May 21st and 22nd from 3.30 to 6.30 pm
WORKSHOP 3
To merz art history that is to take the poison out from the work of art; feel as deeply as possible; making love to the work of art; euphoria; fainting spell; I’ve Got A Crush On You (and other aesthetic theories).
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May 23rd from 11.00 am to 7.00 pm
CONVERSATION II
Fictional subjectivity and objectivity. Art history as intimate narrative illusion.
Love letters for any occasion (slightly modified)
an 8-hour reading of love letters addressed to the work of art
open to anyone who wants to declare a totally unattainable and unrequited love
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Love letters for every occasion (slightly modified) is a reading marathon that lasts 8 hours, that is, a whole working day. There is a microphone and a bouquet of white roses. And there is a music stand with about forty love letters on it. These are letters from websites which provide pre-written words useful for and adaptable to any particular situation. I only altered them, introducing words intended for a hypothetical and ideal work of art, without appearance and without a name. The standardized and impersonal language of love letters, good for every occasion, is the perfect starting point for declaring one’s love for art, passion for art, nostalgia for art: a universal, induced, repetitive, obligatory, thankless love.
Actually, if you long for Kurt Schwitters, his seductive smile and his enthralling art, then you are hopeless; you can only soak your pillow in your teenager’s bedroom with tears, or talk about love in the void of the large empty room of the museum. (All letters traslated by P.P.)
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Love letters for any occasion (slightly modified)
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#01
My love,
sweet love, how beautiful and sublime you are, but how difficult you are to understand! You appear and disappear from my life like a ray of sunshine! Every time I look at you, you seem to me a dream devoid of matter, and when you are not there, I keep thinking and thinking back to you, to us. Our story is complicated, I am aware of it, but we will fight against all adversities. If I think about how you and I will end up, I cannot imagine any hypothesis: I can only say that I want you now, now and forever, because I feel inextricably linked to you, my love… I want to spend every moment by your side, in the mad sweetness of your materiality, leaving the dimension of pure contemplation and abandoning the impalpable linguistic plane of both iconic and verbal expression in itself. I want to use all the historical and technological tools to build our daily lives, because you give me sensations never experienced in the past: I have never loved anyone like I love you! I would like to give myself to you completely, disappear in you, melt in your rhythm and in your syntax, well beyond the convenience of an aesthetic judgment based on the morals of the current time, obedience to the rules of good taste, to the right and sacred being in relationship with ethical purposes, the dictatorship of historical reason, my beautiful love, I have not been able to annihilate it… And it was nice to try to define you without ever being able to do it completely; wrong every time the aim, losing me in points of view that then led nowhere, inventing sometimes failing systems of translation of your techniques into other techniques. I take my responsibilities: if I tried in every way to transfigure you, it was only to bring you closer to me, subject yourself a little to my (poor) reading conditions and, ultimately, I only did it for the pure love of your formal construction, with respect to which I had (and still do) a feeling of ambiguous admiration, on the one hand jealousy, on the other enchantment. Every time you touch me a shiver crosses my back and I feel your passion that envelops me and takes me far away, which makes me dream and makes me feel on a cloud from which I would never want to go down! Keep me with you! Take me away with you! Never leave me alone! You are my life, you are my happiness, you are the essential, you are the air I breathe, you are the water I need to stay alive. Never change, stay as you are, artwork… forever!
Oh my intangible love!
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#02
My love,
I am writing to you because I cannot do otherwise and I would like to share everything I feel with you. In my solitude there is a light that warms my heart, and leads me to travel far from here, looking for you in the night. My body is thirsty for your caresses and my lips are waiting for yours. I miss you every moment of my existence, I feel so alone and sad and only the memory of your face and your sweet smile make me feel good. I think back to your words, to your gaze full of tenderness and love, to your hands holding mine, to your mouth while kissing me. I think back to the last time, when we made love, to the tears in my eyes, to your hands that caressed me, knowing that it was for the last time. How much sadness and how much pain for an unwanted but necessary separation! Wise men say the separation between the work of art and those who long for it, is an unavoidable condition for the work to continue to be what it is; that is, an object of exception in the infinite multitude of objects of non exception in the world, whose status of exception can justify the world as non-exceptional, that means historically bearable. If there was no separation between the work of art and the observer, the gaze would not exist. Poor gaze! The work of art would be condemned to harsh transparency, without an end and without objectives. But I can’t stop wishing to be one with you. Secretly, I tell myself that I don’t give a damn if our deeply name-dissolving and disidentitarian embrace were to cause the irremediable loss of poetic function. I know that I will see you again one day, I know that I will embrace you with the same desire and I will make you mine for eternity. The frontality of the work, after all, is only a passing condition and limited to the gaze of a moment. It is enough for me to look at you a little longer, to feel that you are expanding in and around me, in all directions of my thought and my language and my actions! I would like a different life, where the pain is gone, where there is you and there is me and everything else does not matter at all. My thoughts fly to you and my heart starts to beat faster than ever. It is a strong feeling, which stops time waiting for you to come back and materialize again. My sweet love, artwork, I love you more than my own life! Come back soon my love … I’ll wait for you endlessly! And waiting for you, I send you a kiss.
