsum

Truth is marching on

in all its Ghostly Glory

46.

An Idiosyncratic Lexicon for a Crit Class

The phenomenologicalThe misrepresentationThe performativityThe pedagogicalThe architecturalThe participatoryThe aspirationalThe conundrumThe irrelevanceThe abstractionThe installationThe apparatusThe sculpturalThe constructThe furnitureThe fictionalThe shallowThe bullshitThe portraitThe stagedThe sloppyThe liminalThe valueThe workThe propThe useThe USThe usThe UThe IThe

47.

The Power of a Smile

The community:a workshop for poor kidsa picture of poor kids smiling

The artist:a 10,000 dollar granta picture of poor kids smiling (for a further application)

The Non-Profit:a 1’000.000 dollar granta picture of poor kids smiling (for a brochure)

A Government Institution:a donation of some tens of millions from a corporationa picture of poor kids smiling (for their Annual Report)

A Corporation:a billionaire tax exemptiona picture of poor kids smiling (for a full page ad in magazines and newspapers)

Smile with us. Social Art Practice in progress.

48.

Anthem for a Deprived Neighborhood

Deprived neighborhood, we’ll work hard for you

Deprived neighborhood, we’ll improve your future

Deprived neighborhood, we’ll discover your hidden magic

Deprived neighborhood, we’ll bring some friends with us for a tour

Deprived neighborhood, we’ll move close to you despite of you

Deprived neighborhood, we’ll make cool workshops for kids and moms and junkies

Deprived neighborhood, we’ll map you, we’ll quantify you, we’ll analyze you

Deprived neighborhood, we’ll open gluten-free cafes with organic coconut milk

Deprived neighborhood, we’ll create prosperous economies

Deprived neighborhood, we’ll raise the prices of property

Deprived neighborhood, you’ll be no deprived anymore

Deprived neighborhood, you’ll realize deprived people has gone

Deprived neighborhood, let’s look for a new one

49.

Rap of Misfortuned Days

Days of feeling like crap, days when the body cracks, days when my bones all hurt, days of knowing the absurd of the general situation, of my failed expectations, of my basic misconceptions. These days of feeling so broken, days of having no tokens, days when all that have been spoken reveals itself just as false.

50.

51.

53.

Falling into the void. Bas Jan Ader and the Miracles of Faith

During the past century, some artists explored the notions of negativity, vulnerability and failure as a rich source of materials for art production. Twentieth century art history could be said as a general exploration of negativity ‘in the expanded field’ –abusing the notion coined by Rosalind Krauss–. From Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain to Eva Hesse’s 1970 Untitled (Rope piece) to almost any other significant work produced during the past 100 years, we can attest the outcomes of a general vision of a world went “out of joint.” Falling, as an active process, deploys a basic analogy to express negativity, becoming a methodology to draw out failure as a constitutive part of human experience. In this vein, the last century saw Yves Klein falling into the void, Gary Hill falling and eroding himself against language, Ana Mendieta’s fallen body silhouetted in the ground, and Xu Zhen’s frozen falls of Chinese immigrants. The act of falling has been, as well, revisited in literature and philosophy by several writers, from Soren Kierkegaard’s 1843 Fear and Trembling to Henri Bergson’s 1900 Laughter and to Walter Benjamin’s 1940 “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where he makes a complex depiction of Paul Klee’s 1920 Angelus Novus etching by saying:

[It] shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress (257-8).


