|
James Bradley
GNOSTIKE EPISTEME
|
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #38
Posted
5/18/13
ARTIST STATEMENT #38
S.S.S.S.S.S. Application Essay Excerpt, Year of the Dragon...thirteen cheerleaders forming a human pyramid, a marvel of estrogenic engineering, a monument of esoteric estrogen and pinnacle of my high school career, and I, only I, have been granted the supreme honor of forming the apex to this most essential of American adolescent rituals celebrating the worldly-yet-heaven-aspiring body of the teenage girl, envy of a drooling world. The A at the beginning of America is... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #37
Posted
2/25/13
ARTIST STATEMENT #37
S.S.S.S.S.S. Internal Memo, Year of the Dragon. Individualism lay sprawled across the dew-drenched lawn like a five-pointed star, spread-eagle or, if I may take the liberty of improvising a more evocative colloquialism, spread-phoenix, looking up into the glowing sky of early morning with eyes squinted, imagining a mirror on the ceiling over the heart-shaped bed of creation with which to witness its own writhing autoeroticism. Tactically revealing scraps of fitted fabric far ou... [more]
|
THESES ON INDIVIDUALISM
Posted
2/7/13
THESES ON INDIVIDUALISM
Individualism is the ideology of the abstraction of individuality from lived experience, the separation of the signification of difference from the essence of difference. Individualism is the exaltation of this signification.
Individualism is the creatio ex nihilo of contemporary global (western-derived) culture, the substantive ground upon which modernity is founded, including its various historical manifestations, i.e. the enlightenment, capitalism, democracy, ni... [more]
|
UNION SQUARE PARK IN NYC: A GIANT KABBALISTIC TREE OF LIFE?
Posted
1/30/13
I noticed this while walking through Manhattan recently. The photograph on the left is of a bronze plaque found on the sidewalk alongside the park on Union Square East. It represents the layout of the park itself. The image on the right is a standard dipiction of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. All ten sephirot appear to be accounted for. I have created this post because I could find no other mention of this striking correspondence on the internet. It is interesting to note that at some point in... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #35
Posted
1/24/13
ARTIST STATEMENT #35
A glistening lawn of undulating blades of grass rises one quarter of an inch above the nurturing soil, and one quarter of an inch is no small feat, no insignificant portion of a foot, or of feet. Treaded by bare feet with painted toenails, haunted by an otherworldly mist of pesticides, weighed down by travelling wasps seeking respite from the pre-ordained flight of the wasps' great work, a single blade of grass rises from its daily trampling with remarkable resiliency, an u... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #34
Posted
1/4/13
ARTIST STATEMENT #34
Non Plus Ultra.
The breeze brings (in from the rocky cliffs which mark the last line of defence against the teasing aggression of the ocean, the advance and retreat of a maddeningly ingenious strategic mind) our discarded rhythm back from the vault of aeons. Our past churns within us, our spent expenditures still spin on spokes of spirit. Memory is the meat of the meal of the moment, the primordial mortar of mortal portals. The orange light of the sunset, falling in... [more]
|
SUNYATA: A Subject Guide for the Western Reader
Posted
12/9/12
Śūnyatā:
A Subject Guide for the Western Reader
Sunyata is a Sanskrit word which translates as "emptiness." In Buddhist philosophy, sunyata refers to the non-dualistic,
impermanent nature of ultimate reality. This subject guide has been compiled as a tool designed to introduce students of Western philosophy to the concept of sunyata, particularly as it relates to modern philosophical concepts and figures. Links are provided for online sources, while all of the print sources can be f... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #33
Posted
12/1/12
ARTIST STATEMENT #33
Many dreams occur around 5:30 in the morning. Artists, artists, bless your neurotically sociable hearts. O artists, with your colored blocks like toddlers in a day care center, endeavoring to find the fit the manufacturers intended, and like toddlers, giving no thought to the manufacturers themselves. The elements of the symbolic order are yours to manipulate...on paper. The nuances of the consensus reality are at your fingertips...like keys on a computer keypad. Paper cu... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #32
Posted
11/17/12
ARTIST STATEMENT #32
Judy Blume in the twilight hours, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing while sipping cheap red wine from a chipped mug with the words "MANNA FROM HEAVEN" printed along the side. The Swan Princess has heard it said that red wine is good for the heart, and though she pays little heed to the self-serving assertions of the medical industry, with its dark allegiance to pharmaceutical phantasmagoria and its sublimated ecclesiastical narrow-mindedness, in this case she was forced to c... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #31
Posted
10/28/12
ARTIST STATEMENT #31
Schopenhaur in the afternoon, the best she could cajole a sagging will to undertake, the only path the rain smears on the cloudy windows could conceivably approve. Swans before dawn, trumpets in the morning. A bubble bath in a sudsy, bubble economy, soap in the Eye of Horus burning red. The Swan Princess languished, taking to wearing her glasses upside-down in halfhearted hope that the displacement caused by the discomfort on the bridge of her nose and on her ears, as wel... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #30
Posted
10/16/12
ARTIST STATEMENT #30
1849, Dresden, Prussian troops advancing. The commune existed long before any particular barricades. Mikhail Bakunin advocated the looting of the National Museum, armory of the seven color spectrum, and the utilization of famous paintings, time-tested masterworks, veridical bulwarks, as parapet between value systems and color theories. Cherubim with flaming swords guard the misplaced gates of Eden, firewalls and ancient hieroglyphics of air-faring vehicles guard the obviou... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #29
Posted
9/8/12
ARTIST STATEMENT #29
Anti-Earth poems, wrapped in anti-human waxed paper, transited through the postal service like kidney stones, like mail bombs through the torpedo tubes of bureaucracy, auto recite the longing lost on long, lingering localizations on a desk top, presumably. Movement is the key. Agitation keeps the pulp from settling, keeps the nutrients from dispersing. Traipsing through the chain of command, the nuisance of chain letters and their hesitation to travel upward, the hierarchy and... [more]
|
The Five Aggregates
Posted
6/7/12
THE FIVE AGGREGATES
I. Form. Shadows cast by physical obstructions of the sun's light lengthen and lengthen as the day progresses, until eventually the shade covers all, and this we call night.