Oh my condemned-to-duality love!
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#03
My love,
from that night on, my dreams changed. In an instant I met a special person like you, who captured my mind and senses. As I walk I think of your face, your eyes, your voice, your smile, your body that I would like to hold on to me at all times, in every moment of the day and in every little moment of my useless life. I have wonderful sensations just to pronounce your name! Your definition is always a cause for intellectual apprehension, in the suspicion that you cannot have a name at all, and that whatever name I can invent for you, it is nothing more than a trap in which I remain caught, with my foot amputated by your very sharp self-denial. Thinking about you is no choice for me. Who would be stupid enough to oppose the fate of thinking and desiring the work of art? Dreaming about you is a natural and concrete state; having you completely for me would be an absolutely mental state. Kissing you, caressing you on a beach watching the sunset would be a dream, but I wish this was the reality. Even if you taught me that reality is nothing but speculation, sick of perspective, of our pure desire for space; and that there is nothing more fragile than this fictitious theater, in which you and I continually end up abandoning and separating ourselves. A meter ago; an inch ago; a millimeter ago we separated from each other. And now the time has come for a new separation. I have lost count of the lacerations. How does it happen? It happens like this. You are already here. You are already here when I get here. You are essentially already here when I get here. You are essentially already here, whether I get here or not. But I obviously get here. Because I have no choice but to get here, in front of you the artwork. You are essentially here already and I obviously get here. You, essentially. I, obviously. And starting from the moment that I obviously get here, being you already here essentially, in the very same instant you abandon me. I advance a millimeter towards you. And then you abandon me. Second millimeter. Second abandonment. Third millimeter. Third abandonment. And so on. Endlessly. Without ever a return. Progressive separations without returns. All you do is abandon me. You, essentially abandoning. I obviously approaching. You abandon me to the natural rhythm of breathing. You abandon me to the occasional rhythm of breathing. Every breath of mine is a perfect opportunity for your disappearance. I breathe and you abandon me. In a totally natural way. Occasionally. All these abandonments will make me die from getting close to you. They will make me die in a millimeter-sized way. Breath after breath. Millimeter after millimeter. Your absence after your absence. Your total unsuitability for all forms after your total unsuitability for all forms. Your abandonment and vice versa. My breath and vice versa. Vice versa, my breathing is your abandonment. How sad to be abandoned here, to breathe your disappearance. In spite of everything, I keep dreaming because dreams give me what the world forbids me, emotions that I can’t have, sensations that I can’t feel. Maybe emotions give me hope, a person to cry with, a body to die on. I want to dream, but I want to do it on you, if you want to.
Oh my non-word-reducible love!
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#06
My love,
I would like to speak to you with sweetness, tenderness, without the terrible anxieties that have always tormented me. Speak to you to make you understand the countless emotions that you have given me, and which I have tried in vain to convey to you, all the words that I have never said to you for fear of hurting you, for fear of scratching your soft harmony, for fear of lose your love. If I abandon myself to your form, I feel that the concept takes away my strength, I stagger, I lock up in the innumerable corners of that infinite space that is called: the meaning, I collapse into an exile of conscience and I am totally at the mercy of your surfaces. Oh surfaces, give me a refuge! Be merciful to my nothingness! Be you what thought was never for me, the suffocating thought of techniques and materials; the gas of gestures to repeat to mean, wosh, wosh, wosh. To be repeated in order not to mean. Then, the harrowing calculation of the consequences of every slightest move, both inside and outside the frame, which is so called for convenience, or which is otherwise called the fence of responsibilities, or which is otherwise referred to as the chastity belt of the action, in the precise sense that: beyond there is nothing, and on this side there is not everything but at least there is something, at least there is something, unfortunately there is something very very very delicate, delicate is an understatement , as you move you are wrong, you determine the meaning, first concept, second concept, third concept, be careful to reform the concept, it should not happen but if it happens, then it is better that it happens in a countable way, so as not to lose track of the reform of concepts, party of the reformatory of concepts, first concept, expelled, second concept, expelled, third concept, expelled, but it returns again, it returns relentlessly. The frame is a condemnation, a disaster since its mere definition, what a nonsense the definition of a frame, even the very idea of defining a frame sounds bad. You are immeasurable. Any will to travel your form is weakened already at its manifestation. The desire to give you a name only brings me tiredness. I begin by telling me that you exist because of the evidence of your presence. Your presence is profoundly and superficially undeniable; you appear in the non-deniability of your presence, from all points of view. I can’t say you don’t exist. Nobody can say you don’t exist. The undeniability of your presence takes me by the throat, like an urgency to call you. But the more urgent your name is, the more impossible your definition is. My throat is full of the impossibility of your