TJORG DOUGLAS BEER
Justify My Thug 1
Anna-Catharina Gebbers
Catalogue Text Exhibition Tjorg Douglas Beer - Salonu Istanbul / Narkose #02
published by Revolver Books in 2008
The fluttering chains of pennants lent the stage an air of a bingo hall or a city theater. And the cityscape of London painted on the backdrop resembled the fin de siècle in a contemporary adaptation. When the musicians then entered the stage in Dickensian stovepipe hats, everything seemed lost and one feared a staging of a further variant of history made contemporary, which is as omnipresent as it is fashionable and opportune in current art:

Friday night  |  In the kingdom of doom  |  Ravens fly Across the moon  |  All in now  |  There’s a noise in the sky Following all the rules  |  And not asking why 2

But the artist who had painted the backdrop was Paul Simonon; his Partner in Crime in the visual recourse to the aestheticism of modernism was Damon Albarn; and the band called itself The Good, The Bad & The Queen. And although the visual appearance didn’t exactly underscore it, for me one of the most brilliant concerts of the year took place on that February 8, 2007 in Berlin’s Post Train Station at Ostbahnhof; during the first song, I was already willing to see everything differently:

And when the sunset wheel begins  |  Turning into the night I see everything in black and white  |  And then … 3

One expects anything but a traditional kind of painting from Simonon: “It would be obvious for me to do conceptual art and I think I’ve done it already with smashing bass guitars and whatever – I consider that as conceptual.” Indeed, on September 21, 1979, Simonon smashed his bass in rage on the stage of New York’s Palladium: the hall was filled with chairs, and the otherwise usual dancing, escalating, euphoric audience response did not develop. Afterward, Simonon greatly regretted the act, because he had played on an expensive, heavy Fender Precision bass for the first time. It wasn’t Punk, anarchy, or antibourgeois Concept Art. But: a pose is a pose is a pose. An epic, complete with hero, due to an event and, in accordance with the respective context, the cause for the rise of various interpretations.

Like Paul Simonon’s oil paintings, the collages, installations, figures, and objects of Tjorg Douglas Beer often show urban sceneries. But in contrast to Simonon’s London cityscapes, Beer’s works are shaped by various surroundings in Hamburg’s St. Georg district, New York’s Brooklyn, or Berlin’s Kreuzberg, their populations and their individual experiences with these contexts. His technique of collaging with packing tape, foils, snippets of paper, and home building products stands for the pose of a rapid, anarchistic mode of working. But it is easily overlooked that the supposedly “poor” materials thereby used, for example a roll of neon-colored tape, can cost as much as a tube of oil paint. More important for Beer is that the materials he chooses provide the possibility of a rapid way of working that leaps between two- and three-dimensionality. For Beer employs the collage method in several ways: his perspective on the urban world of life draws kaleidoscopically on a spontaneous, personal/biographical perception, a directed, rather touristy or ethnological gaze, and on a sensitivity for those virtual technologies that have long since begun optimizing the administration of the world by making it less real. The countless eyes of the latter look at the viewer (of the world and of Beer’s works) and make him feel uncertain. Beer also collages real images, depictions of an everyday reality, and completely fictional elements. In his formal implementations, in turn, he effortlessly connects form combinations and media. In this way, Beer’s works open up numerous fields of associations and various levels of experience and offer snapshots of the changing relations of force and situations. The titles of the works or exhibitions often refer to the temporary observation point that Beer has chosen for these snapshots.

Drink all day  |  Coz the country is at war  |  Soon you’ll be falling of the palace walls  |  I can’t be anymore than I say  |  In the flood we all get washed away

Beer plunges into the world and views it as a world of appearance, not of things – thereby avoiding subject/object dichotomies. Central to this viewpoint are the processual and happening aspects of the world. Unlike with Leibniz, with Beer there is not the best of all possible worlds, but a world in which incommensurable elements can unite. It is a world like that found in literature in James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges, a world of multiplicities and discontinuities. Instead of wanting to create causality and continuity, Beer builds on the principles of emergence and the leap. The discontinuously arising whole is no longer reducible to the causal sum of its parts; rather, communication and development are kept in motion by means of unbridgeable gaps and the leaps resulting from them. The corresponding formal artistic method is the collage – however the employed materials are connoted.

The Good, the Bad & the Queen seems like the collage of a band that Blur and Gorillaz bandleader Damon Albarn put together out of his favorite musicians: playing along with Paul Simonon, ex-The Verve guitarist Simon Tong and the former Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen.

