Untitled (Beige Trails)

This artwork from 2001 (like so many pieces I’ve made during this time) is square. There’s a stable purity with the geometry of a square. A square is symbolic of balance. A square is based on rational order & also symbolic of the minimalism from the 60s & 70s. Each side of the sculptural-painting is evenly measured & a square is also the primary element of a grid. This object was made to hang on a wall, while at the same time, I wanted to emphasize the elemental features & materials of a picture within a frame. In this case, the frame was intentionally exaggerated, using common “4 x 4” fir posts. The central focal point within the frame, was routed into a pine block to mimic ‘worm-wood’ trails (trails left by the larvae of wood-boring-beetles). The pattern of the frame, with the random drilled holes, was likewise meant to complement the worm-trails. At the same time, the pattern on the frame is a reference to a map. Maps serve as a way to demarcate pathways on a grid, natural or manmade. During this time, the use of the color beige was a deliberate choice to capture the essence of a painted surface. This was a way of using a ‘plain’ color to show an avoidance of the use of color. I didn’t want it to be colorful as an attention grabber. Art does not need to be ‘colorful’ to be interesting. This too is another influence of minimalism (neo, or even post-minimalism). The subject of a natural process of insects is itself a type of drawing–a sculptural drawing, drawn with an unaesthetic necessity–like maps drawn on grids or like worms eating wood.

–Aurelio Madrid

Untitled (White Flora)

DCF 1.0

Untitled (White Flora), 2002, Oil, aluminum, steel, MDF, fasteners, 13″ x 11 1/2″ x 3″

Looking back at this artwork, “Untitled (White Flora)” is inspirational–I wish to create more works like this with a similar quick nonchalance. A good quantity of the construction materials here were found as they are, the aluminum supports, the small aluminum channels & the black bracket-piece in the center. The MDF ‘leaves’ were originally jig-sawed to create stencils for graphic work (basically each pattern served as a stencil to be spray-painted for an organic negative pattern on paper). After I used them & as I cut them, seeing them layered on each other created a synthetic plantlike structure–the way a plant propagates with its particular ordering of leaves–in other words, it’s inflorescence. This is a nod to nature casually brought together as a light-handed distillation of nature’s codes, then rationally codified, displayed & honored. None of this statement is complete without direct recognition of work itself. Art is always an observation (& implementation) of special types of labor (manual, intuitive & intellectual labor). Unusually, this work was created quickly, within a few days. Waiting for the oil to dry probably took the longest. I see this artwork as a micro containment of nature, conceptualizing growth as a pairing of two slightly symmetrical parts stripped of a soft green organism into the aesthetics of generalized industry.

–Aurelio Madrid

“Spearminted”

“Spearminted”, oil, 252 chewing-gum packs, wood, 20″ x 21 1/4″ x 3 3/8″.

It’s been about 13 years since I made ”Spearminted.” I’m not sure how long it took me to chew all this Extra gum, but there’s something intriguing with the idea that the possibility of this work was achieved by chewing the amount of gum that was present in all these packs. Once I brought all the packs together, there was the need to have them organized neatly in a modernist grid. Of course, when the packs were glued neatly, I bypassed the urge to keep any of the branding visible by overpainting the packs with black primer & framing them stacked within a square. There still was an urge to represent the gum chewed with a painting of a single stick of spearmint gum outside each pack end. Unsurprisingly, the sticks of painted gum got lost in the pattern to then become unidentifiable as gum, shifting to look more like the design of a nondescript vent or perhaps looking like green compartment slots of indistinguishable use. Nowadays there’s the new brand of “5 Gum” by Wrigley with mostly black packaging & supposedly appealing to all the five senses. This work seems to be an unintentional presentiment of their mostly matte black branding. Certainly the intent was perceptual, yet most of the perception is devoted to what’s missing & once used up by the act of chewing. 

–Aurelio Madrid

Clouds of Intensity

“Now since we have distinguished the several senses of priority, it is obvious that actuality is prior to potentiality. By potentiality I mean not that which we have defined as ‘a principle of change which is in something other than the thing changed, or in that same thing qua other,’ but in general any principle of motion or of rest; for nature also is in the same genus as potentiality, because it is a principle of motion, although not in some other thing, but in the thing itself qua itself.” –Aristotle, Metaphysics

“The virtual is opposed not to the real, but to the actual. The virtual is fully real insofar as it’s virtual” –Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition.