name, of the perpetual opening and reopening of your definition, my throat is doomed, broken through, damned, damaged by your nameless presence, when, now in tears, I don’t know how to call you, nameless, indefinable work of art. Indefinable. I see you here in front of me. We are very close. But you don’t notice me and your insensitivity has built around me an invisible prison from which I am afraid I will not be able to get out. Your indifference is my prison. To be one step away from you, and yet receiving no signal from you, no sense, light, smile, word. It would be so logical to touch you, to extend my hand towards you, to tap with my fingers on your surface, yet the only touching is the most unreasonable you can currently imagine. So, if I cannot touch you, I am condemned to call you, so that you may notice me, so that you at least have the mercy to address one of your meanings to me. But how can I call you if I don’t know your name? Then, with patience, I wipe my tears well, get back in position, in front of you, in front of you, around you, and I start again to try the way of your name. Now I know, I understand it: your name is a tightrope between me and you. I will have to rest my feet on the tightrope of your name, and follow it step by step, taking extreme care not to rest my foot out of the very subtle tension of your name, yes, I must be extremely careful to intuit, with my foot, the slightest subsistence of your name. Your tightrope-name is the very difficult test of sensitivity that you ask to my foot. Will my foot, my poor foolish foot, hear your name? Will I be able to perceive it, distinguish it, grasp it in all its subtle development as a tightrope? Will I be able to keep your name in my footstep? But the risk is great of losing balance and falling down, down, down, down, down, without any hope of a floor. Because your name is the only possible floor: a sharp and imperceptible segment that stretches between my need to call you and your very insensitive presence. I know, I will have to walk all your name, to get to you and implore the charity of a face from you. Of one of your face, I mean. I will have to deserve your name, to get out of the invisible prison to which your self-closure condemns me. In vain I walked on the hard and arid desert stones to make you perceive the immense dream in which I plunged into the moment I met you. Our love was such a great love that my body and my mind never managed to contain it. A love that has fascinated me and that has frightened you, a love that could make me immense, invincible, or destroy me (which it has punctually done). How many things I would still have to tell you, how many dreams I would still like to share with you, how much happiness I would still like to give you… but I am left with only the dazzling light of your thought, where I continue enchanted to dream, incapable of any functional apriorism.
Oh my slippery love!
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#07
My love,
if only you knew how much I want you, maybe things would change between us. If only you knew how much I miss you, maybe you would miss me too. If only I could make you understand how illusory is the coincidence between planning and dissipation of what is intentional, perhaps you would look at me gently. If only you knew the truth, I would certainly feel better, but I know that everything will continue to be as it always has been. I know that my fears will continue to resurface, I know that your memory will hardly fade from my heart. I’m here, trying to hold back the pain because you’re not there and I’d like to see you. I’m the only one here, with all my wretched inclination to objectivity, the sheer drop that I can’t escape! You, the object that never gets to give itself completely. Your objectual nature, I mean. The point where I end up slipping, each time attracted by an end, your end, one of your countless ends. Point. Brackets. Curtain. Threshold. Outline. Horizon. Your material horizon is for me like sugar that I can’t resist. Even in your eventual and total incorporeality, I see nothing but matter. In your eventual and total gestures, I see the matter. In your eventual and total inadmissibility, I see the matter. I suspect the matter under your transparency. Because I want your matter more than anything, and I make your matter a hallucination that somehow finds the path of dust, of who knows what kind of dust, the blessed dust of your pre-objectual being. Despite this, things will not change. I will therefore accept to embrace you only in my dreams, to see your smile from afar, your voice will suffice me, even if the words you will say will not be addressed to me, and I will remain here licking the wounds of so many loves that ended badly. Of course I will regret not having declared you my love before, I will regret not having spoken to you, I will regret having hated you for so long deluding myself that you were nothing for me. But the fact was that your extraordinarily powerful presence was a cause of profound unease to me. I didn’t know how to come to terms with the shocking truth of your being exposed and nameless, yet so immanently denied to revelation. Consisting is your nature: consisting of you, limiting yourself, giving you a fence, whose only purpose is to keep me outside, to force me to conceive the outsideness as my natural condition. If your nature is consisting, mine is getting out. The more you end up in your definition, the more I get out of you. In your solidification of matter there is all my unhappiness, which is also my story, it is all I have: the outside-of-you that you have destined for me. You were supposed to be the home address, and in fact you are the border that drives me away. After you, no longer home for me. I will hurt myself knowing that because of my fear you will never be mine, that you have never been mine, except in the moment in which I threw everything up without realizing it, when I was looking for love elsewhere, and instead I I had it next to me: you, only you …
Oh my external love!