A love song for the collaboration  |  You and me will never be undone  |  We’ll let it flow away 3

During the concert, in the Kingdom of Doom, suddenly the bass line of London Calling flashes up – as if his muscles couldn’t help it, Paul Simonon lapses into the old poses of the Clash bass player and thereby presents a kind of live mash-up. When he then also intones Guns of Brixton, the hall’s critical abilities are finished for good. Damon Albarn smiles.


1 Burton, Brian Joseph: Justify My Thug. Auf: Danger Mouse, The Grey Album. Kein Label/ Original Pressing by Danger Mouse: 2004.
2 Damon Albarn, Paul Gustave Simonon: Kindom of Doom. Produziert von Danger Mouse.
  Auf: The Good, the Bad & the Queen, The Good, the Bad & the Queen, Parlophone; EMIRecords Ltd.; Chrysalis Songs: 2007
3 Albarn/Simonon ebda.
Anna-Catharina Gebbers
ist eine international tätige Autorin und Kuratorin; in Berlin betreibt sie den Ausstellungs- und Projektraum Anna-Catharina Gebbers  |  Bibliothekswohnung.
Massimiliano Gioni
Catalogue Text Exhibition Stipendium Kunstverein Hamburg curated by Jens Hoffmann
published by Revolver Books in 2005
The first thing that Tjorg Beer told me when we first met was that somehow he had refused the travel grant from the Hamburg Kunsteverein. Or better, he hadn’t refused it; he had simply decided to use it in a more personal way. Instead of choosing just one destination, he had allowed himself the freedom of letting things open, and decide where to go as different opportunities came along. It was a choice that seemed at the same time perfectly efficient and yet rather absurd: was it about traveling more or about traveling less? Was he interested in staying in one place or run around everywhere he could? Either way you looked at it, it seemed a generously chaotic decision to make, as if Beer knew it was important to allow oneself the luxury of the unexpected. More importantly, such a choice made me immediately realize that so much of Tjorg Beer’s work is about finding a balance between apparently opposing tensions, almost as if he was trying to come to terms with two different personalities. In fact, Beer seems to find himself at ease in a variety of roles. He is an artist, but he also likes to play the role of the catalyst, and organize spaces, exhibitions and other situations around himself. And then, again, when he comes to his own work, to his own art, everything seems to come out of a very personal, somehow intimate space, and yet it is taken often to a very large, almost environmental scale. Beer himself describe this tension as something rather infantile, as the anger of a young child who, frustrated by the world of the adults, decides to trash his room and everything at hand. It is an aggressive universe that Beer occupies in his work. There are plenty of explosions in his paintings and drawings, and plenty of strange machines destroying the space all around. But Beer’s work is very far from being a celebration of nihilism. It is instead the desire to re-imagine one’s own universe and reconstruct it according to one’s own desires and needs. There is, in this sense, something almost naïve and yet very powerful in Beer’s attitude, in his attempt to re-build the world from scratches. Beer’s preference for the medium of the assemblage is yet another signal of his understanding of the world as a series of fragments, bits and pieces. So it comes as no surprise that he hasn’t chosen one final destination but an endless set of possibilities: in the end, the world is probably a collage to him, and you can never experience it by standing still.
Massimiliano Gioni
associate director, New Museum, New York and curator of the 55th Venice Biennale
Narkose # 02 / Narcosis # 02
Stijn Huijts
Catalogue Text Exhibition Tjorg Douglas Beer - Salonu Istanbul / Narkose #02
published by Revolver Books in 2008
When I walk around in the Narkose # 02 installation by Tjorg Douglas Beer, I am reminded of games played regularly by my nine-year-old son. On a small scale he too builds ‘installations’ in which he unites all sorts of figures and constructions. Besides the pre-assembled Playmobil figures, plastic soldiers, vehicles, objects and buildings, a large part of his fabrication usually consists of self-made variations of the aforesaid categories, cobbled together into the most fantastic creatures. But even more important is what he does with them. All his fixations and fascinations at that moment are expressed in dynamic scenarios in which, recently, war and violence have seldom been the dominant themes. I realise at such moments how every growing child has to learn to relate to the many different manifestations of our human condition, not least the unfathomable vicious circle of war and violence that recurs time and again, generation after generation, in our societal reality. The scenarios of my son might therefore be interpreted as fanciful strategies to ward off existential anxieties and doubts – or at least to give them a place.
Similar strategies – but then as part of “adult” artistic expression – crop up in the installations of Tjorg Douglas Beer. The figures and constructions that he brings together are clearly borrowed from the reality that surrounds us and refer emphatically to the current dilemmas of the multicultural society. However, here the fixations and fascinations do not so much stem from the artist and his “childlike” individuality; they seem to operate more at the level of collective benefits and the accompanying anxieties and doubts. Here and there in his installation Beer confronts the viewer with the impossibility of approaching certain symbols and clichés without making value judgements. The different works seem to bob up and down on the invisible but omnipresent underbelly of society. They may be interpreted as yet another attempt to avert this undulating movement and its numbing effect – but also as an invitation to the viewer to ask himself again with the uninhibited wonderment of a child how, in this world, form and content can maintain a positive and meaningful relationship with each other.
Stijn Huijts
is the artistic director of the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht. He has been formerly been the director of SCHUNK* in Heerlen, Netherlands.
Cthulhu’s Call and Xeniu’s Answer
Veit Loers
Catalogue Text Exhibition Tjorg Douglas Beer - Salonu Istanbul / Narkose #02
published by Revolver Books in 2008
As is well known, Howard Phillips Lovecraft met Mr. Lafayette Ron Hubbard at a Fiction Guild banquet in June 1936. In a letter to Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho, he mentions Hubbard’s name, but can no longer really remember the man.
By this time, Lovecraft had written his important horror stories. He died one year later, in 1937. On his tombstone are the words „I am providence”. He is supposed to have written this sentence once in a letter. In 1934, Ron Hubbard had begun writing pulp fiction in which voodoo, horror, and magic were among the main themes. In 1936, he lived in Greenwich Village.

