Notes From the Guest Artist (Eric Schrijver)

Sometimes as I entered the Danslab studio I felt as if I walked into my own mind.

The messages and actors spread out before me, allowing me an interface and view I never had before.

A space filled with the crayons and plastic and funky clothes of pop culture, on top of which bookcases had fallen over, containing books on mind and body and image… and traversing this structure, young inquisitive people saying smart things in strange accents.

I never want to leave.

‘Il faut être de son temps’ says Baudelaire. My favourite modernist artists chose embracing the present over idealising the future.

David Bowie: “Writers like George Steiner had nailed the sexy term post-culture and it seemed a jolly good idea to join up the dots for rock. The main platform would be, other than shoes, ‘we are the future, now’ and the one way of celebrating that was to create it by the only means at our disposal. With, of course, a rock ‘n’ roll band.”

§

When listening to the tapes, I find I make meaningful mistakes: instead of ‘Hollywood movies’ I say ‘Hollywood moving’ and, more importantly, instead of ‘the other way around’ I say ‘the same way around’.

I do it when I write, I write end instead of and, a list is titled ‘List of Things I Know Believe’.

§

Living the dream boils down to carefully selecting a subset of thoughts. Subsequently, in daily life, you carefully limit the impulses you receive in order to have these impulses closely match the thoughts.

§

In ‘Anti-method’ Paul Feyerabend comes up with the maxim ‘anything goes’. This phrase is much-maligned, and often quoted as en example of postmodern apathy: I’ll take anything, I don’t care.

That is silly. As Feyerabend is talking about methodology. He says: any attempt to come up with a fixed methodology beforehand is likely to hamper us in finding knowledge.

Kim Vincs: ‘In the arts, research methodology is often retrospective’. I would say this also holds for science.

§

Bruno describes his choreographic method as ‘organising thought processes’. These words were revelatory to me. They helped me to see thoughts differently. As recipes.

§

Feedback loops. On a day of the rehearsals, I woke up and wrote down:

We launch missiles // look at their trajectory // then relaunch them

§

Our present is a future we that has been dreamt of and written about.

So why do we not stop to notice? Because it does not feel very different from the past. Somehow, we suspect the future to feel much better or much worse, or at least: different. But why would it? Our minds stay more or less the same. And the changes of our society have been thought up and implemented within our society, so each and every innovation does not feel strange, it feels as if it was bound to happen.

§

I see lingual thought as a sense made up of language. That makes the relation between language and the world easy. Why would we expect to be able to nail everything down in language, when we do not expect our eyes to see what is behind our backs?

Meaning is the sensation that comes with this lingual sense. A sensation that can occasionally approach the ecstatic.

§

I think the degree of paradoxality, circularity or reflexivity of a thought determines how much interpretation can be applied to it, and consequently, how much meaning it can generate. Important religious texts are filled with paradoxes. Art is based upon them too.

These paradoxes you could see as functions. At the other end of the spectrum, you have sentences that are as descriptive as possible. These you could see as data. With a continuum inbetween.

And why do you need data? So you, or someone else, can interpret it with functions. (And why do you need functions? etc… (Nietzsche: ‘What is that you say? This would not be a—circulus vitiosus deus?’))

§

Struggling with the nature of language, Rimbaud had to conclude: ‘I is another’. As far as I can tell, he found out how we construct our stories and our thoughts. We pick and choose from a landscape of language: thoughts and sentences said or thought by ourselves, our friends and the rest of culture. In this world of language there is no coherent identity; the only reason we can make one is because we glue everything together with the word I.

§

For your mind, the difference between ‘I is’ and ‘I am’ is small. It is easy to say, I am the thing that glues everything together. This similarity makes it easy to consider yourself omniscient, which causes problems.

§

‘I is another’ seems to be echoed in ‘I am not there’, the name of a song of Bob Dylan and of a recent Dylan biopic. The film treats identity as something that can only be treated from a multitude of perspectives and idioms. I saw this movie, and learned from it that Dylan had actually called himself Rimbaud in the 1960ies. What you could call a postmodern understanding of the subject has been a feature of artistic thought for much longer than the term postmodern has.

§

It feels like every image of the future that 20th century popular culture could come up with has been realised in one form or the other. My parents drive me around in an electric car. I can make video calls to my friends around the world. I have direct access to a huge wealth of information via a personal electronic device. I can even control variations in my temperament with psychofarmaceuticals. And I do not know if science fiction series predicted this, but it seems very futuristic to have a coloured man as president of the United States.

§

David Bowie’s 1972 pop masterpiece ‘Hunky Dory’ tells of the superman. ‘Should I kiss the vipers fang, or herald loud the death of man?’. ‘Gotta make way for the homo superior’.

And the prophet of the superman was like a dancer: ‘Yea, I recognise Zarathustra. Pure is his eye, and no loathing lurketh about his mouth. Goeth he not along like a dancer?

§

Super is something and something more. In set theory, a superset is a second set containing in its entirety a first set, among other things. The superbourgeois, superchristian and supercapitalist appropriates bourgeois, christian and capitalist values, gives them new meaning, and adds them to his range of alternatives.

§

Sentences from the process: ‘The only conclusion is inclusion’. ‘You may not like us, but we like you’.

Inclusion. I really like the word. Makes me think of Andy.

§

While he is often seen as an artist glorifying consumer culture, Andy Warhol is to me an artist glorifying (or affirming) life in its entirety. The Campbell soup cans where what he and his mother bought in the supermarket and had for dinner.

Warhol, too, has been a target for cultural pessimists, making him an example of the vacuity of modern life. But in the BBC interview Bruno send to us during the research, his great inclusive morality shows. He tells how he tries to like everything and everyone.

–Do you ever give yourself to not liking somebody, Andy?
–I try really hard not to. When somebody is acting funny I just try to go to another room.

And I now refrain from writing something sacrilegious.

return to research