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#08
My love,
you entered my world gently and I loved you immensely from the first day we met. I could not help but get lost in your eyes. I heard our hearts beat in unison and I immediately understood what your mouth could not shout to the whole world: “You are mine. Mine forever. ” Back then, my eyes echoed your message saying to you, “I’m yours. Yours forever.” The desire to merge with the work of art, that is, the breaking down of the boundaries between art and life, is nothing but the desire to suppress art and life at the same time, in a dream of copulation beyond which thought will never succeed in dragging its poor illusions. Thought is quick to make decisions at the expense the work of art. But then, Thought does not know what to make of the conclusions that Thought itself has reached. (It’s no secret to anyone that Thought knows nothing about Thought.) And after dragging Desire to the ultimate coincidence between art and life, having made Desire believe that this was extremely possible, then suddenly Thought self-suppresses itself, abandoning Desire to its sad destiny of failure, Desire to the false perspective of itself, to the very false perspective of the lifeless horizon of the work of art. Here is, for example, the seashore, life, possibly the work of art. This coming and going of water and foam that leaves no mark. Far below the nothingness of the work of art, there is Thought, which would like the work of art to be intrinsic to living, just as foam is intrinsic to water. Thought has already foreseen everything: water is life, foam is the work of art, and air is historical time. Thought does not suspect anything of your congenital unpredictability. Because you are totally unreliable, you are the unreliability as it is, you are the most lying floor that one can ever conceive. But will Thought ever surrender to your unthinkability? Thought only thinks of you; Thought chooses the words to say to you one by one, and gives you the sweet candies so that you come out, and you make yourself visible, or at least imaginable. And you, nothing. The imbecility of Thought is always so moving. Thought in general? Or Thought as the idea of the work of art smashed on life? Work of art adhering to the surface of life, generated by the continuous shaking of life, growing and losing itself in life, ultimately swept away by life, having become life itself? I feel a great lack. I miss you today, just as I miss the times we talked, when your sweet smile stole my heart, the times when you whispered sweet words to me. Before, we were so united that we lost our identities and became an indissoluble “we”. The only thought that made me happy was to live on your smiles, your breaths and your kisses, hoping that our fairy tale would never end. Now I’m alone and those days so beautiful, but so far today, invade my mind when I least expect it. I think of you, of everything I wanted to tell you, of what I wanted to shout to the whole world: “I am yours and nobody will separate us, if not the cruel fate!”. So it was: now we are so different that we struggle to recognize each other, but I know that the past love has remained, and that binds us even today, as it will bind us forever …
Oh my non-coincident love!
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#12
My love,
in this world, few people I know who are really happy, but I met one happier than the others: a simple girl, with dark hair and deep brown eyes. One day, while talking about her life and loves, I saw a very strong light in her, a light that has projected me into a state of aesthetic suspension, totally unable to separate the world from its poetic and subjective representation. She told me about a guy who was madly in love with her, and her eyes were shining. She told me that this boy had been crazy about her for some time, but she had never noticed how happy he could make her, and so she refused him. She thought she loved another boy, wishing he was the right one, but in fact he was just an immature boy. I recognized something different and rare in her. The way she disentangled herself from the laces of the banality of a falsely immersive experience, to point straight to the political value of aesthetic participation, this left me breathless. When she realized which of the two was the right person for her, the only one who could understand her, listen to her and make her really happy, she was afraid of losing the right person. She woke up in the middle of the night, with eyes full of tears and deep in the heart the fear of not being able to intercept the contextual meaning of the work of art, since she had never managed with the contexts; no type of context, neither economic, nor social, nor architectural. She felt the weight of her body on the floor, while in the darkness of her house she was moving from the bedroom to the kitchen, imagining that she was a statue that gently touched the edges and doors, the context of the domestic walls, the one she knew for sure, and she began to believe she was the work of art in person. She, herself, the work of art. So she began to spread her expressive beauty to all the objects in the house, which were captured by her and looked at her mesmerized by the sense of her pure presence. Fortunately, however, that boy was truly in love with her and had not forgotten his princess and with his sweetness he conquered her, making her fall in love immediately. He made her and still makes her the happiest and safest person in the world. And the tears that follow the experience of the work of art, drag away the debris of her consciousness, clear away the joy and pain of past experiences, and she has no idea how to find what she really is, and go out to get some fresh air, after the absolute settled in her head.
Oh my astonished love!