“Philosophy is the theory of multiplicities. Every multiplicity implies actual elements & virtual elements. There is no purely actual object. Every actuality surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images.” –Gilles Deleuze, “The Actual and the Virtual”

For Aristotle, metaphysically, we know about being in several ways. One metaphysical perspective with which being is evident, is by way of potentiality. Potency is the English translation of the Greek δύναμις (dunamis)–indicating that which is dynamic. A possibility in order to be actual for Aristotle, must be materialized as the energy of what something is in reality. The movement (or kinesis, κίνησις) of a substance then, is determined by the potential of what something is in actuality. That which is actual must be, by nature of its being, whatever it has the potential to be (in actuality). Something must be actual prior to something having potential with Aristotle.

This takes us to newer problems of virtual reality concerning Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, with Matt Bluemink’s essay, “On Virtuality: Deleuze, Bergson, Simondon.” Bluemink works to sort out a notion of the virtual as distinguished from the actual. This for Bergson was in contrast to our common view that the actual is always more important ontologically (in terms of being). That’s to imply, whatever is possible simply by definition cannot be actual, therefore it’s less real, or not real at all. Bergson advances a shift in our recognition of what is merely possible to what is virtual. This is a transition away from what is possible to what is real. This issue rests on the sense that if the possible is not real, then that which is virtual is real and not actual. For Bergson, as Bluemink explains, the virtual resides in a kinship with “pure memory.” Each thing basically ‘contains’ an actual way in which it is real & an actual ‘memory’ of what that something is virtually. The virtual is combined with the actual in a virtual memory waiting to be summoned by a creative act to be what is real for Bergson.

With Deleuze, this virtual reality is best accessed through a semblance of that which is actual. The virtual is made real by differentiation in any creative act. This creative act is a bringing about that which has not been, as Bluemink hints, by way of the virtual–the virtual memory of what could be held in actuality. With these conclusions we have the implication that, given the virtual is established as no-less real than the actual, then we want to reverse the level of hierarchy from perceiving that the actual has more of a seductive resonance than the virtual, into the idea that the virtual should now take priority.

This frisson is written about by Dale Clisby in his 2015 essay “Deleuze’s Secret Dualism? Competing Accounts of the Relationship Between the Virtual and the Actual.” For Clisby, Deleuze insists on the univocal. Univocity is identified by difference, that is, with Deleuze, the being of everything is unified by nothing other than difference. This also a positioning of the actual & the virtual as two halves of what is real. As with the formulation, ‘that which is actual is real, and that which is virtual is real, yet, that which is virtual is not actual.’

Clisby offers the example of a knotted rope, where the knotted rope is indisputably & realistically actual. Likewise, the knot is a solution to a problem (holding a place, keeping parts together, demonstrating a technique, &c.). The ‘solution’ of the knot is what is virtual. Here’s where we get a distinction Clisby draws on, with the temptation to identify the virtual as having a renewed priority, rather than the typical priority of the actual as ontologically prior to the merely possible. Instead, Clisby is only modestly positioning the two halves of reality for Deleuze as consisting of the actual in reciprocity with the virtual instead of taking a priority over the actual as suggested by Bluemink.

In this way, the reality of that which is virtual still stands enticingly at the forefront of our curiosity. Deleuze, as Clisby reminds us, was radical with his inversion of Platonic idealism, where real things are only imperfect versions of their unreal perfect Ideas. With Deleuze, actualized things are problems solved and the problems are virtual. For this we have to also adjust to the virtual as problematic and also qualitative. The qualities of things are known in their intensity. Things have intensive qualities, not only extensive quantities. These intensive qualities are identifiers. For Deleuze, the virtual is not simply these properties, yet like these properties we are still accounting for what is real with the idea of the virtual known intensively (or by intensity). By the intensity of whatever is actual, we know what is virtual and we additionally know of what is different. This difference is an identifier. We then recognize actual things in terms of a virtual presentation of whatever is real as a means of identifying the reality of what’s actual.

