Free Will

E.D. 2008, A Portrait of a Young Woman, acrylic on canvas 24x36"

When it comes to the question of free will, people disagree with each other. Religious say that there is a free will, but skeptics argue. Mustn’t there be a free will to will this discussion? But many philosophers doubt the existence of the mind. It’s puzzling, right? It must be a mind to mind it, but the problem of the mind is that it escapes definitions…

Motivation is immediate when it comes to survival and procreation.

Motivation is strong when it comes to social acceptance and power.

Motivation is rotten when it comes to arbitrary decision-making.

We always question the shit.

Repetition helps. When we do thing repetitively the sensibility of the thing doesn’t bother us too much. We doubt even less when a group is involved in repetitive activities. We feel well at peace when we belong to the group involved in repetition.

If we received no orders, demands or requests, we are in all sorts of doubts whether we should initiate a thing. We tend to comply when we get an assignment unless we are teenagers, whose human brain is rapidly developing at the moment and defies assignments.

Here is an evolutional pattern that happens inside human sculls: first, a reptile brain grows, second, a brain of a herd animal, and finally, a human brain.  The first two are very old and work automatically. The third brain is wrought with doubt.

What is a human brain, anyway? Isn’t it the zone in the pre-frontal lobe, which is said to be responsible for setting arbitrary goals and making independent decisions, taking stupid risks against instinctive fears and braking away from the herd against all odds? Isn't it the latest step in natural evolution? Aren't we, as a part of nature and the brain's carriers suffering from the growth pains along with the whole nature? Doesn't it manifest itself in discomfort of doubts, guilt, madness, intellectual disabilities, harm to the others and ourselves, environmental destruction, and shit like that?

Religions has been developing all along with the human brain to take care of gross discrepancies. Their rules and prohibitions mean to deal with the harms and suffering associated with brain functions. If we take a careful look, we may even notice that the younger, more developed religions worship of all things the brain itself, or rather the indefinable phenomenon we call intellect and somehow link to it. Christianity calls it Logos as oppose to Chaos, and God-our-Father as oppose to Mother Nature. It makes it responsible for creation but separates it from nature and human consciousness. This separation leads to contradictions. Some religions overcome it by including mind of all sorts as well as Mother Nature in the overall holistic picture. 

Historically, religion was the first PR tool used to manipulate masses by provoking and comforting guilt and doubt. Guilt and doubt that people experience when they suddenly get an idea of doing something new, unconventional, something maybe unreasonable, or totally unsolicited. Religion calls this function of human brain a free will, sometimes praising it but mostly reproaching.

The development of human brain, aka free will, is a very young phenomenon in natural evolution so some people tired of social and individual controversies it creates suggest to deny its existence.

I, personally  don’t deny the freewillshit and struggle for social acceptence while producing unsolicited art.

From the Head of a Russian Woman

 

E.D. 2012, A Woman and a Bull, acrylic on Russian babushka, 30x30"

 

I am the Bull born from the head of Russian woman. She is spun of chromosomes of primitive slavery. Barrenness is in her blood; bleakness is in her cortex. Her thoughts are the unclean boggy soil, inseminated by weird folklore. They leak through the scull staining archaic head-cover. Grandmother wore it on her head, as did her grandmother’s grandmother, each generation passing the old custom to their daughters, each daughter striving to shake it off. Grandmother folds babushka neatly and hangs it on the back of the chair next to her bed to stare at the recurrence of pattern. Floral clusters oozes into her corpus callosum, and then discards into her granddaughter’s thoughts where shit is born.

Overproduction

 E.D. 2011, Butterfly Portraits 7, acrylic on canvas, 46x56"

Like anything else in the world the visual art shit is overproduced. There is no more sense in producing new visual art shit than in any other shit production. The only sense to produce more visual art shit is that the visual art is the only shit production that consciously attempts to overcome sense.

Teeth

  the shady creek bed

I found teeth in the bed of a dry creek on the way to the cliff.  I was not looking for teeth there, and when I spotted them among the pebbles and broken pieces of melted bottles, I crouched to take a better look. At the beginning, covered in mud they looked unrecognizable, and only when I picked them up with my two fingers and brought them closer to my eyes the picture gradually became clear: I was holding a lower jaw of unknown human with my bare hand. But instead of dropping it on the floor, I dropped it into my pocketbook.

The thought that the jaw might have been made of gold occurred later, and prompted me to wash it with soap and sponge.  Yellow metal was shiny and without rust.  Like anyone else I was looking for the meaning, especially in the situation like that, when dressed in tight summer dress and high-heeled sandals I started on the perilous path to a cliff and got distracted by unusual deposit on the polluted bed of a dry shadowy creek. The meaning in this case was: look where others don’t and you will find gold!