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#13
My love,
I would give everything to go back to that day and see you at least once again. Unfortunately, life is too severe, it does not forgive and does not give you a second chance. On the other hand, life likes to endlessly remind you of some of your mistakes. In fact, twenty years have passed since that day and each of us has its own past and existence. Despite the distance, I think of you and I remember a love that, perhaps, would have been the greatest of my life or just a flash in the pan, but that in fact remained a great remorse for my pride, lack of maturity and courage which, at that age, I missed. Sacralizing the artwork is a temptation we can’t wait to give up, and at the same time it is a condemnation from which we would like to save ourselves, but which we try to avoid in vain. Even while we are eating a sandwich, sitting and carefree, in the banality of life, just then we are saying a prayer to the work of art. Do you know this? There is not a single moment of emptiness between our thoughts: each emptiness is filled by the work of art! Whether we want it or don’t want it. And that’s why we die for love. For love, of love, of artwork, for artwork. None of us will ever know how it would have gone, and the horrible regret of not having caught the moment will torment me forever. Life is cruel and has prevented me from holding you in my arms, condemning me however to keep you in my heart among the sweetest thoughts.
Oh my conscious love!
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#14
My love,
I love you and I don’t want to hide what I feel for you anymore, honey. Life has made me a wonderful gift: you! I want to take every moment that I can, to delight me with your presence. I want to be entirely for you, to be all with you, all on your side, to be made of you, I want to be deeply you, I want to be a line in your space, a dew on your surface, I want to sweat your color, breathe the logic of your poetic substance. I am desperately looking for your presence, your concreteness, the measurable volume of the idea that establishes you, shapes you and supports you. I miss you and I would like this lack of you to have a weight, so as to be able to calculate at least the extent of the subtraction of your presence, in the room where I am now, with you and absolutely missing you. I miss you because I know you’re there, but I can’t measure you, there is no way to detect your presence. Seeing you is not enough. Looking at you for hours and hours, without ever taking my eyes off you, does not guarantee anything at all about your stay in the same space where I am and looking at you. If I move from one point to another in the room, sliding millimetrically from place to place, being careful not to leave out any piece of space, at first slowly, and then gradually faster and faster, in the measured attempt to physically run into yours body, in your volumetric, substantial, physical, localizable body, I don’t get any results. I go back to myself, without you, and I repeat to myself that there is no way to ascertain your being here. I know that you are here somewhere, but it is clear that my natural limit prevents me from proving your presence. True, I don’t need confirmation, wanting you sharply is enough for me. My total desire for you is already the clear proof of your presence. My ineliminable desire for you works constantly for your body. My concrete desire for you is the only material thing I have left of you. Or maybe I still have the pain of looking at you? Or the emptiness of my mouth? Or the itching of my skin? Are you in the itch of my skin? Do I have to scratch my skin to touch you? Do I have to cry to see you? But how long will this miserable pain / itch to know you last, present yet undetectable? Undetectable. Unfathomable. Immeasurable. When I look at your beautiful eyes I am breathless. I always get excited and try to mask my embarrassment, because I want to kiss you. Maybe you don’t know but I love you! And when you greet me in friendship I would like to give you a long, endless kiss … but I can’t. I don’t know what feelings you have for me. Come to me and hug me … tell me how you feel for me! Artwork! Love me in turn, without staying within your object limits, get rid of the duplicity of your being for me and not for me, put an end to the sadness of your non-presence and strip yourself of your names. How could I have stayed indefinitely in the front of our mutual position, and endured your progressive derivation of you from you, of your surface from your surface? There has never been a possible point from which to look at you, while you historically dissolve yourself. I see you and suddenly I can’t look at you anymore. Every vision of you reminds me of the sadness of not being able to see you, either partially or never entirely. Your subtraction from here is your caress for me; the sweet confidence that you reserve for my eyes, making seeing and looking fail. So I stand still in front of you, trying not to distract my thoughts from the desire I have for you. At least, I tell myself, I can think of you. You can’t stop me from thinking about you. You can’t take away my desire for you.
If you read this letter, you will understand that my words are the desperate expression to somehow tell you how much I love you. Now stop. Listen to your heart, so you can feel all the love that I would like to give you. Please, artwork, stop!
Oh my here-being love!