It is hard to imagine a physiognomic contrast greater than that between Lovecraft and Hubbard. The one with a slender, almost shy researcher’s face, the other more endomorphic, with sly green eyes and broad lips. What Lovecraft and Hubbard said to each other during the dinner is unknown. But it can be considered certain that Hubbard had delved into Lovecraft’s stories. In his early horror novel Fear, published in 1940, motifs from short stories by Lovecraft are touched upon: nightmares and incipient schizophrenia.

„L. Ron Hubbard’s Fear is one of the few books in the chiller genre which actually merits employment of the overworked adjective ‚classic’, as in ‘This is a classic tale of creeping, surreal menace and horror.’ This is one of the really, really good ones.” This was Stephen King’s take, who himself further developed the Lovecraft horror story.

Unlike Lovecraft, Ron Hubbard was a man of action. Commanding a ship as a lieutenant in World War II, he was highly decorated; but according to Scientology, his discharge from the Navy was under dubious circumstances. In Spring 1945, he got to know Jack Parsons, a student of Aleister Crowley who had founded the Agape Lodge in Pasadena, an offshoot of Crowley’s Thelema Church. Hubbard joined the order. The two of them wanted to use magic to create an elemental being, a moonchild. Frater 210 (Parsons) reported on the rituals to Crowley: „First instructions were received through Lafayette Ron Hubbard the seer. I have followed them to the letter. There was a desire for incarnation. I do not yet know the vehicle, but it will come to me, bringing a secret sign.” But the two magicians came into conflict. Hubbard made off with Parson’s yacht and his girlfriend Betty. He now wrote science fiction and delved into psychotherapy. In 1950, he published his book „The Modern Science of Mental Health”, in which he explicated his method, Dianetics. Hubbard based his theory on Freudian hypotheses, but misunderstood them, as Erich Fromm wrote in a review of the book. According to Hubbard, a person achieves his optimal conditions when he is „clear”. By „recalling” early natal and prenatal experiences, the patient rids himself of his „engrams” – the psychoses, anxieties, and repressions that have accumulated in him. But he can now also be influenced by the „auditors”, who have left him almost without a will of his own. Such patients are then the right members for a religious community that Hubbard founded in New Jersey in 1953: the Scientology Church. It is said that in 1948 he made a bet about this with the famous science fiction author Robert Heinlein.

In the late sixties, Ron Hubbard construed a galactic tyrant named Xenu who was supposed to have lived 75 million years ago and who intervened on earth, killing billions of galactic refugees with hydrogen bombs, which he sank in volcanoes. Only the Thetans, the astral bodies of this population, survived; but they were indoctrinated by Xenu. This is the original sin of humankind that Scientology puts in place of the Christian idea of Original Sin.

