More Nietzsche

57 To the realists – You sober people who feel well armed against passion and fantasies and would like to turn your emptiness into a matter of pride and an ornament: you call yourselves realists and hint that the world really is the way it appears to you ... That mountain there! That cloud there! What is 'real' in that? Subtract the phantasm and and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training – all your humanity and animality. There is no 'reality' for us – not for you either, my sober friends. We are not nearly as different as you think, and perhaps our good will to transcend our intoxication is as respectable as your faith that you are altogether incapable of intoxication.

58 Only as creators! – This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realise that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for – originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to their skin – all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be a part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such. How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called 'reality'. We can destroy only as creators. – But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new 'things'.

I cannot believe it's taken me this long to read this. Ye gods!

I am an idiot!

Idiot!

Idiot!

Last Nietzsche quote for the night

41 Against remorse – A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions – as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. To be annoyed or feel remorse because something goes wrong – that he leaves to those who act because they have received orders and who have to reckon with a beating when his lordship is not satisfied with the result.

42 Work and boredom – Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilised countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare breed, as do men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, travelling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery if only it is associated with pleasure, and the hardest, most difficult if necessary. Otherwise, their idleness is resolute, even if it spells impoverishment, dishonour, and danger to life and limb.

This and today's other Nietzsche quotes (including the poems) are from The gay science (which is not about homosexuality but rather about Nietzsche's approach to philosophy). Yes, just in case you couldn't tell, I'm very much enjoying reading it.

On the advice of the translator, I'm reading it in its entirety from start to finish, as opposed to just dipping in here and there, as I've done with other Nietzsche books (Thus spake Zarathustra and Human, all too human) or reading secondary sources. After this, I plan to read Human, all too human properly.

A Picabia poem (to compare with Nietzsche)

Let chance overflow

Faithful to nature and incomplete!
In the end I write what pleases me
But what pleases me???
That which I think I know how to do!
If I was allowed to choose freely
I wouldn't choose anything
Perhaps a little spot for myself
in the midst of happiness
and for me still
and more willingly before its door
My quill scrawls
Who then reads what I write?
But you are from above
for you live even above praise
Predestined to your orbit
you acknowledge only a single law
Be pure!

This is an example of what Marc Lowenthal alleges is Picabia's plagiarism of Nietzsche. The sources he gives for all but the last five lines are a couple of posts below (numbers 55, 57, and 59). The last five lines are allegedly from:

60 Higher men

He should be praised for climbing; yet
The other men comes always from a height
And lives where praise can never get–
Beyond your sight.

63 Star morals

Called a star's orbit to pursue,
What is the darkness, star, to you?

Roll on in bliss, traverse this age–
Its misery far from you and strange.

Let farthest world your light secure.
Pity is sin you must abjure.

But one command is yours: be pure!

Considering that Lowenthal translated the Picabia poems, used the same translation of Nietzsche as I have, and would want to make the best case for his claim of plagiarism that he could, I think we can discount translation for the differences between the Picabia poem and the Nietzsche ones.

Lowenthal makes a big deal of being the first to discover Picabia's plagiarism. I think he's making a bid for art historical relevance that's not warranted. If he'd toned down his claims to borrowings, appropriation, or influence, that would be a different story.

You have the evidence. What do you think? Plagiarism or not?

Underground musician takes on the IRD

Mick Elborado, underground musician who's played with such luminaries as the Axemen, the Terminals, and Spacedust, and who's supported this by working at the IRD for a long time, couldn't take it any more and drove his car into the Christchurch IRD office. You can read his reasons for doing so here.

I've stolen the pics from the Axemen blog. Click that link for more.

Some nice Nietzsche poetry

7 Vademecum – Vadetecum*

Lured by my style and tendency,
you follow and come after me?
Follow your own self faithfully–
take time – and thus you follow me.

10 Scorn

There is much I drop and spill:
I am full of scorn, you think.
If your beaker is too full,
There is much you drop and spill
Without scorning what you drink.

14 The good man

Better a whole-hearted feud
Than a friendship that is glued.

18 Narrow souls

Narrow souls I cannot abide;
There's almost no good or evil inside.

24 Medicine for pessimists

Nothing tastes good to you, my friend?
I'm tired of your belly-aching.
You spit, rage, slander without end;
My patience and my heart are breaking.
I have a remedy; just follow
My good advice and rest assured:
A toad is what you need to swallow,
And your dyspepsia will be cured.

33 The solitary

I hate to follow and I hate to lead.
Obey? Oh no! And govern? No indeed!
Only who dreads himself inspires dread.
And only those inspiring dread can lead.
Even to lead myself is not my speed.
I love to lose myself for a good while.
Like animals in forests and the sea,
To sit and think on some solitary isle,
And lure myself back home from far away,
Seducing myself to come back to me.

43 Admonition

What you want is fame?
Then note the price:
All claim
To honour you must sacrifice.

55 Realistic painters

'True to nature, all the truth: that's art.'
This hallowed notion is a threadbare fable.
Infinite is nature's smallest part.
They paint what happens to delight their heart.
And what delights them? What to paint they're able.

57 Choosy taste

If it depended on my choice,
I think it might be great
To have a place in Paradise;
Better yet – outside the gate.