All of this doesn’t do too much damage to Aristotle’s actual/possible dichotomy other than to extend the possible into what is virtual and to position the virtual as a mode of identifying difference. The virtual is a greatly enhanced possibility that is then made real by identification of problems made evident in the realistic engagement with the actual. The virtual becomes a matrix of identity from the actual as unidentifiable. The cloud of the virtual is a creative means of knowing what reality is actually and what reality might be possible in terms of qualitative identity. If the virtual is no less real than the actual with Deleuze’s ontology, then the creative act is a way to access a ‘pure memory’ for Bergson, memories held together with the actual, constantly overlapping reality of problems-solved and problems-yet-to-be-solved. To perceive things as clouds of intensity becoming reality and not becoming reality, for Deleuze and for someone else. 

Aurelio Madrid

Back to the Bräunerhof

Over near the city center of Vienna, The Café Bräunerhof is situated near galleries, high-end luxury boutiques, antique dealers & jewelers. These neighbor the anachronistically modest old-world quality of the café, replete with plenty of coat racks, brown velvet booths & slightly high marble café tables. The café opened in the 1920s. It appears to have minimally changed since then, save a name change, originally known as the Café Sans Souci. There’s the semi-updated framed photos of black and white film stars of another era, the open-air Covid seating outside & no more dancing. I tried to have coffee there a few times before, then actually got in on a weekday when business was slower, ready with euros as cash & before it closed for the night. Of course, the reasoning behind my need to experience the cafe had to do with the repeated reference to the Bräunerhof by Bernhard. 

Thomas Bernhard was a regular. There’s a photo of Bernhard above one of the worn booths, there he sits looking remarkably bright & confident. He sits, hands in pockets under two oval mirrors near the entrance, having read a couple of newspapers, & with a coffee & water on the stainless steel tray that keeps all the parts together, underlined & the same as now. When I got there, it was slow enough to sit at the same spot he sits in the photo, probably in the 1980s, then always in the same place. 

The two suited & middle-aged waiters busy themselves with serving the few evening customers, every once in a while straightening the dozen or two desserts sitting on an open counter near the entrance with the newspapers on sticks, magazines, leaflets & five or six unread books that looked to be left behind by someone who just forgot why they were there to begin with. My buttoned-up waiter drops off a menu on the marble table with a perfunctory nonchalance as one would drop the unwanted daily mail on the dining room table only to sort out later. Nobody is in a rush here & the only coffee drink I want is a double cappuccino, given that the selection of coffee is not decipherable in German or Italian, adding that I’m forgoing any misunderstanding in the inadvertent & involuntary attempt to be the crude incurious English-speaking-American who doesn’t know any better. Here the waiter quips that their version of cappuccino is already a double in his crisp unaccented English. It’s only at this point that I notice that there’s no music overhead, all the subtle conversation, slight clinking of glasses, silverware, trays, cups, saucers & muted polite conversation underscore this foggy haunted feeling of time edging away to the real prospect of forgetting absentmindedness into the quiet glinting of the escaping minutes. Whatever version of cappuccino I ordered soon arrives with the customary little spoon atop a tiny glass of water, a selection of three sweeteners again organized on a stainless steel tray as in the black & white Bernhard photo & as they’ve always served it. This is enough to know that you’re taking in a Viennese tradition held long before WWII, a time I suppose, when we didn’t think we needed as much water as we do now.

As I sweeten the coffee an elderly couple are ever so carefully shuffling in, where the gentleman is in a slightly oversized brown suit, straw fedora, a Burberry trench raincoat over his arm holding an umbrella. He makes it to their table to give a squeaky familiar greeting to my waiter who looks to have memorized the best lines of an obscure Grillparzer play or knows how to handle delicate passages of Beethoven on the piano. The man’s wife, who’s hunched over, sadly dragging her feet while over-relying on a cane & is moving at that pace where it either frustrates her husband or he’s thankful she’s finally getting going after other unknown setbacks to her diminishing well being. Plainly the Bräunerhof is not youthful & whatever wistfully vague nostalgia I’m wanting really cannot be for a softer idealized Vienna. 