Ron Hubbard thus built a kind of Cthulhu myth into his religion. In his novel The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft had written about aliens who had come to the earth millions of years ago, horrible, giant beings with the head and sucking tentacles of octopi that, before the continents began to drift, had built mighty cities like the corpse city R’lyeh, which now lay deep under the South Pacific. Apart from the leader Cthulhu, there were also other terrible demons, like Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, and Yog-Sothoth, which Lovecraft united as a pantheon of horror in his Necronomicon.

Lovecraft’s and Hubbard’s fantasies, the latter turned into reality as a money-sucking religion, played out in the mind, in the cyberspace of the conscious and unconscious regions of the brain, for several decades before William Gibson surveyed this territory more precisely in his Neuromancer (1984).

Horror has not halted before the doors of the museum. At least not in Lovecraft’s story, The Horror in the Museum. Wax figures were set up in Lovecraft’s rooms on Southwark Street, the Rogers’ Museum. The author does not answer the question whether these were art, but he has the museum employee Orabona say about the museum director, Mr. Rogers: „He is, as you know, a very great artist.” But that a monster of „cosmic evil”, Rhan Tegoth, sits in the museum magazine is something that museum employees and artists exhibiting in museums should think about.

At any rate, the Scientology Church opened an anti-psychiatry museum „Psychiatry: Industry of Death” in Los Angeles at the end of 2005. There, psychiatric means of torture are exhibited – but by whom?
Veit Loers
ex-director, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach and curator of Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (2000/2002), director Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria, also works as an author and lives in Veneto, Italy.
Numbered Extracts from April / October
Arfus Greenwood
Catalogue Text Exhibition Tjorg Douglas Beer - Salonu Istanbul / Narkose #02
published by Revolver Books in 2008
Extract 7
The hero is a Revisionist; his very presence alters the course of words and deeds, expected.The child on the tracks should be run over by the train, but then the hero. The woman relented to abort the ‘bastard,’ but then the hero. The men fell down, drinking and drugged, until the hero.
All Praise, the Hero! (And other Revisionist?)
The curly-headed Iconoclast, boldly rounded the corner, one hand grasping the strap of his M82, the other his iMP3, because he knew in his desire to smash all that‘s gone before, to kill his idols, that the penultimate resistance is to resist one’s own desires, while the ultimate is to resist this resistance. Damn You, Iconoclast!
The Deconstructionist cop would handcuff the young intellectual killer saying, “You, Dirty Punk,” by which saying, “I, like you, reject the greater Capital authority, but your expression, the gesture of your rejection, is one of total nihilistic excess and so does not allow for even my existence.” Dirty Punk! There are rules to war and she broke them as she slowly sat down, refusing to fight. And so they tried her, convicted her and shot her, shouting, “You are a fucking War Criminal!” True War Criminal!
The Anti-Hero also made something happen; he accidentally tore a hole in the fibre of all perceptible events and exposed one previously unseen; but like the nature of something happening, where appearing is the same thing as disappearing, the Anti-Hero is gone. But all Praise, his Dirty residue!

Extract 11
Who lives here? | I do. | Who enlarged this hole? | I did. |
Who are you? | Isn’t that what you are here to say? |
That is no answer. | Isn’t it? | Who lives here? | I do. |
Who are you? | I am somebody else entirely. | Who is that? | It’s other. |
It’s what? | It’s Other. | What are you doing? | I’m in a competition. |
What? | I’m competing with the man I used to be. |
Why do you do this? | I envy him. | And he? | He made me. |
And who enlarged this hole? | I did.

Extract 23
Everything in its place, and not that you should find it there; rather most things in their approximate place and well considered that those things that have wandered were, undoubtedly, nomadic by nature.
In the reading room, it is not difficult to determine when something is off by degrees, by a fraction of a degree. To the parlour, this would be devastating, but to the bedroom, a farce.
In fact, a fond friendship with the place of things, and its proper situation, the proper situation—today, a reserved handling of it.
There are ten types of order and they march, as it were, to a particular order: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, situation, condition, action and passion. But there is always a reason that reason knows nothing about and more than once things have clustered, associations have been made, in a seemingly inappropriate way.
When this happens twice, maybe three times, it is clear that you have a new order, one that you would not have recognized if everything had not already been in its proper place.
The new order will appear undisciplined, belligerent and rebellious, but the revolution, after all, honours all that came before it. And soon the pieces will be in place to the extent that what just happened in the bedroom will seem affable, defined and delicious.
For that reason, it is important that everything be in its place, that certain methods of behaviour be adhered to and that a particular polish be applied.