I would like to describe the picture on a different way by reducing the elements of the image to its basics: there is only an angel and a void. Suspended in a permanent absence of material context, the angel seems to be incapable to stop its perpetual falling. The image depicts the way an angel falls, but we have no elements to know whether it is falling from sky or, as absurd as it can sound, into the sky. There is no history nor is there progress, there is only an accident, stretched infinitely and infinitely postponed. If its eyes are staring, if its mouth is open and its wings are spread, it is just because it is falling (I’m consciously using it, as I’m referring to an angel), and you know –as everyone knows– that there is nothing else in the world when falling than you and your own fall. I am curious about that suspension: a suspension of being during the fall in which the body expresses its fragility by the tension between acceptance and rejection. The act of free falling is, on one hand, an exposure to openness: while falling, we open eyes and mouth to try the void penetrate us, incorporating its nothingness in our body but, at the same time, we desperately refuse it by stretching our arms and legs as an attempt to catch something solid, something capable to stop the catastrophe that wait for us in the pavement. This is the usual way to fall. There is no premeditation as there is no will. People fall because they fall. Quite different to leap, as the diving champions do, a real fall implies the own suspension of will, the collapse of the structures that define individuality. As an accident, we can say that fall is a contingency that affects substances without altering the essence. In that sense, accident is indifferent to its subjects, it can occur to anyone who stands or walks, resisting the gravity forces. Nonetheless, I wonder about the will to fall. Is there any reason for a will to fall and a conscious way of falling? It would be a real fall to fall this way since I have just defined falling as opposed to will? I am not capable to produce answers to these questions, but that questions are themselves subjacent to this

55. FALLING INTO THE VOID

small narrative. I am intrigued by the tension established by Soren Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling between the notions of ‘resignation’ and ‘faith.’ As I read, “infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation do I become conscious of my eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith” (46), but, as a counterpart, Kierkegaard introduces the figure of the ‘knight of infinity’, someone who “makes one more movement even more wonderful than all the others, for he says: Nevertheless I have faith that I will get her—that is, by virtue of the absurd [...]” (46). Kierkegaard places his notion of faith in the realm of absurdity, as for him,

The absurd does not belong to the differences that lie within the proper domain of the understanding. It is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen. The moment the knight executed the act of resignation, he was convinced of the impossibility, humanly speaking; that was the conclusion of the understanding, and he had sufficient energy to think it. But in the infinite sense it was possible, that is, by relinquishing it [resignere derpaa], but this having, after all, is also a giving up. Nevertheless, to the understanding this having is no absurdity, for the understanding continues to be right in maintaining that in the finite world where it dominates this having was and continues to be an impossibility. The knight of faith realizes this just as clearly; consequently, he can be saved only by the absurd, and this he grasps by faith.

Contemporary art practices are usually defined by a complex relation with discourse, mostly produced on academic platforms by specialists, that usually implies a rejection of absurdity as absurd implies a threat to the pretended meaningfulness of discursive practices. If it is in virtue of the absurd that faith only emerges, and art today seems to be impossible outside of discursive practices, how we can have some faith in art?


Is faith in art a significant condition for art today? Even more, is art resigning faith in its own in order to grow faith in something else? Between 1970-72, Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader produced a series of silent films where he shown himself falling on a varied set of circumstances and places. The first one, from 1970, starts with Ader sitting on top of his house roof in Los Angeles, from where he falls in a way that we can define as “theatrical:” his fall is not the product of an accident, as he throws himself from the chair to roll over the roof pendant and then fall behind the bushes of his garden. The black and white silent film presents the situation on a slowed but fluid motion as if it was recorded on high speed, in the fashion of contemporary music videos or advertising, where movements use to flow slower than the original gestures do. This speeding down of the image generates a double consciousness on the viewer, as the fall in itself would be considered a slapstick but, as it is shown on a slo-mo way, the absurd gesture gets slightly stretched, losing its “natural way” and taking the viewer on an uncomfortable position in which he has to laugh at a joke he already knows. The second one, filmed in Amsterdam the same year, shows nothing else than Ader riding a bike directly to one of the many city canals where he finally sank into the water. The third, from 1971, shot in a path that leads to Westkapelle, Holland –a lighthouse depicted by Piet Mondrian on a series of early paintings– is entitled Broken Fall (Geometric) and shows, as Jörg Heiser (85) describes it, “the artist falling sideways onto a sawhorse and into the bushes.” One more from 1971, Broken Fall (Organic), filmed in a forest in Amsterdam, shows “the artist hanging from the branch of a tree until his strength fails him and he falls into the narrow ditch beneath.” (86)


