IV Paintings for a Carpenter

Amir Mogharabi

(It’s Destruction and It’s Resurrection, found in It’s Denial and It’s Final Decision)
 It would be
difficult to renounce (in certain
people, certain mythologists, or
maybe even alchemists) the
conviction that, the material is
the concept.

In others,
like myself, it is difficult to
renounce the desire not to care
at all.

The desire
not to expect language (this
language, in-itself) to do
anything other than: create more
concepts from concepts.

To
renounce a creative act,
culminating in the painting of a
severed tongue.

Like
Philomela, (her and all of her
silent glamour, all her hysteria
guided by her appearance) when
she arrives unannounced. At
once castrated and castrating.

Her body:
bespeaking the truth of her past.

Her image:

distorting a figural system of

signs.

An arched back, a distended

arm.
II!
 The
harmony of her future:

in the dark
of every rotten throat.

The dark:
an organic geometry reasoned
into existence.

The word:

with the
odor of the breath. With every
canvas rotten under the rain.

To blame:
the rain of what becomes and
why.

To blame:
the organic for our ineptitude.

To feel:
responsible while falling.

To forget:
(or never know) that we are all,
Tears of Eros.

All the
victims of an incurable anxiety
that has finally, ended with a
script.

A
decidedly silent composition on
behalf of 1000 crying babies,
1000 paintings sold for the
benefit of being read.

Like a
book.

III!
 Maybe we
are looking for a musical
property, a sensitive and
ambiguous one, to characterize
the material and the possibility
of:

it’s destruction, it’s

resurrection, it’s denial, it’s
final decision.

IV!
 - It’s Destruction -

Painting #4. (Far Right) 30” x 20”, Pencil, enamel, cigarette burn and ink on canvas. Composition: Wagner. (Original
Score Unknown)

This is, somehow the end. Although, the story is always elliptical in motion, and the ‘lie of the truth’ is what puts these
ellipses into motion. These beginnings.

The rotation of a rotary (or the binding of the page, or (Y)), onto the axis perpendicular to its motion (X).

The walls of a gallery (uniform and mirrored), prepared with canvases of white, conceived on opposite ends of an
insular hallway.

Where language reconvenes at the eye, and the intellect, in a long-since deafened stupor.

An incomplete experience, defied by a new word, a new world. A new word, a new world.

An interval in Daumal’s verse, and the spaces it attempts to organize: What it attempts to give to reading:

1. Nature in its relation to intuition and chance. (the coincidences we never

confront as real)
2. Chance in its relation to volition and crime. (the flowers we never steal
for ourselves)
3. Form in its relation to conceit. (the shapes we never question or
undermine).
4. Figure in its relation to the denial of beauty. (the inventions we cease to
see without coincidence)

It is a painterly suicide, decided by an ascetic, always Nietzschean, denial of metaphysics.

Where sound and breath are both uttered in the r(enunciation) of pain. For, if meaning is determined by negation,
happiness can only come from its opposite, from pain.

It is the tremor that adds and subtracts from the terror, the body that adds and subtracts from the image.

And, when the image adds to the canvas, against all human volition, we must react with a flame under the sundered
outline of our melodic crackle. Of our knowledge gone weary, like a
dead flute, or a trumpet broken at the neck.

The already burned score, whose reproduction accounts for an equivalent number of brush strokes (or even glances) on
the surface of an original ‘disjunction.’ An interval.

A disjunction that we stutter into coherence.

Filling our quiet mouths with linseed and glass. With echoes and resonances of an ulterior performance. Of an empty
theatre built for an indignant conductor.

If I were to be entirely honest here, I really know nothing of Wagner. I know I am decidedly contra.

Contra the affair that the idea engages with the affect.

That is, this affair.

This Painting. Painting #4. The painting for the carpenter and his piano. For his hands contra every cause, every
modality, brought into every knowledgeable effect.

Contra everything contra. Well beyond it’s final decision, well beyond the conjectural end of human history.

V!
and

VI!
 - It’s Final Decision -

Painting #3 (second from right) 30” x 20” Oil Based Frottage done on canvas in the dark.

The final decision is always the most difficult to

execute. Whether it came before or after.

For some, it is the most rewarding. But, as a principle

of private, or studio-based production, we should consider each ending: a
departure.

Each finality: a sense of dissatisfaction.

The resonance of ‘encore’ when we are in love, with

or without a subject; with or without, the ‘one whose love was service.’

The resonance of an ongoing fantasy-unto-death.

The living room becoming the dining room.

Since this is the total ‘destruction and resurrection’ of

a variable (X or Y) referred to only as ‘It’s;’ this is therefore, also a
meditation on four paintings that cease to exist, but continue to mediate.
They continue, themselves, to meditate, but without the (T), without the
cross-section of the (X and Y) axis.

Their contemplation occurs on your behalf.

Reader or writer: intentionally renouncing a

distinction.

The frottage is also a sculpture.

Or it begins as one. A pre-existing rise and fall in the

geology of chance, a crevice defined by its threshold, an imprint defined
by a reversal, in the order of reason and sensation; a threshold between
madness and martyrdom.

A blind man with, or without, brail, can point the

dagger in any direction he so chooses.

The final decision can occur from either end.

Prior

or posterior

to its outcome.

‘Whether it came before or after.’

The bricks are laid from the top down.

Their foundation, based on an ‘equivalence of the

dissimilar’ (Mondrian).

Or a broken obelisque.

I once learned a game.

Beginning with a succession of 4 rows, that decrease

in vertical elements within each row.

Using the order 1:3:5:7

VII!
 |
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When assembled, the parts create a pyramid whose precipice indexes the sky.

