If, therefore, such a ‘demonic’ complicity, insofar as it is always experienced by the artist as external to his will, provokes in him the obsessively persistent vision of something, it is that it arouses in the artist a state wherein the aspect under which the obsession appears reappears on the painting and awakens in the contemplator a state responding to this aspect… Reproducing the stratagem, it is for the artist to exorcise the obsession.
- Pierre Klossowski, “Retour à Hermès Trismégiste – de la collaboration des démons dans l’œuvre d’art”
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When I started to draw again with some focus during my most recent psychiatric admission, I quickly came to an appreciation of the fact that the distinct pleasure of making some kind of quick and kinetic drawing is qualitatively different from that achieved in writing or making music, contexts where for myself the parameters have to be fundamentally clear for anything to even happen and where I have spent time cultivating skills I know how to use such that they now may be employed in an intelligent and targeted way. As somebody applying lines and strokes to a page I have no idea what I am after until, like Pierre Klossowski, I start to see imaginative mobilizations of my carnal desires, secret rhyming tendencies and archetypal scenarios with crucial autobiographical content, and horrible things with specific phobic imaginative anatomy that it is a challenge to face—this stuff immediately flagged as the raw content I will be likely to chase after most ardently, carved then with any luck into a tremulous permanence all the better to be inspected at leisure. The answer to the question of why I draw now and continue to and plan to continue is easy. I am very pleased and very surprised by the drawing that is emerging before me, as long as there is a drawing in front of me to be stirred to both heinous and rapturous ends (with a high tendency toward the mixing of the colours). Is something from my future or past stalking me? Death is a lottery so intricate they had to invent a whole new number system...in the distant future...we're still unravelling it...the pen is scratching like a seismometer. I've been psychotic and I've been ecstatic. I know daemons as travelers of circuitry the kind of which shoots through all of us, moving pens and digits and associative connections even in the most liberating extremities of autokinetic autopilot, space-time blasting back at you like an inverted cone...which is easy enough a thing to draw, come to think of it. Am I running from anything? Did I inadvertently leave behind some sin so heinous I locked it in a box and buried it under concrete and decided to go on and act the grinning fool like all were prim? No. There is very low chance of aggravated psychotic paranoia for me anywhere on the tangerine summer horizon. All I see are bunnies...fucking...like bunnies...and savagely chewing each others' throats out, fur matted with blood (and the whole while the drapes on fire). Thank goodness. This is sweet, sordid God-sized stuff the early pagan Roman could and did get behind, this putting they in good company with the Vodouisants of beleaguered Haiti and creole adherents of ancient rites everywhere. All those people are my friends, no contract need be signed nor whispered clasp-handed ritual undertaken. Just look at my drawings. You'll see the main things that make me uneasy: sudden but also regular chaos doing whatever the fuck, meanness and cruelty, humiliation and shame, perverse aggregations of mongrel forms (especially as relate to human commercial life and dating/marrying/fucking), the human mouth, violent creativity, and the millions and millions of tiny rhinoceros horns Félix Guattari said only a truly mad individual would see where in fact there were but mere goosebumps on his skin.
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