Juan L. Gomez-Perales

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Food For Starlings

by Bryan Sentes
The Apparatus: some components are glass, transparent, embodying thereby their transparency to the will; likewise, other parts are hollow: they are that-which-holds-or-is-flowed-through, a conduit, again embodying thereby their being a conduit to the will. What is the concept of essence at work here? The sculptures specifically render this transparency and emptiness opaque and solid: for the poet artist sculptor Who-on this estrangement/aestheticisation of the object reveals its essence, a contrary (?) to the instrumental essence of the appartus; likewise, the aesthetic essence of the components (the process they embody) is defined precisely by these aestheticized components being unusable, useless. Here, 'aesthetic' is deployed more etymologically as that which presents its sensuous thingness over its transparent/conduit instrumentality.

A Process, a technique, is "discovered" (history, memory, is forgotten, or appears in incoherent flashes, dreamlike because individual), which, for the present artist, is a means to producing an aesthetic object, a liquid possessed of sensuous qualities, the "spirit", the "geist", the "life" (liquor?ichor?, e.g., Himbeerngeist, aqua vita, eau de vie, (sp.), spirits (Engl.), al-cohol-s, from vegetable matter, first or last harvests (for fine liquors, ice wines, economy re spoiled harvest): such distillates always spatiotemporally particular, given the spatiotemporal inscapes of the ingredients (soil, water, season, plants, etc.) and apparatus & process: "Here, this is what my land tasted like this year!" Our yard would taste mainly like cat piss. "some years are better than others" or other preserves, jams jellies pickels, etc. A cornocopia. Juan swims against the current aestheticizing estranging empiricizing.../ the apparatus and process: a useless representation of an instrument is an exploratory phenomenology, a veiling to remove a veil: ironically a hyperattention to the means of production, an exagerrated attention compared to that of the more artisinal makers (artisinal vs artistic)(a further refinement, distinction), further hyperbolized by chemical attention (linguistic attention...). Might this meditation lead to technical improvement? Are Use and Appearance binary opposites in design or can the beautiful be useful, the useful beautiful? This hyperattention is an inflation, an articulation, an analysis, study, detailing of the apparatus and process, inflation opposite to condensation: deflation?

The discourse here, of "aesthetics" the doctrine of the beautiful, both momentary, ie belonging to the writer, the sculpture, others..., but also within the historical horizon of Platonic metaphysics: who will deny philosophy (what is the true, beautiful, good?) has nought to do with a draught?

The "show" (how aptly named) as such will be articulablelementarily, as it will present only the present, i.e., the process (how aptly) is unconscious, unknown, unrevealed, unpresented to the "viewer" (the "aesthete")[like Kant let me give the term back to its genesis]. Prose might articulate a representational representation, but poetry, as language likewise aestheticized or formalized in such a way that it need not name but show or embody structurally ie make present or present the process & refer, as discourse, to itself, its own terms, eg Brownian motion, or principles or "elements" eg 'copper tubing'.

Here an optimum object, perhaps only ever sketched, imagined, never finally fully articulated, a probing, a poietic phenomenology, a suggestive gesture, ...

So prime text would be such a representation or recreation or "repetition" (a term demanding discurses) under the aegis of the problematics around these terms. A rendering of the apparatus opaque by a process that mimics the artists, e.g., by means of Brownian motion (vs rhizone, tho both maybe rooted in clinamen), dichten = distil, paradigmatic axes,

Politicallyeconomicallysocially (Marxist) Juan's art is socialist realist, revealing the means of production, tha opiate of the masses...

these remarkings a kind of sipping, distillation

OVER AND ABOVE objects aforementioned are 2D objects and juxtaposition of 2D with 3D (a Gestalt): an abstraction or rotation revolution, a walking around, an "explanation" revealing new other facets faces: the sculpture is exteriority being sensuousness, but how much inscape, i.e., to what explicit degree or extent do the pieces or the installation in toto escape the fate of the art object in the age of mechanical reproduction? Stills can be mass produced: cd the art objects, i.e., how essential is the concrete sensation over against or beyond mere sensuousness? "Clearly" the objects could be in a manner mass produced, become an end or object of a means of production.

ART AGAINST THE LAW

What is the Project? to build a working still, distill fine spirits, present said machine and process with directions for construction and execution, add catalogue, book, etc., i.e., as performance and installation construct and operate a device AGAINST THE LAW?

Then concretely JP has constructediscovered an artobjectspace that threatens the legal order, concretely revolutionary, but also calling to mind the Bacchanal or Carnival, where spirits spirited high spirits to dissolve the law in license.

What are the consequences of the art FRAME (& frame in its criminal sense, i.e., JP is framing himself!)...

Bryan Sentes
2004

Gomez-Perales, Lab
Originally Published in:
The Hunger of the Starlings - The Artwork of Juan L. Gomez-Perales
2004, Dawson College, ISBN: 1-55016-809-6
Copyright © 2004 by Juan L. Gomez-Perales