59 The pen is stubborn

The pen is stubborn, sputters – hell!
Am I condemned to scrawl?
Boldly I dip it in the well,
My writing flows, and all
I try succeeds. Of course, the spatter
Of this tormented night
Is quite illegible. No matter:
Who reads the stuff I write?

*Vademecum: a manual or guidebook; literally, 'go with me.' Vadetecum: go with yourself.

Fair warning: There is likely to be a fair bit of Nietzsche on its way.

Heh

I had a couple of amusing meetings with tutors yesterday. One of them said the problem with talking to me was that a couple of days later there'd be a blog post about an earnest lecturer talking bullshit over a cup of tea. The other said they were finding it difficult talking to a nihilist.

It's simple, really. When everything is meaningless, you might as well have some fun. Nothing is sacred. As Picabia put it: 'Free rein to the very point of excess!'

'For me, happiness is to command no-one and not be commanded.'

Next up, some nice Nietzsche poetry...

Quote of the day

How repulsive pleasure is now, that crude, musty, brown pleasure as it is understood by those who like pleasure, our 'educated' people, our rich people, and our rulers! How maliciously we listen now to the big county-fair boom-boom with which the 'educated' person and city dweller today permits art, books, and music to rape him and provide 'spiritual pleasures' – with the aid of spirituous liquors!

How the theatrical scream of passion now hurts our ears, how strange to our taste the whole romantic uproar and tumult of the senses have become, which the educated mob loves, and all its aspirations after the elevated, inflated, and exaggerated! No, if we convalescents still need art, it is another kind of art – a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art that, like a pure flame, licks into unclouded skies. Above all, an art for artists, for artists only!

We know better afterward what above all is needed for this: cheerfulness, any cheerfulness, my friends – also as artists: let me prove it. There are a few things we now know too well, we knowing ones: oh, how we now learn to forget well, and to be good at not knowing, as artists!

- Friedrich Nietzsche (the first dada), Preface to the second edition of The gay science

Another boring post about school

We had a workshop on framing this arvo. I was the only person to show up.

I think we've pretty much got this stupid group project done. It's really been doing my head in. It strikes me as make-work, to get the little bastards who aren't doing much actually doing something. From my point of view, it's been a dead-end waste of time that's distracted me from my own work.

I've got another assignment to do – an annotated bibliography and literature review of all things – that will require some time and thought, but apart from that I think I can just get stuck into doing some drawings. I may not post them on here though.

I've had a couple of interesting conversations about the dangers of recuperation recently. I'm a bit worried that Massey is winning but am not sure what to do about it. One of the problems is that I like the tutors. As Rose put it, 'You've got to know them as people and can't just treat them as cardboard cut-outs any more.' Damnit. I reckon the thing to do is not worry about it too much. After all, the whole point of this art lark is to amuse and enjoy myself. Fuck what anyone else thinks.

At the moment, I'm very much enjoying doing line drawings (the more derivative, the better!). I don't really distinguish between painting and drawing. Piero della Francesca, abstractionist that he was, defined painting as lines and colour on a flat surface. I think you can dispense with the colour part of it, unless you count the black of the line as colour. I suppose you probably should. I did start a largish abstract painting but have abandoned it, at least for the meanwhile. It was boring.

In other news, I've quit Can't Play Won't Play.

The crit

I had a crit yesterday. I wore my suit. The idea was to present myself well and my work shabbily, i.e. the opposite of what most students do. The work was drawings and slogans on A4 paper sellotaped crudely and wonkily on to my studio wall. I probably should take a studio photo again soon.

The crit went pretty well. Some of the slogans got laughs. There was a nice comment about being juvenile (that referred to a particularly infantile slogan). My assessor also made some interesting remarks about not needing to be obsessed with contemporaneity. After some initial doubts, I've come round. I've got a fair bit of confidence in him. Hell, anyone who likes Daniel Johnston is all right by me.

There was one particularly interesting question from the floor about whether my interests and opinions have changed over the years. The answer is both yes and no. There's definitely a core that hasn't changed.

I've mentioned before how I first discovered dada in the Encyclopedia Brittanica when I was 13. That was it until I found a copy of Hans Richter's Dada: Art and anti-art when I was 15. I still have that copy, though it's unreadable cos I cut it to shreds so I could stick pictures on my wall.

That was when I discovered Francis Picabia. His pictures stood head and shoulders above the rest. They really blew me away. It's now 24 years later, and I'm still obsessed with dada and still can't get over good Picabia is.

The main thing to come out of the crit was being put on to Henry Flynt, described as an artist no-one looks at, a musician no-one listens to, and a philosopher no-one reads. Story.

Groups are pissing me right off

Fuck I hate working with other people. For school, we've been told we have to do a collaborative group exhibition. This as part of our alleged self-directed studio paper. One of our group, when talking about our initial idea, got told that we weren't being collaborative enough. It's really putting me off school in general.

Apparently, we were told about this at the the start of the year, but I missed it, along with every other member of my class I've spoken to. But then communication and organisation are not exactly Massey's strong points.

Jesus fuck, I'm pissed off enough as it is with Can't Play Won't Play. I don't need this dictatorial bullshit as well. I really don't like working with other people, and I object to having it forced on me. I don't give a fuck if it's the latest academic fashion. And I really am not into jumping through hoops for jumping through fucking hoops' sake. Though the reaction of another member of the group's been usefully telling.

However, if I sabotage it, I'm doing in the other members of the group, which is a little unfair. But fucking hell, I'm tempted.