My piece is below. The process that lead me to this piece was similar to the first one. I was wrestling with the absurdity of trying to truly shock people by putting two things together that clearly didn't belong. But I came to the conclusion that in the modern world, the generation that has been living with "lobster-telephones" for years is no longer shocked by the bizarre juxtaposition of two things under the category of "art". Therefore the only true way to shock someone is simply not to tell them that it is "art". The splicing of Dr. Suess with Nietzche, while fun, was a satire of the oblivious pretension of those who comment on the pretension of other thinkers.
Gus Halper
Gus Halper
For this surrealist piece I interfused a paragraph from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good And Evil” with a tongue twister by Dr. Suess. I had the idea before I knew what I wanted the outcome to be, and I felt it ended up being rather comical, highlighting the absurdity and pretension that comes hand in hand with philosophical thought. But I guess that’s for you to decide? Anyway, since I’m usually very organized with my art, I wanted to take this opportunity to do something messy, something that I don’t even fully understand. So that’s what I tried to do. After all, what’s the point of making art that has the potential to be fully realized? (And my apologies about the backside of the piece. I accidentally stapled it to my homework for my acting class and didn't want to tear the sheets apart in case it would rip them both.)
LIGHT ME ON FIRE
After examining philosophers between the lines with a sharp eye for a sufficient length of time, I tell myself the following: if your daddy’s name is Jim
and if Jim swims and if Jim’s slim,
the perfect Christmas gift for him
is a set of slim Jim swim fins. Even in the case of philosophical thinking we must re-learn here, in the same way we re-learned about heredity and what is “innate.” Just as if your daddy’s name is Dwight
and he likes to look at birds at night,
the gift for Dwight that might be right
is a bright Dwight bird-flight
night-sight light, so there’s little point in setting up “consciousness” in any significant sense as something opposite to what is instinctual—the most conscious thinking of a philosopher is led on secretly and forced into particular paths by his instincts. Even behind all logic and its apparent dynamic authority stand evaluations of worth or, putting the matter more clearly, a walrus with whiskers
is not a good pet. And a walrus which whispers
is worse even yet—for example, that what is certain is more valuable than what is uncertain, that appearance is of less value than the “truth.” Evaluations like these could, for all their regulatory importance for us, still be only foreground evaluations, a particular kind of niaiserie necessary for the preservation of beings precisely like us. That’s assuming, of course, that when a walrus lisps whispers
through tough rough wet whiskers,
your poor daddy’s ear
will get blispers and bliskers.