This ambling nostalgia must be for something faintly like Berhard’s  philosophical patronage of the place characterized by his stylized unfulfillment, unease & ever-long dissatisfactions. Ultimately I have to imagine that most of his experience was spent reading the papers, thinking of writing his never ending paragraphs into novels that capture his wealth of now legendary unease, now done & gone waiting on the pages of his books scattered about & every so often on display in the window of the one the many bookstores around the city. No, this is not a nostalgia for better times, given that Bernhard obviously never felt all that wonderful anyway. His specific, high-minded, detailed & precise suffering wasn’t any better than this. Why am I here working to capture what?–everything that’s here, give or take a few decades, the absence of an unsmiling Bernhard in person, who wouldn’t have anything to do with me,  whose preoccupied & taken over with his rarified pain with others, needing to be left alone, only to wrap his cool fingers on his lauded literature of distaste. Those years are faded as the velvet booths. Bernhard worked here on his words to capture his feelings that frequently escaped any optimism. Whatever it was to be felt & experienced, with his pen & typewriter didn’t have much to do with my need for nostalgic satisfaction. 

A loose-ended Bräunerhof mood with German-spoken-not-to-me hangs there suspended along the gray second-hand smoke floating in from the smoking patrons just outside the propped open front door. It goes without saying that everything keeps extending onward as with the lady next to me who is pensively jotting notes, the older couple eating a soup & sandwich, the man finishing up his light paperwork, the couple who seem American but are not, carefully repositioning their three newspapers on sticks after a slow coffee & a long tending to their ever-present cell phones. The waiters look like they’d rather be somewhere else with a lady who also looks to be a waitress that’s appeared from the back, all in black, who groans with a limp as she walks to the couple outside (seated in the area recently constructed to save a customer or two during the covid pandemic) putting the final touches on their closing tab.

Then, before long, I’m the only customer left, even though I know they have an hour or two before placing the chairs on the tables to lock up for the night. My waiter rightfully takes my standing up as a cue to close out my tab. I know I want to tip him, yet uncomfortably fumble around voicing that, only to have him remind me how to ask for change. I’m not completely sure I said goodbye as I set to move away from a unique experience, leaving too much for a tip & knowing that this is what’s left of this over-anticipated sense of place, this experience of a location. 

Any number of Austrian stories that I’ll never know of because they’re written in untranslated German are to be left behind as is anything close to Bernhard’s confinement of discontent for a place or people. The inexplicable wish to embrace this overused nostalgia of first-world Weltschmerz could be similar to an unnamed emotion of a world-weary pulling-back to reach to what’s not there, scarcely there, mostly gone, & barely pleased. This is as much of a feeling Bernhard would care for anyone to have at the Bräunerhof. Going onto the narrow sidewalk, now into a Vienna Bernhard would not like any better than the Vienna he already hated, walking just that much further with this particular discomfort, a type of isolated Austrian luxury nearly captured & pinned in a specimen case like a rare species of some usually unnoticed & distinctive European moth.

–Aurelio Madrid

ptolemy v epiphanes

Gold Octodrachm of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, 204-180 BCE [featured in a numismatics library book]

…the Rosetta Stone was inscribed during the regency of Ptolemy V Epiphanes. …other points of intrigue, Ptolemy V’s mother & father were also full-blooded brother & sister. Because his family practiced intermarriage & inbreeding so often, the Ptolemaic family ‘tree’ is knotting inward rather than branching outward. Hence, a few of the Ptolemys have the title: philadelphos (sibling-lover). The Cleopatra of bibilcal legend (& who also had two brother-husbands) was one of the last from the Ptolemaic dynasty to rule Egypt.

Aurelio Madrid

Bernhard’s Woodcutters

Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters (Holzfällen) from 1984 is a singular purging paragraph of complaints cleverly disguised as a fictional novel. It’s explained that earlier at the graveyard to bury Joana who committed suicide, our unnamed narrator also collided with his one-time friends the Auersbergers. Herr Auersberger and his wife inconveniently invite him and other mutual friends to an untactfully timed ‘artistic dinner’ after the funeral to honor an actor from the Burgtheater in Vienna. When the actor finally arrives he dominates the late night dinner of champagne, Balaton pike, while sputtering through potato soup, plenty of white wine and dessert with an egoistic onslaught of his supposed mastery performing the role of Hjalmar Ekdal in Ibsen’s 19th century tragicomedy The Wild Duck. The parallels to a dreadful suicidal confrontation with the cold insistence of facing painful disclosures of truth at any cost for Bernhard are never fully announced.