One can attest the artist’s resolution in each one of his falls. The actions, presented in clear general shots are limited to its basics: a place, an individual and an action. All of the situations are carefully produced to create a tension with no space for surprises. Since the very first minute, we know Ader will fall. In that sense, his will emerge as the absurd factor that makes room for faith: as absurd as it is, we trust in the artist’s fall as he clearly removes any contingency from his experience. His fall is produced, but remains real. Then, this double bind is one of the conditions of a tragic narrative that uses its reverse, namely contingency, as a vehicle for a mimetic relationship with their witnesses. Kierkegaard depicts his character of the ‘knight of infinity’ as “one seems to stand and to walk, to change the leap into life into walking, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian” (41), and, under my perspective, I can see Ader purposely falling as if he was this knight, changing a leap into a walking, with the slight difference that, for him, falling is in itself the sublime expression of a tragic will. But, at the same time, it is a joke. It must be obvious for every contemporary viewer, familiar with contemporary art, that Ader was the precursor of Fail TV, of Krazy Videos shows and, undoubtedly, of Jackass. Once and again, each time I watch to the Johnny Knoxville/Steve-O show, I can see clearly the Ader’s falling resonance, transplanted to the pure core of stupidity. How Ader’s actions combines these two structurally opposed narratives of the Romantic hero and the professional jackass to produce a slapstick placed in the core of the tragic or a Greek tragedy in the mind of the trash TV viewer? This aspect, present throughout all Ader’s work, have been commented by other authors, addressing out not only the conflictive concurrence of the artist’s tragic and comic vocations but the unsuitability of his means and ends. In this sense, Heiser’s commentary makes a point by placing the artist in a crossroad:


Ader’s enquiry into the ‘bohemian bourgeois’ steers clear of overt comic effect –there is no acrobatic grotesqueness in his movements or facial expressions, quite the opposite: there is seriousness in his actions, isolating and exposing the romanticist strain in the comical mishap as a means to isolate and expose the relation between failure and empathy. In this respect, the slapstick works are intricately linked to, rather than separated from, Ader’s evocations of melodrama: both employ the genre traditions of an outmoded medium –silent film– as a means to destabilize the (then relatively new) stereotype of the Conceptual artist as a stem hero of critique who never embarrasses himself. But again, Ader is not simply a parodist. Rather, as a Dutch artist based in Los Angeles, this chasm between romanticism and slapstick at the heart of his work echoes the chasm between Europe and America: between the European school of thought leading from nineteenth-century romanticism via Freud to auteur cinema –the concept of psychological depth and singularity– and the American deadpan concern for repetition and social interaction that connects early slapstick with late Modernism (88).

If Bas Jan Ader accomplishes the idea of being simultaneously a “knight of infinity,” a rationalist and a jackass is, for sure, in virtue of his will to fall, of the acceptance of his vulnerable nature that enables an absurd faith –or a faith in absurdity, or simply, in a Kierkegaard fashion, just faith– and obviously, of a permanent vocation to embarrassing himself. It is clear for me that the constitutive structure of Ader’s work is located in the middle of the Christian ideas of communion and redemption, as it is clear for me as well that Ader himself is an embodiment of Christ. His use of failure in co-dependence of empathy production is a cornerstone for the most precarious forms of social interaction and communion: that one of a YouTube generation united in the


contemplative breakdown of humanity expressed in the form of millions of videos or skaters failing their leaps, of car crashes, of pedestrian accidents and of idiots challenging death with an enormous faith in the value of their slapsticks.