I had other reasons to use 20 odd minutes in my schedule between two compensated job assignments to take a walk on the cliff. The cliff precipitated over the intersection of Belmont Avenue and Rock Hill Road, and gave a feel of desolation to everyone who ventured there from the surrounding streets of cheerful suburban community. To pause on it’s edge some sixty feet above the blight industrial park relieved the stress of senselessness. The gold found on this path had a double potential to make sense: as an overall philosophical justification of unconventional ways, and as an extra buck.  

That evening I showed teeth to my family at the dinner table. It freaked everyone out; they laughed, but my husband said that it would be a hard sale.

A week later I had an orthodontist appointment in Ambler. At the end I took the jaw out of my pocketbook and showed it to the hygienist. The dental artistry of the porcelain teeth on the golden plate delighted her. She called the doctor, and together they estimated it in about four to five hundred dollars. The receptionist who peaked in the doorway suggested taking it to Sam. Sam had a gold-buying business on Butler Pike only couple blocks down the street. They knew him because their patient, a nice old lady, carried homemade cookies down to his store every time she came for an appointment. Sam was a high-school buddy of her late son.

Pale blue gems of Sam’s eyes set in the copper of thin eyelids made me realize that I didn’t even know the current price of gold. He took out his cell phone and theatrically pinched a number to find out the exact exchange rate, but no one answered. “According to yesterday’s rate,” he said, “this much gold would cost ninety-seven dollars,” and he took out the money, which I accepted.

I was driving away when at the sight of obese water tower on the intersection of Butler Pike and Church Road I heard a call from the teeth, “You sold us unfairly!” I turned my car back with the squeak in the wheels. Now driving towards Sam’s bulletproof door I imagined his freckled face. I couldn’t think of a single argument. I forgot my cellphone at home, I didn’t know the exchange rate, and I was at risk to be late for work. At the red light at Ambler train station I made a careful U-turn. Passed obese water tower the pressure started building up again. Who cares what the argument, I must face the scoundrel!

Sam rendered surprise on his inert face. He stood me up at the door while looking for keys. “I changed my mind,” I said putting money on the counter, “give me back my teeth.” “But I cannot,” he argued, “it’s already in the truck!” “What truck?” I wondered. “The truck, which takes my gold to the smith.” “Where is the truck?” “In the back of the office.” “Go there and get my teeth!” “But I cant. They are mixed with all other teeth there.” “How often people bring you teeth for sale?” “You would be surprised.” “I remember my teeth very well. I will recognize them.” “But I cannot leave you here alone, when I go looking for them.” “I will wait outside.” “Give me fifteen minutes.” And I found myself outwitted again.

Fifteen minutes later, fingers jitter, he opened a plastic sandwich bag with a few miniscule remnants of golden plate buried under the dust of crushed teeth. “So,” I said, “that’s what worth ninety seven dollars? Thank you for honesty. I am just coming from the orthodontist office up the street. They recommended you as an honest man. They have seen the teeth.  I can call them as witnesses to verify that it cannot be all the gold I brought here.” With a little more copper in his face he took out a hundred dollar bill from his wallet. “I can give you another hundred dollars and that’s to my disadvantage.”  “It is not what the gold was worth!” “Two hundred and fifty dollars altogether. I am losing money on this deal because I don’t want you to spread a bad word about me.” The jitter spread to my fingers when I stuck money in my pocketbook.

melted jars in the creek bed

 The debris that made me wonder up the bed of the dry creek contained melted glass bottles. In the past I did a project where I stained used jars and bottles, broke them and arranged the pieces to restore the original shape the best I could. I fired them in the kiln to the melting point to see if their brokenness could be mended. The melting temperature for glass is over 1000 degrees. 

I climbed up that creek next day to look for answers. There were no signs of the body of unknown human whose teeth I just sold and I found only a few more pieces of melted glass. The climb ended at the open mouth of an underground pipe. I had no way of finding out where this shit originated.

 

jars and bottles from my kiln

At Her B(r)east

 

 E.D. A Family, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 54x54

Breastfeeding. Is it animal-like?  I craved it with each of three fruitful and abhorred pregnancies. The first draw. Deep pleasure underneath the pain surface. It starts at the abdomen's bottom filling me up and swirling around the breasts, then erupts inside the head and rushes out of the swollen nipples. The labor of the newborn at my labor's finale. The sweaty freeze.