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#16
My love,
Since I abandoned the hope of healing the definitive trauma of you, the crack that opened between matter and destiny, since then I walk tirelessly under a sky that seems to have to fall at any moment, and at every step I tell myself, this is the last one before the violence of infinity sucks everything into the dust of the no-more-possible-artwork. I am alone, completely alone. Nobody can help me. I got into this mess and I have to get rid of it. I fell into the impatience of the artwork, in the transparency without judgment of the passion, millimeter by millimeter, driven by the rhythm of a verse that continually denies me the reason for this dictatorship. The artwork orders, and I obey, madly dependent on the will of it. I feel lonely, but I know I am not. If I’m there with you, but I think of the artwork, that’s not love; if at night I do nothing but dream of the artwork, instead of dreaming of you, that is not love; if I hope with all my heart that artwork will come and enrapture me every time I am with you, that is not love; if I burn with love for the artwork, that’s love, it’s passion, it’s obsession, but not for you; if my heart cries for help to the heart of artwork, that is love; if every time I see the artwork I have nothing left because I melt, except for a mad desire to go and kiss the artwork, that’s love. It is a pure love, and only for the artwork, but not for you. It is also an impossible love, unfortunately. A love that will never be there, and that’s why I stay with you, when in reality I’m dying for loving the artwork. Whenever I stand in front of you and look at you, my mental eyes are looking at the work of art, even if the gaze does not find anything in it. You talk to me and tell me to love me, and I tell you to love you in turn, but in truth I don’t love you at all, because all my sentimental capacity is absorbed and blown away by the very thin outline of the idea of the artwork, the only idea is enough to make me lose my gaze. my eyes are completely reversed, they look for the work of art in the desert of thoughts, in the forest of thoughts, in the ocean of thoughts. How can I look at you then? The work of art knows that every time I look at something that is not the work of art, then I will remain silent, but my heart will cry and the work of art will be the only one to hear it. Artwork and me. Alone.
Oh my subsidiary love!
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#17
My love,
I am writing you this letter that you will never read to tell you that, even if everything is over now, my heart has never stopped beating for you. My eyes have never stopped looking for you among the thousand faces I see every day on the street. It hasn’t been an hour or minute for my mind to stop thinking about you. You always stayed there, still in my mind. You are always present in my dreams, but it is all over because of you. I know that for you I never meant anything, that I was one like many others, but I really loved you and, even if you don’t deserve it, I still do it. The theories of language can never sufficiently explain the transition from figuration to expression; not abstraction, no. That is the pure consequence of having said something senseless, which took me and threw me against the evidence of the lack of conceptual, pictorial surface. And yet, this is love, my love. Knowing that you have no surface, that you are only an infinite promise of substance, just that substance that you gain from my undeterred thinking of you. I wish I could forget love, because I suffer every time I remember you, I suffer thinking that there has never been anything true in this year. But remember, love, I will never forget you despite all the evil you did to me.
Oh my consequential love!
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#19
My love,
I am suspended between my confused thoughts, trying to find the solution to all my problems. Anyone who passes now can see me while staring into the void, but no one will understand what I’m looking at, because my eyes wander inside me and my ears listen to a song that repeats, repeats, repeats itself in my mind … I used to say: artwork please limit me! Build a mountain of meanings around me! Let me turn my existence around, artwork! I lose sense continually. Even while I try to keep the thoughts in order, those thoughts that you drop in my mind, and that I collect, one after the other, in the hope that sooner or later your secret will be revealed to me. I see my thoughts traveling elusive in front of me and I can only observe all these strange creatures. A tear whispers to my heart something I already know: what’s missing is you! I was lying when I said no! I was choking back tears when I smiled before your eyes! I was lying to me and to all those creatures who suddenly stopped. But you’ve never been there. For hours and hours I looked at the most empty space in the universe, believing that I was witnessing the renewed fulfillment of an aesthetic meaning, capable of binding the world within itself, healing the wounds of metaphysical and political disaster, but you have never been there. Never. Never. I’ve always looked at nothing. Now everything seems clearer to me: what is missing is you, what is missing is something impossible, it is an impossible dream, it is you … and to me there remains only a song that repeats itself, repeats itself, repeats itself …
Oh my too-not-being love!
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#20
My love,
it is not easy to describe an emotion, the emotion of feeling loved, sought, the emotion of a look, of a kiss, of an “I love you”. An emotion is that warm shiver that envelops you, that upsets you, it is that thought that lulls you before falling asleep, it is that precise moment that you relive a thousand times, it is that small part of love that is given to you by every single moment. One, a thousand, billions are the emotions that the person you love can give you, unique emotions, unique like you, artwork. Since you entered my life, I have had emotions: everything has become enlightened, it has softened, it has become animated, it has been enchanted. I have become a more ingenious and sensitive person. I understand the human. Thanks to you I went through the crisis of meaning, without ever losing the ability to reinvest failures in new conquests of space, objectivity, and even de-objectualization in function of a more brilliant truth about your nature, artwork. But will I now get used to not seeing you anymore? Will I be able to pretend to be happy without you? It is useless to try to forget something really important and I will not try to do it. I will only need to think of everything as a sweet and beautiful memory that has now passed and must remain so. You have been a true love and that is how I want to remember you, object, not-object, artwork. Once upon a time there was a proportion between me and you, artwork; you and I were proportionate and built to the last detail, gently, accurately, sexually, intimately, plastically. Then the story of our ruinous air language is over. For me you will always be the most precious thing I have, I will always keep you in my heart and I thank every day the destiny that made me meet you, because thanks to you I felt myself the luckiest person in the world. It was like a unique dream, beautiful, and our love had the flavor of an eternal bond, but unfortunately everything ended … too soon.
