THE GHOST AND THE HOLY ABORTION: A LEAVING PROCESS
Exhibit by COSTANTINO ZICARELLI


1.

While artistic creation for centuries has been normally associated with giving birth—

(what will the painted canvas feel when it finds out it’s adopted? that its dad is its mother’s cousin? that the womb is the site of the aftermath of rape? etc.)

—THE GHOST AND THE HOLY ABORTION also looks at Art from the periscope of pregnancy, but toward the direction opposite birthing and arrival, against coming into a new world. An endless series of departures.

What is Art but a leaving process, the very act of abortion and abandonment? Stick the unwound wire of a rusty hanger into the vagina: a skinny middle finger to tell the Great Cunt something like

FUCK YOU.


2.

Before Arthur Rimbaud decided to abandon poetry altogether, he made the bold declaration:

The ‘I’ is an other.

The child inside the pregnant woman—is this not the mother’s other? But the child is part of the mother, is one with the mother herself. Where the other is the mother, the act of giving birth henceforth isn’t the expulsion of another but of an other, of the self—or, should we say, the other(ed) self. The artist and his art: they are the same and they are different—

to give birth to a work of art is to expel the self from self. A kind of suicide but more brutal, the sort that leaves the one committing it alive.

It is in this sense that art continually fails the artist. The made has to kill its maker, and vice versa. Such that the aim of Art, therefore, is a complete and utter Artlessness. Paint, in effect, is the canvas’ flaw. Form is nothing but ink like a snake eating its own tail.

It’s the crack that makes the butt. Now raise your middle finger and chant with me:

AUM MANE PADME FUCK YOU.

3.

What remains of form past murder but a Ghost? Every drawing in this room is an exquisite corpse; the exhibit is a shameless revelation of massacre. That which we cannot explain leaves the throat dry but the armpits watery, the thighs wet with piss and the palms with sweat, while thru the ear canal pass the parched snakes of whispered

fuck you’s

and the mind plays with its own dick and eventually it comes. It comes, this shadow of the past, right from the very tip of the mind’s gigantic penis to commit the most heinous of imaginable crimes: the haunting.

Can you feel the anguish, the music played by phantom figures on invisible pianos and massive accordions? Pain is a note on the scale of masturbation. (That certainly puts the “concert” in “disconcerting.” And that was a really lame joke.)

Let it be known, from here on,

that all acts of masturbation are acts of artistic creation.

The semen spills elsewhere and I stick into the Great Cunt my middle finger of love. Of hate. Of electric fans and calculators now formulated with beta-carotene and Omega-8.

I am Onan but with a cellphone; I store porn in my video inbox. I am Onan but with a blog; I post porn pics for your professional perusal. My name is Onan and I’m on Friendster. Status: it’s complicated.

So what the hell. FUCK YOU.


4.

Birthing therefore is a kind of self-mutilation, just as all loving is a process of hating. When I say “fuck you,” what I really mean is I want you to stay away from me while I make love to you. Semen spills on the floor between us. I love you because you are not here. I love you because you and I are no different, because our difference makes us the same. You are every woman. I am every woman. Just as you and I are men—chest hair and manly physique and all, penis in the left hand with a photo of Chesca Garcia screwing Maike Evers in the right.

And at the Betty Go-Belmonte LRT station, no less. Jack off at the Betty Go-Belmonte station.

Yet still—you and I, we are not the same. Don’t think I’m not glad we’re not. It is when I kill myself when I know I am most alive, and I only come to trust God when he torments me by jiggling his seven testicles and eating his own crusting smegma for brunch.


5.

“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” —Marcel Duchamp

FUCK YOU. I hope you don’t enjoy the show.

- Angelo V. suarez

2006