 A woman outside  her job placement. Is she animal-like? All the fashions in the world cannot kill her everlasting natural nature. Male's torso in the back is the reference to the Bull, of cause. His head is out of picture. It is not time for thinking. The Nature whipshit.     

Money

Too bad, we don't appreciate money as an artifact.
A copper penny is more expensive to make than a dollar bill, which once was in gold.
When money go virtual, owning a dollar bill will be prestigious.
Money has always been in our heads rather then pockets or banks.
Coins were used for the lack of math skills, like children's fingers to count their age.
Soon we all will remember the forgotten fact, which will make bills unnecessary, that money represents relationships.
Virtual money will replace paper like facebook likes, and the truism about serving two lords now conveniently located under one umbrella will make the headacheshit unbearable.



.

Love One Another

E.D. A Love Scene. 2009 Acrylic on canvas, 50x60"

I look at the familiar face to see unfamiliar. The person behind the face is unknown. Facial features, facial expressions don’t reveal anything about the person behind the face, but there is also no such thing as behind. The person is the face.

I look at my face in the mirror to see unfamiliar. Behind the face I am unknown. Facial features, facial expressions don’t reveal anything, but there is also no such thing as behind. I am the face.

Religion teaches that god knows me; teology teaches that god cannot be known. I cannot know the god who knows me. So what do I do? I fall in love. If I am too old to fall, I just love.

In love I desire to know and to be known. I desire to dissolve completely in the poor fellow I love.

Sex, of cause, is the most obvious way to pursue this desire, but I am ultimately unsuccessful in it. I am tempted to buy every magazine in supermarket promising to reveal the secret of successful sex. 


But recently I realized that successful sex is in the way of thinking. 

 
Leave the preoccupied consciousness behind to enter the realms of unconscious. There everything is the successful sex!

The greatest pleasure comes from the experience of oneness, like in a mother and a baby. Starting to engage in efforts of self-assertion, we have lost it forever. Blame the prefrontal lobe whose uncontrollable growth gives the mature consciousness superiority over poor infantile unconscious, like eating an apple from the tree, like the original sin.  Ovaries and testicles ripen at the same time giving an impression that sin is in the sex.


How confusing! Sex helps to overcome separateness and connect the mature human non-animals with the world, whereas consciousness triggers self-conscious, ambitious and egotistic, and prevents people from kissing each other. 

There is nothing left for poor non-beasts but to wait for the death's eternal kiss, the one that brings back the lost infantile experience of oneness. It comes in the aroma of final dissolution of our ever-unfamiliar faces, like paradise, like shit. 

Gender Relationships

ED. From "A Woman and a Bull" series, 2010 Acrylic on canvas 24x36"

Gender relationships can be complicated. Take this for instance, a woman being born from the bull’s carcass. The bull, no doubt, represents a man. Or should we look at it from a different angle? Say, every bull has a chick inside. To me it certainly looks like a woman’s sexy torso “dressed” in the armor of the bull’s ribs. The bull, no doubt, represents a man. Is she killing the dude? Or could it be that when she is wormed up and ready to be alive, the guy is already done? Or is she compelled to pry-open the cage, which by circumstance happened to be her husband’s ribs?

And what the heck? The shit is headless anyway!

pARTners

The hierarchy of names is a little complicated here. There is an agency, called Peaceful Living. It serves adults with intellectual disabilities. It has a day program, called Creative Gifts, where I run a workshop called pARTners. We are in constant flux. People who participate in doing art are diverse, sometimes unpredictable, and... just fun to deal with. When I do my workshop I have to think fast and catch every ball they send my way. Later the production of never boring sessions becomes a never boring art. Above are some samples.

   

I want people come to our Fall Market, November 16th, and buy pARTners art not out charity or their personal history with intellectual disabilities, but because

theycantresistashit

www.peacefulliving.org

Roy Choi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n51sFvSKkHs

Roy Choi says that he doesn't plan. He gets ideas, sometime just dreams them, and goes on realizing them. He mixes flavors in his food like crazy inspired by colors, tastes and the spirit of LA streets cultures. When he cooks, he says that he doesn't not have a problem if the tastes are not consistent from one day to another. I have never been to LA. I have never try his food.
Iwonnatryashit

Down

ED. Down, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 60X60"

I think that human personality much like a physical world has a double structure. It may be hierarchical, but as for the present instance, I think it is elemental. Like two different natures simultaneously. Like a wave and a particle. We have biochemical processes running in our brain. Emotions, feelings, impulses.   We also have a thought processes. The thought allows us to observe ourselves. Who observes who? I think, the observer is the wave.
There must be articles and books about it. 
I wonnareadashit