Everything Now is Measured by After

The following is an excerpt of an 11 May 2015 email exchange between Art, Liza, and the group.

Go Sea Devils!

Art:

Hey Liza! 

I was thinking about your excellent drawing from a couple days ago and it got me thinking of how that could be a great post. 

Although your style isn't like this at all, I love this photos and text way of talking through a piece of art for a few reasons, the biggest being that it conforms to that meta, diegetical, frames-within-frames, proscenium-arches-radiating-out-from-the-stage style of our "narrative." Unlike the linked page, however, your drawings would actually benefit from not being a finished draft! I told Will a long time back that one of my favorite things about growing up in the late 80s/early 90s was how many "box sets" of bands came out, and invariably, they would have such wonderful artifacts--photos, ticket stubs, lyrics scribbled on napkins or hotel stationary--such that these large liner note booklets became almost more interesting than the music itself. Now, it gets a little complicated that some of these things predated what happened on stage (scribbled lyrics = postscenium?), but still, there's a preferencing of what surrounds the thing--its radiations as it were--over the thing itself. 

In other words, talking about the thing--preferably the unfinished thing--is better than the thing itself. Perhaps because Plato-like we stay closer to the ideal that we have glimpsed than if this were ever fully actualized. 

One area that I wanted to ask you about was Farthington's (or Steffi's?) sea devil mascot suit. I want something inspired by but not plagiarizing this, something that could be plausibly used in an actual sports arena capacity, but would strike everyone as just the slightest bit off, somewhat more so than in this photo. 

Art

Liza:

Greetings, 

Count me on board with all of this (good thing, too, for I'd hate to be overboard with the lurking CD-evils!).  In particular, the interplay of photo and text, of visual and aural, of medium and message.    

I've been thinking a great deal lately about a related interplay of sorts: the interplay of the Benefactor's scribbled horror-raps (think: text - aural - Realm of the Ear) and the cave walls (think: "photo" - visual - Kingdom of the Eye).  

For a variety of reasons, I believe a proximal encounter with such a spectacle carries the overwhelming potential for transcendence and this "turbulent reversal" of which you frequentlynspeak. Even for a polyfocal digital audience. Better yet, especially for a polyfocal digital audience.  

Throw in nature's ambient instrumentation as the soundtrack, and we're suddenly standing before the altar of what Walter Benjamin calls "the hierarchical pinnacle of aesthetic experiences." 

I've plenty more I want to write, but, for now, all I've time and energy left to scribble is: I'll get to scribbling StefFiarthington's sea devil tomorrow.  

And, 

I'll write what I want to write right now after Thursday. In the days after Thursday.  

Those will be the days after. Everything now is measured by after. (Don DeLillo, Falling Man) 

Later, 

Liza