It’s foundation muddles in the earth. Its feet, are broader than its head, its base is grounded in what beckons every
artist’s return to sincerity.

The return to materialism: returning to a transience of the horizon within our most deceptive opera: history.

Returning to the axis of each row (X) in this game (in this text), while losing oneself in the indeterminate number of
interruptions possible with the assent of (Y).

Elements are then removed (in any sum) by each player (by each painter) from one
row.

One-row-at-a-time.

The decision that determines the game’s outcome (the decision that reduces rows (X), and columns (Y), to a single and
ambiguous element, capable of rotating along both axis) can only be made by the successor of the final column.
Because it is the opponent left with the final element, who loses. Who suffers the weight of a building de-constructed
on behalf of the other.

On behalf of the master, in an incoherent (nevertheless consequential) lie.

This is the carpenter’s game.

The game that concludes with a rotating column (after the destruction of its prior placement along the illusion of an
immutable axis, after the destruction of its history as paradigm) and commences, only after its conclusion.

After confounding craft with concept.

As we descend

VIII!
from the pyramid

and it’s final decision

which now turns us

away from the

sun.

We may, of course, paint for less important reasons:

beneath

the sun (and not the rain),

or

before

its humble resurrection.

IX!
and

X!
- It’s Resurrection –

Painting #1 (far left) 30” x 20” Oil on Canvas, Cigarette Ash. Profile of Friedrich Nietzsche Facing Paintings #2, #3,
and #4.

Excerpts from an un-authored text, as a prelude to the description of a corresponding painting:

“Hostile to life, the Painting is hostile thus to woman also, who is herself
life (femina vita).”

“One should survey the whole history of the painters, philosophers, and
performance artists:

the most poisonous things against the senses have been said not by the
impotent, nor by the ascetics, but by the impossible ascetics, those who
were really in dire need of ‘the spritualization of sensuality,’ or love.”

“All this leads one to say at long last that once the factor of painting has
been understood in these various manifestations, and there is nothing to
prevent the relationship of painting and mysticism from being grasped as
well: all that is needed is to find the common factor in the fascination of
such apparently contradictory experiences as obscenity and idyllic love,
morose delectation and the mating of the drone.”

What is humble about its resurrection (in this instance, referring to the sun, and not the aforementioned painting) is that
it expends indefinitely, without asking, or beckoning, for anything in return.

Its resurrection is therefore an indefinite exchange with itself, or expenditure on behalf of an absolute knowledge, an
irrevocable truth that is taken back by error.

One that appears when life and light, reflect upon their own capacity to create and exchange error as object, error as
time distended across the hysterics arm, never horizontal.

What is humble about its resurrection (in this instance referring to the
painting, and not the aforementioned sun) is that it ceases to exist. It ceases to converge life and light in exchange for
the error of (its) existence as an object. For (its) is not an object, but an abstract and variable reference to any number
of possible outcomes, any number of games not yet played.

Nietzsche is in this way, like a woman without object. A woman whose gaze is
neither reflected nor reflecting, always aware of irony and its inversion. Of the image without vision or knowledge
(inversion cannot be spelled without vision).

Of the morose disguised as the dead.

Of the hand disguised as utility.

The discursive hand, unaware of its obsolescence. Unaware that the laborer too, must cease to exist, and that the artist
should no longer consider craft in the domain of labor, but in the domain of a contradictory statement that exists
spatially.

Exists as language in the carpenter’s resurrection of an immediate space.

From which we came, and towards which we must digress, yet again.

XI!
found in

XII!
 - It’s Denial -

Painting #2 (second from left) 30” x 20” Oil on Canvas, Cigarette Ash. Profile of Alphonse
Allais Facing Painting #1, and essentially #2, #3, and #4

It is not the intention to be vague, contradictory or strategic (since all strategies are firmly denounced from the
foreground) when leaving the following four pages blank. Albeit intentionally numbered. The text is already there,
defined by the parameters of each page you are now holding in your hands. It is also already there, in the (r)
enunciation of denial. In the original carpenter, unaware of his role, in this game of light, now without its paradoxical
reference, now without the sun to distinguish foreground from background, dark from light, cause from effect.

Abyss from Text.

XIII!
XIV!
XV!
XVI!
XVII!
- And Found In And -

The Immaterial Effects of Chance, in Between Paintings #1, #2, #3, #4

This is the combination of referents in between each painting, or between the titles of each painting. The paintings are
(and this is said with the same veracity as Henry Flynt’s Self-Validating Falsehood (1988)) on these pages, also as a
combination of referents, as images now occurring before you, before me, without pre-existing references, but co-
existing ones.

The paintings are the pages, and the pages, are the painting. Considered together, they are singular, much like any over-
arching artistic practice that reflects upon itself, while simultaneously understanding itself as a pre-condition for
reflection.

But the page, unlike the painting, cannot extend onto the wall or the floor, unless we reconsider where the previous four
pages do not exist.

That is, where the text occurs in an abyss simulated around what I am saying.

One may only imagine when listening. One may only perform when reading: And Found In And.

Now you and I are one, although, I could be understood as the cause and you, the reader, the effect that causes.

The effect that causes and to be found in and as long as you chose to read what was just read.

And, since the eye now coincides with the spirit, much like I have said before, the phenomenology of our discontent
lies precisely in the fact that seeing and reading have become one and the same thing.

The painting lies before you, and before this. This.

And the coincidences come after.

Or rather, during. This.

This.

XVIII!
And only found in and this.

This abyss.

Not this End.

XIX!
The Material is Not the Concept.

It is.

The End.

XX!