An Unrivaled Fulfillment

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group on 3 December 2015.

For the sake of brevity (that's my favorite joke), I'm limiting the scope of this reply to your e-mails preceding December 2nd. The rest I'll take on tomorrow.

At a glance: engulfing tidal waves, Detroit as a microcosm for every city everywhere, burying harsh realities under static isolation and willful ignorance, childhood innocence and purity, the mechanicalization of human life, the stigmatization of creativity, creation’s destruction, the paving of Black Bottom, retribalization, the global village, power absorption, silenced horrors, the lodestone, irreverence toward the natural world, Edenic exile, Gluck’s "Daisies," Gibran’s "On Children," Don Gilber, Detroit trash, human sacrifice, the Most Authentic Detroiter ever, etc.

Anyhow, thanks for the accidental introduction, Will. I look forward to reading more of Gustafson's word-magic, as well as finding a way to integrate all of my new, mostly dead friends' words and images into my classroom. What was Gustafson’s funeral like? I hope there was a jukebox, with quarters clanging in every pocket.

Art, thanks for the clarification! This may have been referenced or elucidated in previous correspondences, but my understanding is still partially clouded.

A few questions:

1. Does the Benefactor's creation story have any roots in Luke 22:24-27? 
2. Is he, in part, an incarnation of the authoritative pagan kings who exploited their power by placing self-interest over public-interest?  
3. More specifically, was the Benefactor’s character inspired by Ptolemy III Euergetes?  
4. THEREON BE FACT? Or BE THERE NO FACT?

While brainstorming my previous round of Benefactor related questions, I began scribbling a series of short, mostly cryptic anagrammatic poems wherein each line is composed of the reorganized letters found in “The Benefactor.” I did something similar when I last sat down to sketch the Sea Devil, but stopped once I became so absorbed in the letters that I began to feel crazy. It’s a maddening process, yet I still find an unrivaled fulfillment in making do with what little you have; in discovering the many hidden potentials that lurk beneath the surface.  

The Savage Sisters (Part 1 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email from Art to the group sent 22 May 2015.

Wow!

Where to start...! You've laid out some pretty compelling options.

I like all of it, but I think I like the packaged trash idea the most.

And then, once we've got them hooked, take it to the next level: packaged nothingness (I like that my phone knows when I type "packaged" that the next word is "nothingness.")

I think some of the other options are too difficult and distract from the "empty frames" motif that is central to the project.

We could even give the whole thing a bogus charitable pretense too, like so many cults and large-group awareness trainings promote to distract attention away from their brainwashing and/or profiteering activities. Maybe pictures of the place the trash was picked up? Maybe suggesting that you have in some sense "adopted" that spot? Maybe that you can keep buying trash from this one spot in Detroit in order to keep transporting it out of town--with the hilarious aspect being that we create more packaging to do this! Then again, maybe that's too much content. I think the point is to have context without text...or tent without content?

Here are some posts that might provide some insight as to why the empty/trash-filled box makes a LOT of sense:

• Another Arch in the Proscenium - May 21, 2014
• Cataclysmic Changes (Part 2 of 3) - May 31, 2014

Actually, a lot of stuff in the April - May 2014 range deals with nothingness in a box, in a frame, on stage.

Other fun tidbits:

• Can we get people to buy nothingness from Detroit? Like having a little black hole in your living room radiating street cred. Better than a "Detroit vs. Everybody" shirt. Of course, don't get too close to the event horizon of the box. Kind of like tanning.

• I guess I can see the relevance of transporting bat shit and ghosts out of Detroit too. All these things--trash, nothingness, black holes, bat shit, ghosts--seem to fit into the same category.

• Like Henry Ford before him, Dan Gilbert is definitely basking daily in the dark light of the lodestone, listening to The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever speed rap in Old Icelandic.

• Who is making these products? Followers of Farthington? Of Steffi? Of Victoria Woolf or Shakespeare's Sister? It feels like some of the latter-day, post-Farthington people. I like them being members of some kind of female-only version of Yahowa's Savage Sons. The Savage Daughters of Shakespeare's Sister? Sworn enemies of Dan Gilbert, buying up vacant lots in Detroit and fighting his henchmen on the banks of the river beneath a river. I'm not sure if they are friendly, hostile, or indifferent to Arthur White and company. And they live in harmony with the land. So it makes sense that they might sell Poop Paper, Guano Tea, Moisturizers, Dung Masks, Sea Salt Scrubs. Maybe it doesn't make sense that they create more packaging.