A little sneak preview of the upcoming talk: The phenomenal experience of shit (ie. how it tastes and smells) are evident and universal - but can we ever really know the shit-in-itself (Scheiße-an-sich)? Sneak preview of the talk: The phenomenal experience of shit (ie. how it tastes and smells) are evident and universal - but can we ever really know what shit is, will it ever be possible for humans to grasp the shit-in-itself (Scheiße-an-sich)? is it ever possible for us to *really know shit*? Is there, beyond the realm of sensreally is, to know the shit-in-itself (Scheiße-an-sich)? -- The exhibit as it has passed till now What I think of that preface = general apology for the use and consideration of excrement sheer interrogation/provocation - what is art in itself? the essay - general ontology, but doesn't actually but forth something but rather sets up the possibility; art as proposal, art as curatorial preface, art as collection (correspondence...) - the process of doing it; the process of figuring out what you're doing? or as in the statement, think before you act, we are acting before we think; the conceptual idea: kosuth's three chairs - the work = the three chairs, the idea = plato's three levels - work as just the explanation - blank work + explanation - why not just explanation; art as a move towards the idea of the art; - science art - coupling a social question with a radical form of art - art as empty signifier to fill in gaps, a purely hypothetical realm; why collect shit? it generalizes the aesthetic creation, makes it slightly more inhuman, involuntary; undermines the work of artists - perhaps, but if so in doing so it shifts what they're doing - because they're doing things - to less a question of artistic production than producing something which may or may not be a part of art; this project is a kind of sentinel for the artistic-in-itself (the sublime, the beautiful) - instead of the sublime, there is an inchoate mess that not to say here is what art is or can be, but rather that these are the things that can be done under its rubric. the category itself may be being misused the aesthetic question is one of cipher aesthetics - the art of the zero (in both the negative and pejorative aspects) aesthetic nihilism - by not asserting anything definitive, the category of aesthetics becomes potentially superfluous satirical nihilism shit-in-itself - you understand the subjective experience of shit, but can you ever know the shit-in-itself (Scheiße-an-sich)? Sneak preview of the talk: The phenomenal experience of shit (ie. how it tastes and smells) are evident and universal - but is it possible for us to know what shit really is, to know the shit-in-itself (Scheiße-an-sich)? shit - interrogative pronoun - both negative and pejorative (of course the pejorative can always be inverted - your satan is my god (the shit, sick, bad-ass, wicked)) shit as the object of cipher aesthetics; shit as the ultimate object of ontology - you're a realist - shit is just chemicals, etc, it gives info like anything most realist questions blast off into outer space (or its virutal equivalent, inner) - atoms, god, laws (rational order); with excrement, realism is blatantly obvious, and the subjective is unavoidable; shit evokes base empiricism - an extremity of the empirical - it is engaged, active, provocative, ridden with taboo, it is a hub of generation (of comedy and repulsion) - the realist idea collapses into absurdity, it is either obvious or superfluous, experience overwhelms it entirely it is always obvious (the referent) but talking about it is always avoided; in names (are we referencing the same thing?) it becomes a question of custom (is it viable/acceptable to mention the same thing? or for either of us to mention it?) - communicative rationalism requires that it's just a matter of figuring out what we're talking about. shit is about as close an object-in-itself as we can arrive at to represent that which simply cannot be talked about, thus its engagement serves as a symbol the acceptance of the unacceptable. the revolutionary spur, the base realization that informs disrupting/reordering what is and is not talked about. the shit ritual is something of this, the requestioning or regenerating. the difference between hypothesis and law (or actual entity, actual being) is nill with no experimental corroboration; the question of naming - an object that generates language (fecund source of slang) and that cannot/should not be discussed (or is "talked around"); the name itself quickly refers to anything - it presses this as a fundamental question - what do you mean when you say shit? anything but shit. but whereas say a table versus tisch, mesa, table (fr) or that/this table can be sorted out, the subjective difficulty of shit resists its rational discussion - there is something more than merely sorting of what you're referring to - there's the problem that it's shit, and maybe the fact that it all smells is more important than which part of it you're referring to. problematize aesthetics in an absurd manner (all para-aesthetic activities become involved) - the material itself becomes a general philosophical consideration, to attempt to arrive at the shit-in-itself - it renders basic questions absurd and instead serves as a node of provocation and the upsetting