TTT ISSUE #4 (The Total Thirst/Time To Think/Try To Taste)

TTT (The Total Thirst / Time To Think / Try To Taste) is not a space for arguments and disputes but for gifts, insights, visions, desires of ours and perhaps even love if once a penguin will disappear inside of us.


Dear friends,
Beneath we have our dear Flo s letter. He gifted us big and valuable present a deeply sensible reportage from Skowhegan (where Flo has a scholarship right now). It s extremely beneficial for us all to know what s going on across the ocean at the place where they try to collect the most talented and intellectual young artists and to put them in touch with others already more advanced in their art/spiritual researches. This letter makes a subtle impression to which directions taking today updated creative efforts. It is also very useful because it s written by a young man who earnestly wants to understand this new process and to become one with the radical movement which tries to find the new form for human consciousness beyond of hierarchy and subordinations, beyond of production of meaning based on the binary principles, beyond of the thought systems orientated towards the centre and so on and so on. To say shortly all the basic believes/superstitious from where our recent form of consciousness got its shape.
Let s enjoy the sensitiveness of our ears and let s move the penetration capacity of our open hearts.
Best wishes,
Gia



13.07.2009 Skowhegan
Dearare Gia,
First i want to say that i am absolutely astonished and happy that we are able to create such an intense and open discussion and exchange via the internet or our email. It gives me, and i hope everyone, energy and faith to believe. YOU SHALL NOT BORE GOD! (Thanks Stephan!)

I really feel that I somehow disappear, as i am so astonished and wondering about so many things which I never saw, was never aware or where thinking of, so its really difficult to follow or describe these developments and incidents in a written form in a way I am an absolute beginner. And I apologize that it took some time to express myself and I couldn t stay in contact with all of you.
I hope that everyone will be able to accept my attempts to speak about my personality, in a subjective and even eccentric way, as a result of my limited and raw possibilities to express myself perfectly in a written form.

Of course I received your edited version of my letter to Zizek Gia and I thank you very much that you were open for my proposal and also for your ability to understand, sharpen, clear and reconstruct everything in everything. I am looking forward that this collaboration of us will touch Slavoj Zizek and hope it will make him curious to come.

I feel it is not so easy for me to write about Skowhegan and what happening here. For this I need to be descriptive, reflective and also analytical and it s a lot. That s why I decided to divide these parts and hope it makes it easier for understanding. So I decided to write two letters marking them with different colours, one more about the concrete things and events and the other one more abstract and creative.
I have the feeling that the way how i want to live, communicate and practise art in my (as you called it) ARTISTICDAILYLIFEPERFORMANCE (ADLP) needs somehow a new forms or ways of presentation. But for a moment I don t know any special means that can express this ungraspable what we live, commit, act1 for this goal I am still using only a language descriptive structure which is pretty limited and dry way of expression for such a goal. But this resistance which ARTISTICDAILYLIFEPERFORMANCE (ADLP) shows towards being expressed within any medium is a clear proof of its strength, power, the monumental breath of life in it, its giant scale that can t be documented, exhibited, labelled or stick on something.

Somehow astonishing but I don t feel anymore much necessity to present or represent something in a certain, or concrete way, neither as a person nor as an artist, i rather hope that it is a permanent natural drift in which i feel more like a joyful mirror reflecting the ongoing process of life in every second, reacting on it in an open, artistic, humorous way.
At this point i would like to put under the stress the word reflect as it consists these two abilities an artistic and deeply human man should try to have this quality.
(I was also thinking about the situation where two mirrors are facing each other and what it can be seen if there is no any concrete object in between of them......)

Just now I met Devin Kenny initiator of our group here for the "Artist as a model of change" .
He told me that he felt that he would only like to make art by watching and trying to document what I am doing every day in every situation. Then he came back for taking photos of a big machine, I built yesterday (please see attachments). I considered this as a really beautiful compliment and felt for the first time that the ADLP, which I just discovered for my self, is able to communicate and to reach or infect people. I also think that the TTT is an endless motivation and wish to reflect in every second inside of the ADLP.

Together with Eva I was writing a proposal for a lecture which we may call:

"LETTER TO A SPEAKING ARTIST
OR better A PROPOSAL FOR A SKINNY DIP"

It is a kind of emailmagazine we created as a reaction and reflection of us regarding the system here in Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (which actually is built on the main and common system established everywhere).
We almost finished our main statement and we would like to send it to you all. Our idea is also to send this proposal to every visiting artist who is still going to come here Luca Buvoli, Steve Mc Queen, Dr.Paul Farmer and Leonardo Drew.
Afterwards we want to grow this magazine into a more general proposal which will speak about possible new ways of communication and understanding art by the artists.