II. Receptivity. The moon sometimes obstructs the sun's light, its shadow dilating until eventually it blankets the land, and this we call an eclipse.
III. Conception. Shadows cast by flashing lights and hollow promises lengthen and lengthen as the new aeon looms, until eventually the shade covers... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #27
Posted
5/13/12
ARTIST STATEMENT #27
The shackles itch. The mask itches. Ineffable wisps of pure love and undying sentiment occupy the sensory deprivation of my forgotten life and I am becoming as blind as Milton or Homer as they recorded the pulsations of the universe and its ungainly beatitudes, as all-seeing as Hildegard of Bingen as she cast her gaze to the mountain's summit and glimpsed the angel in her cloak of eyes, bathed in a music so serene one could scarcely resist, upon hearing, curling up and b... [more]
|
NOTHING CAN BURN THE SUN
Posted
5/6/12
"NOTHING CAN BURN THE SUN"
The solar plexus, for the purposes of our current inquiry, will henceforth be referred to as the chink in the armor of a garlanded, stratified guild of thieves and sun worshippers. Night in their temple of luminosity is the respite from usury which others call day in the temple of straw. The kindling of our repressed interaction, like the exhibitionism of Dogma, Inc. parading glints in an infant's emerging subservience, the miracle of unfolding cognitive development of a... [more]
|
INVISIBLE BEAMS OF SOUND AND SIGHT
Posted
4/29/12
INVISIBLE BEAMS OF SOUND AND SIGHT
The torture of a turning phrase, which I, in turn, have turned withal. Danger in the solitary cell tucked away in a corner of a nearly forgotten wing of the dungeon city of Saint Francis! What torments await the one who presumes to while away the days of boredom and the nights of horrific visions and condemnatory apparitions of abstract transgression with the soothing balm of pen and scraps of aloe leaf smuggled into my traitor's cell by the hand of a sympat... [more]
|
YOUNG GIRLS WHISTLING BLOWBACK
Posted
4/24/12
YOUNG GIRLS WHISTLING BLOWBACK
The street is night, only when the questioning of the location of the night is pressed. Otherwise the street is hypertextualized, flowing ever and ever outward, like rivers and streams dead tired in the search for ocean. It all happens if you allow it, that, in any event, is what I would tell those serpents of water digesting pebbles if I had the heart, but I know that to deprive a system of its systematizing is a fate potentially worse than death, and certainly wo... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #22
Posted
3/24/12
ARTIST STATEMENT #22
Painting is a highway to low ideals, base physicality and redundant mimicry, or else it is a "low way" to high sentiment, subtle metaphysics and jarring revelations. Or else it is neither, or both. By nature of the very process by which a painting is created, that of building up layer upon layer, each willingly subsumed by the subsequent, the painted surface is a locus which reveals as it conceals, which diverts attention as it instructs, which withholds in order to pres... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #21
Posted
3/13/12
ARTIST STATEMENT #21
A stranger's recalcitrant glance across a room full of frightened children, unrepentant as the day is long. Swans of the east, guilty of the crime of not acknowledging Christ, as well as of brandishing those flaming swords on hallowed ground at inopportune moments, feathers all akimbo like a woman who knows what she wants. "My scalp is all sore, I miss you tons;" the sweetest, most innocent text message of recent memory, and suddenly the feeling of smallness is inescapable.... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #16
Posted
2/5/12
ARTIST STATEMENT # 16
There is a sense in which it can all be attributed to the dreamers and the wanderers congregating at the "Occupy Wall Street" protests down in the phenomenological part of town. There are book hauls and gandharvas, public libraries and karmic traces, returning heavenly bodies and signposts that don't leave a trace. There is presence and there is radioactivity. There is uncertainty and there is melancholia. There are technicians and galactic clusters, absence and hyperinflatio... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #15
Posted
1/16/12
ARTIST STATEMENT #15
Movements of the night, waves of sound swell, on your blood-purple stirrings and songs of the latent spark of the east I rest my sight.