On a description of the Hegelian “passage from tragedy to comedy,” Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (217) explains that this passage “is about overcoming the limits of representation. While in a tragedy the individual actor represents the universal character he plays, in a comedy he immediately is this character.” So is, in the case of Ader and his repeated falling that, by falling beyond representation –as I defined the act of falling as not susceptible to be represented– that Christ takes possession over Ader and makes possible this communion. Observed through his actions, Ader is not representing Christ, is not producing an illusion of communion and is not pretending to produce something that could be named ‘a community’. Nonetheless, it is clear that his will to fall into the void made the void real, and this embodiment of the void opened a space for faith. Bas Jan Ader falling is ‘the universal character’ of individual breakdown. Following the general structure of faith in Kierkegaard, I can recognize that is in virtue of the absurd of the nothingness that it is possible for Ader to make a statement on the nature of faith, and this statement ended up producing a series of social consequences which have been silently pervading the nature of human understandings on belief. Johnny Knoxville is the philistine prophet of a future global community of people whose only faith remains in the void of a world in which there are only free falls.

I can see the absurd nature of my statement, but is in virtue of the absurd that I decided to increase the bet. Some paragraphs above I was wondering on the possibility of faith in contemporary art, so I can state now that faith is only possible once we assume the absolute vulnerability of our experience.


On a metaphorical view, Ader’s parable functioned as a response to the end of Modernism: it is no possible anymore to believe in the idea of progress. It is not meaningless that Bas Jan Ader used the Westkapelle (the same Westkapelle used by Mondrian) as a background for his 1971 Broken Fall (Geometric), making a radical statement on the impossibility of progress and a lucid commentary on the permanent failure of art in society.

As Edgar Wind brilliantly pointed out in ‘Art and Anarchy’ (8), one of his Reith lectures from 1960,

We are much given to art, but it touches us lightly, and that is why we can take so much of it, and so much of different kinds. If a man has the time and the means, he can see a comprehensive Picasso show in London one day, and the next a comprehensive Poussin exhibition in Paris, and –what is the most amazing thing of all– find himself exhilarated by both. When such large displays of incompatible artists are received with equal interest and appreciation, it is clear that those who visit these exhibitions have acquired a strong immunity to them. Art is so well received because it has lost its sting.

The legacy of Bas Jan Ader is faraway from the art sphere. It was hijacked by the media in an unconscious way. Just focused in the comical character of his gestures, broadcast producers were incapable to see the transformative nature of this permanent void. They used resignation as a tool to show the world as an infinite series of fallen bodies. But all of us are still falling, and permanent fall is shaping our lives. So we are ad portas of transformation. To be in a permanent search of the miraculous implies that Willie E. Coyote is absolutely right: There is no death by falling.


The being that has reached its end, that has consumed all of its possibilities, thus receives as a gift a supplemental possibility. This is that potentia permixta actui (or that actus permixtus potentiae) that a brilliant fourteenth-century philosopher called actus confusionis, a fusional act, insofar as specific form or nature is not preserved in it, but mixed and dissolved in a new birth with no residue. This imperceptible trembling of the finite that makes its limits indeterminate and allows it to blend, to make itself whatever, is the tiny displacement that every thing must accomplish in the messianic world. Its beatitude is that of a potentiality that comes only after the act, of matter that does not remain beneath the form, but surrounds it with a halo. –Giorgio Agamben (55).


References

AGAMBEN, Giorgio. The Coming Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

BENJAMIN, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 253-264.

DUMBADZE, Alexander. Death is Elsewhere, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

HEISER, Jörg. “Curb your Romanticism: Bas Jan Ader’s Slapstick” in The Artist’s Joke, edited by Jennifer Higgie, London: Whitechapel Ventures Limited – MIT Press, 2007, pp. 85-89.

KIERKEGAARD, Soren. Fear and Trembling, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983.

VERWOERT, Jan. Bas Jan Ader. In Search of the Miraculous, London: Afterall Books, 2006.

WIND, Edgar. “Art and Anarchy” in Art and Anarchy, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1985, pp. 1-16.

ZIZEK, Slavoj. “The Christian – Hegelian Comedy” in The Artist’s Joke, edited by Jennifer Higgie, London: Whitechapel Ventures Limited – MIT Press, 2007, pp. 216-220.

63.