Oh my disproportionate love!
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#24
My love,
I decided to dedicate this love letter to you. Will it help? Could words bring me closer to your truth, to the exhibition of the unrepresentable concept of your being expressed form and, at the same time and in principle, definitive flight from expression? Who are you? The crisis of yourself? The infringement of your law? The constant babble of your name? The human word, love, is insufficient for the intimacy that promises us our being in function of a reciprocal, but silent, revelation. To love means to put the good of the other before your own, and you did it unconditionally, making me feel protected. Mistakes are often made in love and, precisely for this reason, I am now here and I ask you for forgiveness for all the times that I made you angry. Sorry, forgive me! I know I am a disaster, I am moody, jealous, crazy. I have all the flaws in this world, but … I love you so much and I can’t give up on you. You are a shining star, you are the light of my eyes, you are the Prince Charming that I have been waiting for in a life and that I finally met. There are many reasons why I love you and why I can’t live without you: together we are unbeatable and I will always fight for us, remember that! You made huge sacrifices, neglecting everything else to be with me, even when I didn’t show you the same, I was distant and I still hadn’t realized how essential you were to me. Now, I’m here on my knees asking for forgiveness, my love, artwork! Forgive me for looking for the expression in every way! Forgive me for doubting your paradox! Forgive me for not being dead and risen in your language! Forgive me for having considered your materiality passed off forever, when you came to me completely devoid of matter, with the sole aim of showing me all your seminal philosophical truth! Forgive me to forget your name on waking up, and to spend the rest of the day producing complicated and nominative aesthetic guesses, which poison the air and hurt your substance, before failing, on time, at sunset. I love you very much and without you my life no longer makes sense! I want to kiss you endlessly! I love you and I will love you until the end of my days: I love you today, I will love you tomorrow, I will love you forever! I will stand in front of you as one stands before the hypothesis of the transformation of the subject through active contemplation of the artwork. I don’t know if this letter will change something between you and me, but I wanted to show you that I would do anything for you … you are my sweet puppy!
Oh my expressly-without-reason love!
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#25
My love,
yesterday, late at night, I could no longer sleep. I listened to the music and started thinking about the past, my friends, my travels, my past twenty years. When, all of a sudden, I came across you, and I dug deep into our memories. I started writing this letter with the fear that I could take myself for crazy, but … I’m crazy! Crazy about you! For you I would do anything, but certainly nothing that could hurt you, because making you happy is what is most dear to me. I decided to stay here and follow your example. Transmitting a meaning only with my presence, without worrying about who or what will come here to interpret me. Just transmit. Understanding life as an action of involuntary semiosis and yet capable of making things tremble. I want, like you, to wait for the gaze of others, to remain motionless while everyone passes and interprets me and wonders what I mean, what my position means, what my measurements mean, what my name, weight, volume and my surface mean. Without saying a single word, I would like to accept that my surface is a matter of endless questions and speculations. And I don’t want to be afraid of not being fully understood. I would like to forget the dilemma of the existence or non-existence of a fullness, every fullness. Being, like you, just the object that is in a certain very precise position, and nothing else. You are not afraid of not being deciphered and understood in the totality of your expression. You pretend you don’t know you’re an expression in the eyes of others. You act as if your meaning was not your problem. I like your way of being and so I decided to look like you. You know, I like to be in company, to laugh, to joke, but now my whole daily life is turned upside down because I have my head in the clouds and I would like to be alone with you. I am happy with our phone calls and messages, but it is not easy to go on without being able to see you. Do you know how many times I wanted to sneak up on you? Even just to feel closer to you! No, I don’t want to be far away, I just can’t. I miss you so much and feel lost. Love, please, let yourself go! I would also like to see you every now and then, in person, I would be happy with just that! I know you can do it! Invisibility is one of the virtues originating from your own sinking to the surface, confusing the skin of matter in the breath of your form, which is made up of negations and overlaps of nothingness to nothingness, I know, I know, I know. But for me, when I look at you, and I think of you looking at you as if I could do nothing but think of the evidence of your non-visibility, this game of evading is an unbearable pain. Forgive me if I insist, but it’s stronger than me. You must know that it is not easy to express my thoughts, because I am afraid that, by dint of insisting, I might lose you, instead of having you all for me forever.
Oh my self-lessening love!
