Akuma Aizawa – explanation (2014)

Truthfully, I know fuck all about collage as a form–thus I won’t be able to address this as directly as a photography.

What does interest me about this (besides getting the giddy feeling in my tummy that always accompanies finding work that resonates with me), is the conceptual praxis.

The text reads:

This is to my absurd trying/of intending anything/AT ALL Example:/I’ll try to remember the/sensation of imagining you/missing/me

I’m not sure quite how the text interacts with the image yet–although I do think the example is the image and not that statement beneath the image.

I am more comfortable with the text, so let’s stick with that for a minute. The first block of text mentions the absurdity of trying to intend anything at all.

It reminds me of that famous line Yoda utters in The Empire Strikes Back. Luke Skywalker is trying to use the force to life his X-Wing out of a swamp on Dagoba. It seems like he’s making progress and then the vehicle sinks back. Yoda chides him and Luke whines that he’s trying as hard as he can. Yoda snaps back: do or do not; there is no try.

It’s a very Zen sentiment. Essentially, what Yoda means is doing the thing, you either do or do not do it. But by trying to do something the effort of your action is focused not singularly on the doing of it but on the trying to do it–the question of whether or not it can even be done.

The distinct Yoda is pointing toward is the same thing Wittgenstein is getting at in his Philosophical Investigations–only Wittgenstein is concerned with how language means instead of lifting a vehicle out of mire with nothing more than the power of the mind.

Essentially, Wittgenstein says hey, as long as your talking–language isn’t at all difficult for you. You just talk. It’s when you start thinking about how you language works, that you begin to run into problems. Because instead of doing, one begins to think about how one does what one does and that’s where trouble creeps in at the seams.

The philosophy of language questions how words mean. And that question is already off on quite the wrong foot. Wittgenstein proceeds systematically to poke holes in the notion that words mean via some sort of mental process as opposed to meaning as use in context.

The last stand of the person intent on language being a mental process clings to the notion of the possibility of a private language.

In order to demonstrate what this would be like, Wittgenstein conceives the staggeringly brilliant metaphor of The Beetle in the Box.

Say there’s a group of people somewhere and everyone of these people has a box and in that box is what is called a ‘beetle’. There’s a catch: no one can look in anyone else’s box. So there’s no way for anyone to check what anyone else’s beetle looks like. This begs the question does Jethro have an ant in his box while Marieanne has a mosquito, or perhaps her box is empty. Thus ‘beetle’ can only mean nothing or what the group agrees it means independent of whatever is or isn’t in their respective boxes.

(As an aside bad artist, racists and mansplainers are always whining about how they didn’t mean it that way, their intent was different. But that’s the thing, it doesn’t matter how you meant it, there’s a generally agreed upon external context and whether or not you meant it that way, that’s how it functions in the external context. Do or do not; there is no try.)

So what I dig about this is the way the top text cancels itself in a similar fashion to the way the bottom text does the same thing. In the top portion the speaker is trying to intend which is decidedly not doing or meaning–thus, I would assume the absurdity of the undertaking. In the lower portion, there’s again a trying–in this case a trying to imagine the sensation of you missing me. Trying imagine the feeling of something that will never happen.

There’s something profoundly lonely about this but in an unusual and I would argue defiantly feminist way. I feel like this is supposed to look like it’s about a relationship. But I think this is also on a meta-level about the relationship between an artist and their art as well as the relationship between women and the art historical male gaze.