The preliminary materialist question in the arts,
in memory of George Maciunas
(12 symptoms)

 First.
Art is not a thing, it is a cause. Just like hysteria is a corporal prodigy.

 Second.
The materialistic argument, which occupies a position between corporality and sociality, constitutes the functional link between the senses and sense, between representation and meaning. In the same movement it dissociates the supposed one between body and mind, between nature and culture.

Third.
The “vegetation of objects” is the new still life of modern art.
It suffocates the substance of the thing.

Fourth.
Linguistic excess leads the visual to blindness and, further on, to the revulsions of abstraction. In so doing it demonstrates the opacity and heaviness of the spirit that has long forgotten the nobility of the wind that turned into pneuma.

Fifth.
Martin Heidegger writes, the young girl who is engaged in a task too difficult for her can be said to be a young thing, still too young for it (ein noch zu junges Ding). How to put it? Uma coisa ainda muito nova… a little thing, that behind the green door of desire becomes the origin of the world, even in spite of Gustave Courbet’s anatomical realism.

Sixth.
The being other of the res (Ding) is the form of merchandise, its “usability” is united with its Gestalt. A condition that makes ability an attrition.

Seventh.
If the edifice of the representation “con.forms”, the “signi.ficance” is a hotchpotch of liver and black figs.

Eighth.
When the chips are down, for idealisms meaning is always transcendental, and so it is in the form of a distraction.

Ninth.
For the work of art historicity is an infinite alteration of the style on which meaning contorts the form even where the significanza makes it flat.

Tenth.
Representation is the bad substance of meaning. A substance that embraces the reality that is does not re.cognize and the imaginary of which it fears the symbolic rains. This is why in the complex emblem of the Borromeo family the rings go rusty and it grows dark on the trou around which the psychosis is organized.

Eleventh.
Representation is a denegation of the void. Different are the lost trace and resemblance. Different is the remnant as testimony of what does not face.

Twelfth.
Eating sugared icons in the museums. There is always a plus-enjoyment that glimmers behind the mutilations inflicted by bites. In the shadow of the counter-reformations.

“Demolish serious culture.” – Henry Flynt