Extract 27
Children are not people. Children are not people and they know that we know what they are is something that the anti-hero will say in perhaps the most arbitrary of ways.
Of course, there are formal assumptions about the relations between marked signifiers, and still these vary by nth degrees, further still from person to person, from the universal to the particular. Approximately 92.3% would consent to the statement that ‘children are not adults.’ A lesser degree would consent to the statement that ‘children are not monsters.’ To most it would seem meaningless to say that ‘children are not children.’ And only 2.67% would find themselves saying ‘children are not people.’
If we respond in a manner that estimates his meaning we might say ‘no, children are not people,’ and all that that is is a residue of his true intentions, because we know what it means when he says ‘children’ and what it means when he says ‘people.’

Extract 28
There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies which underlie and permeate a message. Silence itself, the things one is not inclined to say, or is forbidden to name—prudence between receiver and speaker—does not limit the discourse, rather, expands it, renders along side the things said and often exposes other strategies. But what knocks around one’s head in a desert can scarcely be assessed by silence.
But he thought and what he thought he heard.

i am in need of a new colour ... it is almost white but is not white ... it has a bluish tint, maybe greenish, yellowish, reddish. yes, and no, it is none of these. it is a new colour entirely. it is a remarkable colour which one can not take for granted. we will see it because it has always been there, but we will say ‘wow.’ our eyes will rest on it for moments at a time and we will think ... what a colour. it is a colour that exist ... and is a part of all things ... and we can not see it ... and why can we not see it ... and it is a colour that we need. because of it, the nature of everything will change; and as all the other elements remain the same, this change will be banal, unreasonable in its subtlety, blunt and unrequited. it will recreate god and it will be fresh.

Something so pure, you can not see it. Something so obvious, you would not question it. Something so essential, you could no longer live without it.

Extract 31
The average Hebrew year is slower than the average solar year by one day in every two hundred and sixteen years, and so it follows that in a little over a hundred years today will be eight days later.
The actual repeatable cycle of the Gregorian calendar is four hundred Gregorian years, whereas, the average Gregorian year is three hundred and sixty-five point twenty-four days long. And so today, however slowly, the dates are travelling the seasons.
The Chinese year follows the lunar calendar where once in a blue moon signifies that between every one to three years the moon rotates to produce a second full moon within a single month; the blue moon is that second moon. The years vary, the months vary, the machinations of the moon vary and the dates are perversely travelling the seasons.

Today’s tomorrow and the same children swimming would be frozen in a pond.
Arfus Greenwood
is a author / curator living in New York City. He has been working for Avenue B Gallery, Thing.Net, Review and PS1. He is currently working on an historical examination titled Punk Playboy!
Extracts from Ricochet – A work in progress
Max Henry
Capricious Gods convene again
To arouse the slayer in me
Of dragons and sloganeering

Beyond all means
Tensile strength; May I be lifted
Lord Mantra of the eon’s coil
God of the olive grove and of the living
None of the likeness of creeping things
A different fire burns O Jupiter!

Must jump over the roses
Scale height and angles
Cleft a riddle ride to solve the verse King
Come back to the anteroom

Wrest control of monsoons
My sovereign land-mind
Off the manic wreckage of Utopia

Turn, look towards the Sphinxes, transmit Eastward;
triangulate
The journey into the sublime
IS fraught with madness

This decadent life is not damnation above life O
Muses!
Never to quit this heavenly fealty
Sit cross-legged
Get Sparrow’d away
By days end I know my ample is the true flame

Having sown the flesh gaze
And den upon den of fire rings
The young lasses indulge their infernal carnality
Lashed onto my bed pole
So it is to be a God but who a better a God than Jove
And I too “whose disheveled ways forsook grammarbook”
Rough-riding histories backchannels
In ode to the grief of the Gods, I drink from the ray of
the Gods
What fortune do ye hold O mighty Jove?
Thus in my sentient life
I’ll open the seven seals justly
Have richness of impregnability
Benediction in all matters of durable goods
Not to be dragged by the merchandisers
The phallo-centric whores and maidens

Sold on Zeus
Solid is the flag of the verse prince
Bear witness to his transmigration;
Debauchery the world over
May I be Godly legal for the temporal ages
Let he who awakens contumely masses,
Reclaim what is his birthright
His fossil tool

Strung out on Jupiter’s cumulus clouds
Sun ascending perimeter,, transmitting matter
Alight the four corners of said temple
Hereby I stand, sanctified by four God’s,
North, West, East, South,
Let the mists of subterfuge enshroud my glorious aura
Glide through panes of glass, dematerialize,
Reform the algorithmic sub-divisions, atomized
The sun bolsters my prayers
Do not be greedy!

