The video is a dialogue between whales and humans about madness.
Whales ask questions from philosopher Michel Foucault’s massive tome History of Madness.
On a cruise ship, my family answers the whales’ questions with quotes from Moby Dick.
Melville’s canonical American narrative of mania directed towards the white whale (a stand-in for oil? for happiness? for domination of nature/others?) is juxtaposed with Foucault’s history of madness in relationship to animality, criminality, sickness, the body, power, the unknown, and otherness.

Q: Why, from the old alliance of water and madness, was this ship born, and what made it appear at that very moment?
A: Oh! jolly is the gale, And a joker is the whale, A’ flourishin’ his tail, — Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh! The scud all a flyin’, That’s his flip only foamin’; When he stirs in the spicin’, — Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh! Thunder splits the ships, But he only smacks his lips, A tastin’ of this flip, — Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky- poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXqW1OCrAUo

Installation Shot

The Watery Part of the World, Digital Drawing

Freudian Lip, Digital Drawing

Friends of Kind, Digital Drawing

Vox Humana & Antique Kinship, C-prints

A short video about the Walmart vs Dukes case of this year, in which the court said women don’t exist, or only exist if there is a policy towards women. Justice Scalia, writing for the majority says (as summarized by NPR) “in order to sue as a single class, the women would have to point to a discriminatory policy that affected all of them, and they could not do that…. the company has a specific corporate policy against discrimination.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuapXHOD_pg

I am so inspired by this new thing now happening at Occupy Wall Street.
In this triptych, the first text is a quote from Foucault’s History of Madness– a book I’m reading for another project– which delineates how madness, poverty, illness, and otherness in general have all been constructed as categories (and then the people assigned to those categories have been confined) throughout European history. Definitions of the mad have fluctuated to include the diseased, the poor, the indebted, the libertines, the irrelegious, the artists, the gay, the “girlish”, and, of course, the genuinely mentally troubled. The subtext of Foucault’s tome is compassion for outsiders, and the tribe of outsiders– representing the 99%– at Occupy Wall Street is now seeming to gather with a force I’ve never seen before. Building on the space of the agora and the occupations of the past, it is perhaps a new thing, more than a demand. It is uncapturable; it is musical.

Lieder of the Pact includes appropriated YouTube footage of the 1960s girl band, The Shangri-Las, performing for television. With homophonous English sub-titles we reconstruct their “Leader of the Pack” as our “Lieder of the Pact.” Where the original song connects romance and rebellion within a constrained matrix of gender and social relations, we re-imagine it to reveal love transformed into desire for knowledge, a fight against nihilism, and the possibility of new ways of reading old things that hide in plain sight in the original. Originally this video was part of an exhibition, FeedbackFeedbackLoopLoop, with twelve collaborative call and response drawing triptychs – our response to reading Alain Badiou’s The Theory of the Subject, together.

The video is also installment #3 in my project me & ooooo, an ongoing effort where I ask people to read books with me and make collaborative songs in response.

2010
Drawings/Music Video with Rebecca Carter
Project Space, Gallery 500X
Dallas, TX

Page x: The four domains of truth

FeedbackFeedbackLoopLoop is a recent exhibition of drawings and music/video resulting from a collaboration between Rebecca Carter, radical philosopher Alain Badiou, and myself. Ok, Badiou was the silent partner… he is not aware of this collaboration. FeedbackFeedbackLoopLoop responds to conversations, research, and moments of inspiration linked to Rebecca’s and my collaborative reading of Badiou’s 1982 text, The Theory of the Subject.

Inspired by Badiou’s beautiful language and his theories of Truth, dialectics, and Subjects, we created a call and response drawing structure resulting in triptychs. The first drawing in each triptych, (the call) responds to a page in the text (pictured in the center). The second drawing, (the response) must be a compositional homology to the first drawing. The resulting dialectical triptychs, image-text-image, contain both returns to and flights from the original text.

Extending the dialogical play of the drawings, we also rewrote the music of the 60s “bad girl band”, The Shangri-Las. Our new song—The Lieder of the Pact—explores both the joys of textual possibilities and the resistance to the authority of the text.

Installation shot from the show at 500x.

Page 13: Any contradiction is fundamentally asymmetrical

Page 59: a-specific, beyond necessity, absolutely out-of-place, unsplaceable, unfigurable

Page 63: That which grounds the possibility of thinking suffers a shipwreck in the unthinkable

Page 159: Render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe

More drawings coming soon.

Cats debate capitalism through anagrams of “rethinking capitalism.”

Inspired by the cat website “I can has cheezburger” (which assumes cats can’t spell), texting shorthand, and current debates about capitalism and power relations, the cats fluctuate between anarchist leanings, nihilism, and hope for new possibilities.

These are projects that slowly or spastically emerge–
in the meantime they are books, published in editions of three.

Installment #2 in me & ooooo, a project where I ask people to read books with me and then write songs in response, Todd Ableser and I wrote a song about The Thesaurus.

Listen

An intergalactic visitor asks questions about the human species.

What’s your name? (That’s my name too.)
What are those machines that your species fondles all day? 
Are those things advancing the species?
Why do some of you have long fringes and some of you short fringes?
How does your species access truth?

(The show, curated by Kari Adelaide and Sorine Anderson, was called The Perseids, after the spectacular meteor shower that week.)

2002- Current
To see the full drawings, click on the thumbnails to the right.

I have been making drawings since 2002; they are shown as individual pieces, as a small slideshow installation, or in Blank Paige & The Mirror Stage. As individual pieces, the drawings range from tiny (3×5 inches) to poster-size. As a small slideshow, the drawings fade in and out of darkness. I think of this installation as a pedagogical exercise gone awry, a slideshow of thinking slogans and objectified logical systems.

Blank Paige & The Mirror Stage is a more complex installation, consisting of:

1. A band (made up of me and guests artists) that always performs on a reflective, mirrored stage.

2. An installation (pictured below), the scene of post-performance, after Blank Paige & The Mirror Stage has performed. The installation is composed of recorded songs, real and cardboard music production equipment (a drum kit, a few microphones…), the plexiglass mirror stage, a slide projection set-up, and the projection of drawings behind the mirror stage.

3. The concept. According to Wikipedia, “The mirror stage was the subject of Jacques Lacan’s first official contribution to psychoanalytic theory. He described it as representing a permanent structure of subjectivity, the paradigm of the Imaginary order; it is a phrase in which the subject is permanently caught and captivated by his own image… [Lacan said] ‘the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body image.”

Blank Paige & The Mirror Stage installation mockup.

Drawings projected as a small slideshow