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#26
My love,
only my heart knows that I won’t have you. This is our fairy tale and I look for it desperately, wherever it is, daydreaming. My mind flies through the clouds towards an enchanted island, the island that does not exist. The island of infinite distinction and re-synthesis between your current form, socially and linguistically established, and the reasons that justify your eventual appearance or disappearance and re-appearance in a different material, also spatially re-discussed, sensually redefined. In my dream I walk and do not perceive fatigue, I am nourished by the enchantment of nature in order to soften nostalgia. I ask the birds of the forest to guide me to the island and a hawk leads me to a deserted beach, where I wait for the sunset in the hope of letting my love invade me. But you are far away, you are distant and your return shows no signs of happening. A seagull then takes me on its wings, flying beyond the mountains and the sea, landing on the roof of your house, revealing to me that the island I was looking for is nothing more than living by your side. At this point, then, my fable ends, like a shipwrecked man who has found his way: the island that is not there is inside me, it is the love I feel for you, sweet artwork. You put your foot on the thin and sharp rope which gives rise to the difficult distinction between: (i) a world as an object always given below a voice, unaware of any breath and any gaze and which, breath or no breath, gaze or no gaze, continues in any case to be world, and (ii) a world as an exclusive referent of the artwork, nail and blossom of the artwork, and nothing else outside of it.
Oh my ideological love!
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#27
My love,
being with you seems like a dream from which i would never want to wake up. You represent everything: you are my life, my world, my fairy tale, my reality, my Heaven and my Hell. A wave of passion, love and emotion assails me every time you hug me, kiss me, caress me. My heart starts to beat very fast, so I let myself go gently in your arms, holding me close to you. I feel a tremor in my very deep heart every time your body is above mine, when, lying on the bed, we are lulled by our melody of pleasure. You overpower me with the consistency of your lines. Your body escapes any conceptualization, denying pathetic attempts at specular absorption on my part. Because your body is everywhere. You cross me and you stand in front of me. If I close my eyes, this is the moment when I have the sensation of capturing a defined spatial image of your inconceivable body; then, when I open my eyes again, I understand that the immeasurability of your body is nothing but the sign of your providential lack of a phenomenal nudity. You walk along the seashore, and step by step the whole context is touched by your presence, and it is no longer possible to subtract anything from the semantic action that spreads from your body. A dark halo falls over me every time we fight and then I feel empty inside, an unbridgeable void that seems to fade only when I feel you, when I see you, when I hold your hands in mine, when I take hold of the your lips, your mind … then yes I’m happy. I miss you every moment of my existence. Every minute I spend without you is hell and I find peace only if I see you, if I cuddle you, if I know that you are mine alone. When I am with you, a single second contains a myriad of emotions, sensations, infinite passions, shared with you in the wonderful fairy tale that is our story. We are a spell on a starless night, we are wind on a sunless day, we are soul mates in a world without space. But I no longer know what space is for, now that the only space is the imaginary development of a single point on one of your infinite lines.
Oh my never-fully-developed love!
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#33
My love,
I don’t know if you will ever read this letter one day, but do you realize how far I went for you? I don’t know what you are thinking right now, but I hope you appreciate my decision to write to you. You are the first boy who pulled me out of my shell and now I am ready to scream to the world how much I love you and how much I care about you, despite the lies you have told me and the evil you have inflicted on me. You have not kept any of your promises: neither freedom, nor justice, and not even a pleasure that can somehow do good for life. You betray all expectations, and yet you believe you are essential. You need continuous and infinite attention and definitions, specific lighting, a specific place, a precise name, however impossibly precise. You are a true condemnation, my love, a work of art. But I love you anyway. What nonsense! And my love overcomes all anguish. It is not the intangibility that worries me. Nor does the progressive decadence of the principle of staticity to which you falsely rely. You have never been concrete or immobile. Even when your constituency seems to be fixed once and for all, and your fence is a collective judgment, not a vague personal hallucination, there is a part of you that does not find peace in being precisely at the point, and this part is discordant, de-substantiated of spatiality, going to be located outside the limits of the gaze, sometimes very outside sometimes just just outside the natural boundaries of the gaze, where the natural boundaries of the gaze will mean, roughly and in general, the place of the presumable pact of mutual devotion between object-since-thought and object-since-looked at, that is, in other words, the sensitive split of skin, all within the wretched whateverness of the object. The object that tends to look from two distinct sides of its presentation, on the one hand, that is, the gaze on the object, on the other hand, the gaze without the object but for the object, that is, the gaze due to the absence of the object, that is to say the gaze for the absent object which, from the fullness of its absence, is however always an object deeply and sensibly turned towards the gaze. I am not worried about intangibility at all. Looking at you is nothing. Right now I’m listening to our song and I would like time to stop, but unfortunately it flows without ever stopping, and it takes me away from you. We lived together unforgettable moments, fantastic emotions that only you would have been able to give me. When I’m with you, everything becomes a beautiful dream and it doesn’t matter where we are: the important thing is to be close to you. You make me feel special and it’s beautiful, because no one had ever been able to! Even if our story is over, I would very much like you to remember our love, so that that past can become a beautiful present again. I hope that day will come soon.
Oh my whatever love!
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