Honorarium’s milk of the Gods
Keeper of the scepter key,
Beckon Jesus over the airwaves
Transmit my sing-along chorus
My opus not to be outshone, old Kingmaker Horus
Water is for birthing
Fire is the metabolic deconstruct of life
Emulsifier of all things cold

Must be serene to this last knowledge, cool breath
And last hurrah of penury
The good coin I knoweth well;
The monsters that men can be
Do not fall into snake pits time and again

What man has done to mankind
Disintegrates to marble dust

Out of such combustible material. particles
Oracles have wrought masterpieces
A mere marble sphere endures

Terra Firma is an ob form
The knowing at first drives you mad, mad, mad,
Crimson tumbles the blood,
Red is the color of revolution
Throughout the ages plunderous men wore crimson
robes,
Such fineness such flare!
How fucking blessed am I
To recalibrate the anomic methods of contemporary
barbarians

Can’t be too rash, too harsh
Too anxious to rush to the judgment of others; as most
do
I go it alone,
And so find myself
Very at home
In my own solace

You make yourself; the living strong.
By virtue of oracular trance
Writ repetition the fertility God’s approval
A triad; one eye, one arm, one leg, unified
That’s enough to calibrate,
There is joy in all things impeccable
Holy of holies
Observing molecular structures
Shaman, the belly then the heart
Is the seat of intelligence


Science, art, religion, you get some sense
A black robe connotes what kind of persona,
Distortions zigzagged and disseminated after epochs
flame out,

Cast from a primeval swamp
This monument out of time
Perfects the imperfect world,

Whereby the forces of Horus and Set meet
A sacred lake, an eternal shadow
Goddess with a thousand names
I reject you!

Levers of the world, moth-eaten earth,
A knighted quartermaster,
Rome’s name is an old chameleon order,
500-year old psy-ops
Cultural revolutions are scientific alchemy
Fuck planned communities


From the eon’s sons wisdom of troglodyte’s
Dissolve me into this nutrient earth,
Then fracture the binary of its dialectic

Putrefying sepulchral compounds transmogrified into
multifarious forms
That will be the new strength; let the immutability of
Mercury
Converge with the powerful gravitational force of Jupiter

For this, may I increase my phosphorescence

Amidst such treachery
The avarice is something creepier than lustful
The price paid is the fate of superstition
Stupid men, stupid women, and their insipid offspring
Who follow the shepherd’s orders

Perfidious countries, barbarous men, hands clasped eyes
raised
Dead temples in the grandeur of nature
Where everything resides,
Something more powerful than its sum parts

Lost precepts of the great soul Nimrod
The very first fable of the world
In the heathen world
Orpheus searches, plays sonorous electronic verses

All that’s left of stolid sages
Turning it all tumbles brewing inside my head,
The rarified objects pondering mechanization
Pursuing things of eternal value
That I perceive something of the immortality in my
being

As they drink at-large the crystal shards of trajectory
To the pursuit of pleasure steer clear of ‘em
Sweep out all cobwebs, dead corners
Richness of too many things

I can make do
Not to dull my sense centers

NOR BE HYPNOTIZED

To die with the mystery in tact
Therein lies the construct of forty-four

All elections crafted on the square,
Stand tall against blood lusting unworthy initiates, bastard
offspring’s
Of calumnious men and Eastern Stars, loveless marriages
Of my own lineage let Thursdays be strong

I’ve lived so decadent in a days work
Because life should not be droll and dull
To drown in an antediluvian opiate glass
Has been my recompense, somewhat drugged
Why talk in the past tense of Gods under-known
Sextant winged sculptural pediments and somnambulant
Who is your covenanter wreathed serpents?

