More insanity

I'm not dead yet. But I don't have much more to say than what I'm working on; so enjoy.

Aldous Huxley tells us that art is only for beginners, for those “who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.” If this is the epiphany of Huxley’s new found perception, then perhaps Julie Mehretu is not an artist; rather, she is a creator, an image producer, a traitor, a world assembler, a manifold becoming: a woman, man, demon, landscape, flight; a writer.

Begin with a map. The ink landscapes and diagrams in Mehretu’s works have been described as the underlying structure of her work; however, a beginning does not imply this notion of hierarchy. Rather, the image becomes with map, is map becoming… becoming what? Like Perec, sitting in a café, looking, reckoning, connecting, “Try to describe,” “Try to classify,” “Decipher a bit,” “Carry on until the scene becomes improbable….” This vision has no underlying structure even if it begins somewhere. These points of beginning will already be inflected with a past, present, and future becoming. Begin with a map without the intention of getting there (if not to get somewhere, to know somewhere), the pleasure will come from someplace in between.

Mehretu begins with familiar places: airports, court buildings, schools—and takes leave of them; this is different from Huxley’s line of flight, where another world is created, but seems unconcerned to move with us; in a way, inactive. Lawrence writes, “To leave, to leave, to escape…to cross the horizon, enter into another life….” To enter into life, to become a participant in moving, shifting, cutting, and traversing the world—these are the forces that emerge from Mehretu’s diagrams. From a grid, an arced trajectory becomes grass that is swept into an ocean becoming cloud, and if followed upward, meets diagram again. This is what Deleuze calls a line of flight, “to trace lines of flight which are not imaginary, and which one is indeed forced to follow, because in reality writing involves us there, draws us in there.” These lines of flight are almost overpowering, delirious, in person. You are for a moment displaced within the work, unable to find yourself, and yet it is still inviting. You step closer, into its world. You see that these lines of flight taking leave, escaping, were never a fleeing from life, from the real into art, but a production capable of interacting and participating in your life. You walk away looking and waiting for those same forces to follow you through the street, wedding colored forces to the diagram, creating impossible worlds.

This is the power of writing: a constant theft that forges itself anew at the site of every repetition. Mehretu’s works participate in our life, as we do in their lives, in our reading of them. Proust speaks of this power, “…in great literature all our mistranslations result in beauty.” To be fair, this is also Mehretu’s story, she carves her own narrative into these spaces, but this will never have been a creation of what Huxley calls Suchness, a removal from the real, or what Deleuze calls authorship: “The author creates a world, but there is no world which awaits us to be created.” The real power that Mehretu holds is that of a writer; she creates a world becoming in which we are always part of the conversation.