///////////////////hopeless effort to descripe or communicate some of my ADLP sensation/actions in a written form adequately/////////////
//////////////////////////////

//////

It appeared that since I am here I constantly create and realise, even almost not noticing it, all kind of different projects, so now I try to tell you about them:

I gave almost every day a small present to Nate Young////
You know Gia the everyday presents I am always giving to you all, my beloved people, like used handkerchiefs, or the rest of the skin of orange, or the crumps a rubber produced while erasing some writing on a paper etc...
So Nate Young got already a magic spoon from Germany, a cursed onion, a carrot which makes you smile etc. He was first irritated but then he started to understand the presents in his own way and included these presents into his art practice.

One day i figured out that everything on our world is smaller then 4 inches
4 inches = 10.16 centimeters
i proofed this by measuring all things i could see and was able to meassure with my measuring tape. Holding the tape very close to my eyes of course everything is smaller then 4 inches. Here are some of my revolutionary results:

ordinary chair 2,5 inches
ordinary man 3,7 inches
the sun 1,5 inches!
ordinary cloud 2 inches
etc etc

Yesterday I constructed a kind of tent and decided spontaneously that it should be more a machine then a tent and was looking for a reason to call a tent officially a machine. So i found out that the most logical purpose for this was to taint your arms while you are lying under the shade created by the fabric which was hanged between two chairs and a broom.
After 2 hours under the laying under the machine my arms were brown and my body remained white. The machine is free for use for everyone so I invited everybody to use it.
So one more time I felt that the never ending open process of rethinking, recreating and redefining was for me more important than the concrete "piece" itself and this mental process/procedure deserves much more to be called art then the object I created.
I deconstructed the machine today.

Tomorrow i meet with the chief of the kitchen here and we are going to create together a secret mission for everyone poodesserts we will form for the dinner out of a huge mass of chocolat and peanuts more or less individual soft poodesserts. Eating here is for everybody very very important as it is served 3!!! times a day and it is for free. As you told me once Gia about the student who urgently stopped thinking about Nietzsche to rush to the mensa, here we also had to cancel the meeting of the groop "artist as a model of change" because of the dinnertime.
Nobody knows the secret mission and nobody should know it also afterwards when it will be realised, but the most interesting thing will be if anyone will notice it.


I would also like to tell you about the group the "Artist as a Model of Change"
and the thoughts and ideas which came up related to it. I told you about the first meeting on the small wooden island. We felt there that we should meet always in slightly different places or situations to create a chance for a gap in which we could jump or fall to discuss openly beyond of our common behaviour models and boarders.

So the next meeting was in the Dunkin Donut in Walmart (a huge supermarket), everyone arrived separately with a car and it was not possible to communicate in anyway. It was a real disaster overpowering and ego exhibition.
The last meeting was 2 days ago, we met at 10pm in the evening and went without flashlights and without a concrete aim into the woods we went deeper and deeper. Then we stopped and created a circle with 2 meter distance between each other and started to speak and discuss.
We could see barely the shade of each other in the darkness and we really discussed for the first time in an absolute open and energetic way our ideas and thoughts about change.
I felt that it was really important that we as a group went for a certain time together through space and time and we had to trust each other and were depending on each other. All this and the fact that we couldn t see each other made it possible to really speak beyond of the limited understanding and comparative mind supported by our egos.

For the next meeting we planed to meet in the 2.LIFE a virtual world in the internet, which is basically a sad projection of our own boring vision of life and ourselves by our conditioned and cultured souls and consciousness. It is even worse because it is a "better" one, so this might be a place for the next meeting.

I just have the idea that perhaps anybody from TTT communication net likes to join us?
What do you think? We will do it next week and i love the idea that we could meet in the 2.LIFE to discuss our concerns...

I had to think a lot about change and i heard a lot of different understandings and visions about change in art during our meetings, so my own understanding changed.
I would like to say that there is a kind of common view inside of us what the word change suppose to mean. We associate the change with how to make from something abnormal something normal (this is actually what happens in art as well), to change the ugly into beautiful, to fight for the rights of any kind of outsiders or minorities and make them feeling better like women, blacks, gays etc. which means to accept things, event, people, whatsoever as something of ours, part of our society and culture. As well one could change his girlfriend or boyfriend every week without never feeling or even touching real love.
The human being is so much determined with this scheme that he is not able to see that the only thing he is doing is just manipulating world for fether comfort and consuming and about in real change we even never think of. Real change must happen deeply inside of the human being and it is not stick to anything concrete.

Dear Gia, I wrote as much as I could trying to express what is going on around and inside of me.
Your Florian


1. That s why Andy Warhol always tried to record all his daily speeches with people and his near friend Michel Auder was endlessly putting on the video tape every sequence of their life. (G.E.)