ISSUE 2: SIRENS AS MUSES
2017–2018
Sirens as muses; sirens as muses within; sirens as muses forming feelings; feelings that can merge wholly with thoughts; thoughts that can now ossify into objects; objects that can be elevated to things: from the realm of things to the territory of affective things...from the territory of affective things to the grotto of feverish existences - painful and turbulent, in perpetual frenzy, in dynamic compounding, flesh descending from the bone, monsters in becoming...
“The color red,” Alfred North Whitehead notes, “is eternal….It comes and goes….It appears when it is wanted.” Like Whitehead’s eternal red, monsters, melancholia - muses and sirens - ingress upon us and in a hot flash, provoke a problem of existence. From a swelling, to a tendency, to a force, and finally to a boiling intensification, these feign anything but cool professionalism. The basic idea is try not to bury the turbulence inside, but instead try to possess it.
An era which began on a note of heady optimism closes with insistent self-critique. That our future can no longer be adequately anticipated proves the fateful consequence, the collapse of “truth” and “realism.” Without such sure pictures to look forward to then (always at a distance), we depict for you the psycho-aesthetic laid bare. Careful not to be mistaken for wanton indulgences, it is important to regard once more the unyielding pangs of dullness yet to be expelled from our existential inheritance.