Must rise above an artificially inseminate God
To roost back in yer old haunt, self
Do not surrender to the catacombs retracting
The amusements of treacherous wizards
To say so is to be so inclined to know so

Inside the orifices of the muse
I lock this knowledge
With Saturnine verses


In dusty rooms …
Pagan rituals are commenced with precise incantations
Revelations drawn forth, incanted by twelve wise men,
enslaved
Look into the good spoil of Jupiter to lightning spark!

Thus it is possible; to still unfurl magic banter; the lair
mellows our whistle
High on persiflage as gales blast ‘round the old perimeter,
new parameters
Henceforth the ricochet careening diagonally
Traversing your quantum zap, the one eye panorama
What’s left of monoliths we once were
The bells of gothic cathedrals ring centuries and centuries
on
My nerves my joy!

I am most political.
I am most subversive.
I am most subjective.
I am most ascendant.
Must have reverence for the facets transmuted

May the dark seed of my soul be lifted; light
In its continuum
The modem punts long again
The dialectical scaffold alters, anomalously,
I steal glimpses of the philosopher’s stone, note
Nefarious men in basement ateliers building casements,
damn them!
I am the desert
I am the tealeaf

Still I revere the Goddesses, their deification etc.
Ad lib the secret doctrines they impart
Hallowed ground, levitating above terra-terror
A millstone ‘round the neck of square
Chaldean magic, incantations, Wizard
After the claims and charm of Eros
This my calling for there is no time
I am very old

To stoke the fire of drained tumescence at just so temperature,
use
One eighth of a gram of tincture, a richness of your own
impregnation
Be it at the end or the beginning of
The autonomous divination anomaly
Must escape the sub-prime locusts in the whir-whir-whir
Ancient order of Olympus protect me Olympians

No I won’t slither towards the way of the serpent’s lair
Wondering where I’ll be at the end of this transitory
corridor
So the chariot of my incarnate mojo moves on,
upwards spiral
Concatenations, pedestal, my ground-stand
Baal and some other Gods
The thicket is no sacred grove

She is afraid to foreground the lateral world, footballing
real uranium
The stupor of people everywhere their own pliant
selves
And my own occasional stupor

May our souls one day off-load from the virtual
grip, through
Alchemical inducement, the ricochet frees you
Of your own making,
You keep your composure, yield
And overcome its velocity
What can be more transcendent than to perpetrate
the nodes of anomaly?
Nothing.


Not for nothing, no
May I be transmogrified into the newest of the
neo-constructs
And boomerang sweet rhapsody amidst my acoustic
breadth;
Wise old fellow,, I am a mystery to y’all and yet
still virtuous
That’s a neat trick isn’t it?
To wake up each morning a sentient man, double
eagle
Through a wormhole I go!


All I can do is to work my way through
With salutations, ides, encomiums, etc.,
The ricochet navigates, pulls me along
Brushing off ravenous passions, the re-deposits of
contemporary bank barons
Dusting off rigged positions of austerity and
pseudo-values
An able bodied man
I’ve built up enduring strength, compressed
As a lightning bolt!

Contemptuous ode to August ones, hereby a delirious
salutation,
I cry aloud in my silent parlance


And scram at the patrimony of history, Lord this,
Lord that,
My own fiction is no different than the fiction of
tyrannical committees
Thus I profoundly understand their mechanisms
And disperse its empty contents
To the God of my own choosing,
Not the foolhardy mendicants who live off of alms
and think it noble
To wash at the mouth of a muddy river

Madame I’m looking to metamorphose but it’s
none too easy
To shale off dead fossils from your own metanarrative
To measure the source of all structures
Break loose the dam of composite knowledge
made new again


May I be forgiven for such impudence!
And the rat-a-tat-tat repartee
I’ve hit the slander sandbar again,
Down at the heels, a bone meal or less
Abundant fig my petition answered again
Long it’s been my mark


So to slough off dead weight
Is to beware of lampooned Gods and their fair
handmaidens
Whilst the world spins ever imperceptive, tilts,
And tumbles from its nether regions
What should I do but pray to the lonely icon
And stay away from the malformation of information
Slowly but surely I work on my own masterpiece

Surely we mustn’t be a dour pedagogy
Don’t you get the gist of the signs,
Take your piece of this new Modernity disrobe
And geometrize her,
No more dead corners squared
I am now resolved more than ever
Not to fall into sordid debauchery
Max Henry
is a poet maudit and mercenary curator. He writes for Flashart The Art Newspaper, Art Agenda. He has written catalogue texts for Kunsthalle Nuernberg, Kunsthalle Vienna and Saatchi Gallery