The struggle was to accept that, to coexist with the forces of my own uncertainty. Desperate as I was for a resolution, I had to understand that it might never come.–Paul Auster

65. BIOGRAPHY

Víctor Albarracín Llanos (1974) is a Colombian artist, writer, curator and teacher. He was co-founder and member of El Bodegón, a seminal artist-run space in Bogotá, between 2005-2009. As an artist, Víctor has exhibited in Colombia, Germany, the US, Canada and Latin America. His work generates fictions and conflicts to create situations of vulnerability, disenfranchisement and estrangement, through the amateurish use of different cultural mediums, including music, literature and video. From 2000-2013, he taught at most of the art programs in Bogotá. As a writer, he has published narratives, reviews and articles on contemporary art and culture, literature, and institutional critique, on books, magazines and websites in Colombia, Latin America, and the US. In 2009, he received the Colombian National Art Critic Award. In 2013, he released El tratamiento de las contradicciones, a book of selected writings, and Materials for a Makeshift Shack, a volume from conversation pieces with art field agents in Bogotá. He’s a good cook, a music freak and an inept musician, lyricist and singer, with a long history of bands, gigs and solo projects. Víctor currently lives as a Fulbright fellow in Los Angeles, CA, where he floats like a ghost between the Public Practice and the Fine Arts MFA programs at Otis College of Art and Design.

www.victoralbarracin.com

66. IMAGE CREDITS

10: Still from 2066, a video project by Alma Sarmiento (2014). Courtesy of Alma Sarmiento.

14: Still from Carpe Diem (2014). Courtesy of Víctor Albarracín Llanos

20: Still from Beggin’ at Paradise (2014). Courtesy of Víctor Albarracín Llanos

30: Still from It Never Rains in Southern California (2014). Courtesy of Víctor Albarracín Llanos

35-36: Stills from Mastication (2014). Courtesy of Víctor Albarracín Llanos

40: Casper, the friendly Ghost. Courtesy of Google image search

44: David Banner turning into the Hulk. Courtesy of Google image search

50-52: Stills from The Persistence of Tears (2015). Courtesy of Víctor Albarracín Llanos

69: Groundsel, that weed emerging from the cracks. Courtesy of Google image search

68. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have no words to express my gratitude to each one who made possible, not only the precarious existence of this book but my whole life in Los Angeles during the past two years. If I survived, it was only thanks to the generous support of those who gave me a word, a hand, and a chance.

Corazón del Sol, Sara Daleiden, Consuelo Velasco Montoya, Margarethe Drexel, Benjamin Weissman, Karen Moss, Frida Li, and Carolina Caycedo: horrible would be the story without your loving souls close to mine. Thank you for bringing light to my days.

I also would like to say thanks to all you guys at the Otis Fine Arts MFA, who generously accepted me as part of your days during my darkest season. I wish the best for you.

Finally, there is no way I could make it without the general support and the sponsorship of the Fulbright Program in Colombia and the US, and Colfuturo. Thank you.


Feign. Selected Texts

Editor: Ghost Writer

Series Editor: Staff at Institut für kleines Licht

Publisher: La Parte Maldita

2015 Víctor Albarracín Llanos, the editors, La Parte Maldita

No rights reserved, including the right of this book to exist.

This book plagiarized the template of Kim Gordon’s Is it My Body?

Selected Texts, edited by Isabelle Graw and Daniel Birnbaum, from the

Institut für Kunstkritik, Frankfurt am Main. The original design of the

series was created by Pascal Kress and Markus Weisbeck at Surface,

Berlin/Frankfurt am Main. Our respect and admiration to the original

author, editors, designers and publisher. Plagiarizing books from

Sternberg Press is nothing different than a failed hommage to one of

our favorite publishing houses, and the evidence of a fantasy to be part,

even in this inappropriate way, of their catalogue.

Printing: L.A. Press Printing Inc.

Cover: Classic linen

Dust jacket: Solar white matte

Inside: Classic Crest natural white

La Parte Maldita


©

One of the sparks is the Big Bang, the other one, a little light against the nightly sky. Different pulsations of the same chord.

To Lorena, to Chispa. Lux Triumphans.

Feign. Selected Texts

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