Who among us dare discover the way of the principalities, the wrath of the void? [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #14
Posted
12/3/11
ARTIST STATEMENT #14
It swells, it churns and it boils as it waits, this diabolical ocean of faith and cowardice which men call 'Global Governance.' To be honest with you, I have had enough dreams in which overturning a large rock to reveal a thriving colony of writhing, kicking insects plays a paramount role, and this repetition of symbolism of such obvious pertinence has caused me to shy away from the larger public discourse, opting instead to pursue my own investigations into the cyclic natur... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #13
Posted
7/7/11
ARTIST STATEMENT #13
She glanced quickly toward the dusty cardboard box marked "Art Supplies," knowing the neglected contents to be the last thing a girl in her circumstances should concern herself with, here, in this room, in an age of darkness. Like an ill-advised message smeared with an unsteady forefinger upon the frost of a winter window pane to a forbidden lover who waits, wandering the urbane streets below, she must wipe such fancies from her mind. She must be the strong one. She must be t... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT #12
Posted
1/27/11
ARTIST STATEMENT #12
Witchcraft grew up in the night time, skipped days completely, and emerged fully formed after a comfortable gestation period into the adolescence of its days. Now there are teenage witches everywhere you look, high school warlocks in the subway stations, sorcerers with iPods bumping into each other on the busy streets. It's such a mess, sorting the lovers from the fighters, the winding wordiness of the western wordsmiths from the generally well-meaning yet incompetent bookw... [more]
|
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLOG BLOG BLOG BLUE BLUE BLUE BLOB BLOB BLOB
Posted
5/28/10
There is a shift in the paper which lies on the tabletop by the east-facing window. It rises, hangs suspended an inch above its former resting spot, and gently descends. It is the tug of the wind, strong enough to be acknowledged, weak enough for its attempts at disruption and disordering to be tolerated with a modicum of good humor. The paper is a lined sheet of notebook paper with 28 thin, horizontal blue lines running across its surface and one long red line running from top to bottom on the le... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT NUMBER ELEVEN
Posted
5/13/10
ARTIST STATEMENT #11
There are diamonds in the eyes of the young woman standing alone in the far corner of the gallery, and as she holds her champagne glass up to the light to inspect it for God-knows-what, foreign particles, old bits of shrapnel, it seems as though the diamonds are conversing with diamonds, which is only fitting since everyone in the room, save the young woman with diamonds in her eyes, is engaged, to varying degrees of commitment, sincerity, and voracity, in that... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT NUMBER TEN
Posted
4/16/10
ARTIST STATEMENT #10
Hypnos, the god of sleep, looks down upon his greatest prize, dubbed by its inhabitants the United States of America, and smiles. A land of illusion, a land of the unconscious, a land of the forgetful slumber of mechanization and digitalization. O diripio carus! From his palace in the clouds he sees the rectangular concrete entities shoot higher and higher, like cornstalks, nourished with water from the river Lathe, reaching for the summer sun, until he feels... [more]
|
ARTIST STATEMENT NUMBER NINE
Posted
1/15/10
ARTIST STATEMENT #9:
FOUR POSTULATIONS
1. Modern Civilization exists as a consciously controlled and orchestrated interpenetrating network of hypnotic illusion, designed to operate invisibly so as to ensure maximum effectiveness of control over its target populations.
2. Popular Culture, while overwhelmingly concerned with the dissemination of intentional falsehoods, also contains stark and singular truths, available to those who know how to look.
3. Andy Warhol, as... [more]
|
The Rain
Posted
10/13/09
The rain falls, making criminals of us all. Conspirators for shelter, collaborators with blankets, lusters after warmth, we take comfort in the belief that it could not have been otherwise.
The tea kettle endures its fate for our sake. Its is the acceptance of warmth beyond all reason, the leap into fire...
...the boiling point...
...the threshold we refuse ourselves. The path toward extremes is not ours to tread in our daily lives. We do not hoard the limits of experience.
This we reserve for the whole world... [more]
|
SEPTEMBER THE ELEVENTH, TWO THOUSAND AND NINE
Posted
9/11/09
Through the chain-linked fence I saw it. It was like a fairy tale, like something straight out of the evening news. You know, something not to be believed. A fancy parlor trick. Smoke and mirrors. Slight of hand. All the dead bodies just served to supplement what was already there, and growing: a monumental production, an undertaking of historic significance.
I can't go on. My future babies are all already dead by terrorist acts not yet committed. [more]
|
|
|
|
|
|
add to mylist
forward by email
report abuse
contact us for help