A good percentage of the narrator’s excoriating ruminations are recounted with exhausting precision while sitting in a ‘wing chair’ at the Auersberger’s home during the ‘artistic dinner’ and while waiting for the guest-of-honor who’s exceedingly late. Bernhard’s narrator agonizes through his unpleasant iñner frustrations from the vantage of the ‘wing chair’ obsessively enough to offer a distinct rhythmic quality to the tirade of regrets, second guessing, misanthropy, and complex hateful repetitions (the wing chair is referenced over 100 times!). There are other chairs he imperiously sits on while expressing his extreme and mostly silent dissatisfaction, a dining room chair and a sitting room chair.

All the drudgery and pitfalls of the high-culture pretenses of the Auersbergers, Joana, the Burgtheater actor, the ‘Viennese Virgina Woolf’, et al, serve as Bernhard’s deeply scrupulous grousing clenched neck high with a Kierkegaardian injunction on the ethical limitations of leading an aesthetic life. All of the narrator’s so-called friends are diagnosed, cut, and chopped down like cord wood from the ‘wing chair’ as leading aesthetic lives in the name of culture. They all seem more and more degraded and self-serving as our narrator recalls plaintively sitting in the ‘wing chair.’ It’s easy to see why this thinly veiled roman à clef irritated the hell out of the real-life composer and former friend Gerhard Lampersberger to sue Bernhard shortly after publication due to his unmistakable likeness with Herr Auersberger, a sad and drunk ‘successor of Webern.’

Bernhard’s high point near the end of the novel is to suddenly recognize a faint glimmer of value in a life of philosophy and woodcutting by way of the garrulous Bergtheater actor. This call to philosophize-while-cutting-wood conclusion of Bernhard’s can’t be ignored with regard to a slightly foreboding photo from the 1920s depicting Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer cutting wood at Hiedegger’s hut at (or near) Todtnauberg (‘the mountain of death’). Somehow for the narrator the value placed on old people, philosophers, and woodcutting carries us back to the forest, philosophy as art, a singular ideal…found somewhere in the barrage of Bernhard’s world-weary dissatisfaction.

Aurelio Madrid

Cherokee Generating Station

Somewhere in the background of this image is the Cherokee Generating Station, a few miles north of downtown Denver. This is a natural-gas-fired-power-plant, one of the largest in Colorado and just west of the Platte River. This image was taken on the morning of January 21st of 2023. 

Looking at this landscape, there’s a searching unfulfilled sense of visual appeal. Yet at the same time every man-made object is meant to be seen, the fluorescent traffic drums, the signage, the traffic lights, the red & white smoke stack, and so on. 

Then there’s the terrain, snow, smoke & sky, not to mention the obvious exchange of energy this plant represents. It’s this exchange of energy that’s also worth considering in terms of greenhouse emissions & the contribution to climate change. We can’t help but have mixed feelings, given that our daily comfort is brought to us with a sacrifice. 

This land is also said to belong to the Cherokee Indians at one time. A place that seems so easily forgotten, while at the same time representing a universal need for comfort and energy. It must be the barely noticeable anonymity of the place that’s so clear. The conflicts are painfully obvious. 

How do we see what we usually ignore?

Epicurean & Cynical Environmental Ethics

After reading and grading our recent work on Cynicism and Epicureanism, I found a few key elements worth highlighting. Everyone brilliantly captured the basics on the ethical components for each ancient philosophical school of thought. On the other hand, it’s a challenge to apply Epicureanism or Cynicism to a particular environmental problem in a way that demonstrates the practical application held in tandem with the ethical structure of the theory. Also remember to capitalize the terms Epicureanism and Cynicism.

