Kuhbeere Kinepiffle: Seven Collages with Introduction

A mask traversed the air, causing people of multiple and complex lives to disappear, and took human form at a café terrace. The silhouette of a man appeared in profile; so, simultaneously, did thousands. There really were thousands.

-Raymond Queneau, Witch Grass

It is the position of Gilles Deleuze in his profoundly useful Proust and Signs that "all signs converge upon art" and "all apprenticeships, by the most diverse paths, are already unconscious apprenticeships to art itself." Listen to Susan Sontag and learn to surf and skate the incoming incomprehensible array of finicky signs without succumbing to the delirium of interpretation. You're probably leaning psychotic if you think you can read the signs with any regularity. The artist moves and gathers and ideally the artist moves and gathers in fraternal accord with the opaque and inscrutable order of signs, which pop up out of the material world to conduct explicitly metaphysical business. For Jacques Lacan, mob boss of psychoanalysis, metaphor and metonymy create meaning by running into their own epistemological limit and the endless displacement of desire, and before that's what art already is, it's what a creature negotiating the surface of the earth always already was. I have provided seven new collages below as though I were a wee fortune cookie with nary a care in this badly had world, and I have dotingly named each collage as though it were a child. I promise that if you come after me with daffy interpretations you're going to get yourself mostly lost (and no doubt in a bit of a funk). Originally I thought I might do ten collages in homage to Abbas Kiarostami's pathbreaking 2002 video masterpiece Ten, which I first saw back in the day at the Calgary International Film Festival and for which I harbour a great abiding passion. We might call the production values of Ten "deceptively low." Kiarostami sets up the filming of ten conversations between a harried, stressed-out female motorist (Mania Akbari) and a series of passengers, not least her petulant and bossy son, all of it covered with two video cameras mounted on the dash, one trained on the driver and the other on the passenger. Formal constraints and mathematical formal parameters are enough to get the art life kicking again to the tune of "what the exact fuck be thee?" I stopped the collages at number seven instead of at ten because it was obvious number seven was the last one.

I would like to close-out in stridently declaring that the Iranian-Persian people are beautiful and heroic and that they love poetry very, very much...but their state is absolute trash...so the Iranian citizenry can use whatever help it can get...