Ethically for an Epicurean we find a basic structure of pain management in the name of pleasure. Epicureans aim for pleasure as a rationally considered avoidance of pain. Cynics on the other hand ethically seek to avoid an endless hunger for pleasure with the careful application of ascetic and rational temperance.

The two ancient philosophies are understood ethically and materialistically. Tying together an empirical atomistic theory for Epicurus and a Cynic’s reverence for nature alongside basic human nature.

For Epicurus everything is materially composed of atoms. The affairs of the Gods do not concern us. When we die, we simply die, nothing more, nothing less–we are composed of atoms afterall. As atomically embodied Epicureans we love pleasure and we rationally know that pleasure must be tempered. A life of pleasure for the Epicurean is not about frivolity or the indulgence in the superficial pleasures of the body. The Epicurean rationally knows that immediate pleasure is fleeting. Pleasure for the sake of pleasure quickly becomes painful if practiced in excess. An Epicurean aims for ‘higher-order’ pleasures, the pleasures of the philosophical intellect and most of all the fun of friendship. It’s easy to interpret Epicurean friendship as ethically practical. It is just as easy to lose sight of this as a type of communal involvement. We live in community with others and care for ourselves who connect and care for others and so forth. Plenty of our day-to-day contacts are ‘friends’ personally, professionally and academically. An Epicurean aims to accept simplicity but not austerity. To live with friends in the avoidance of pain must have environmental significance.

Cynicism is an ascetic philosophy. A Cynic aims to reduce the pangs of needless pleasure derived and dictated by popular culture. Unlike our understanding of cynicism today, ancient Greek Cynics are not cynical of  integrity, or of another’s honest intentions. Instead, Ancient Cynics are cynical of all that takes us away from our essential, and our ‘natural’ humanity. This is a rationally understood aim toward an ascetic life of temperance. Cynics view an ethical life as a temperate life, a life of controlling pleasure. A Cynic is a Cosmopolitan, a citizen of the cosmos according to Diogenes, who lived with dogs and practiced philosophy on the streets (to you and I, he was voluntarily homeless).

With Cynicism it’s easy to see an ethical framework as a mediation between an aim toward reducing pleasure held together with virtuous, excellent temperance. This is certainly an aim we all wish to share as citizens of the world, and citizens of the cosmos. 

It’s easy to envision an ethical framework for my use and abuse of plastic-bottles. The problem of plastic-bottle use (and waste) is a symptom of consumer culture ease. As a Cynic, I am cynical of such delusional ease because of the waste and abuse of the environment plastic-bottle usage represents. As a Cynic, I wish to see beyond the delusion of ease and beyond the pleasures of ease. To bring about such restraint is tough especially when I’m thirsty or I feel I deserve the immediate pleasure of a cold sweet beverage from a single-use plastic-bottle. I work on my Cynical temperance to withhold from the pleasure of quenching my momentary thirst on a walk, or on the road.

It’s easy to see a strong connection from a withdrawal of pleasure brought about by temperance for the Cynic caught in the familiar deluge of consumer choices and appetites. To deploy Cynical temperance is a type of ascetic practice known rationally. It’s rationally clear that to curb a series of momentary refreshments over time contributes to consuming less. Such a conclusion has Cosmopolitan implications for the community and for the cosmos. With Cynical temperance we rationally aim to decrease plastic use as a means of becoming virtuous and ethical to ourselves and others. Certainly a Cynical ethos is aimed at reducing pleasure to strengthen temperance and self-control in the name of global citizenship.

…on demagogues

The demagogue often (if not always) is simply unaware of his/her demagoguery & is often mistaking it for a well reasoned argument coupled with sound evidence. Evil is more-often-than-not done by people who feel they’re doing good & that they’re justified to hate others, not because the demagogue ‘knows’ or reflects on his/her own ignorance, but because the demagogue feels ‘smarter’ & more reasonable than the rest of us. 
Such thinking offers a line of reasoning that permits immorality towards others who seem to fall outside the demagogue’s moral (political) correctness, & the demagogue’s moral reasoning. We often over-estimate the possibility that the demagogue ‘knows’ he/she is lying, or that the demagogue knows he/she is hateful, because the demagogue feels they’re on the right path, the truth, & hence he/she feels justified to hate.