feature! interview

recently i, fukky, was strangely privileged to bump into sadoo kalinotot at an underground bar in bangkok. we drank and chatted for a few days and on the boat home i took the opportunity to distill our time into an interview. here it is, in all its pulpy glory, to inspire and annoy sadoos everywhere.

thanks sadoo kalinotot!

it seems to me that depression, horror, despair, rage, bitterness, …

envy?

envy’s ridiculous.

resentment?

resentment’s difficult because of what nietzsche did to it.

what did nietzsche do to it?

he resented it.   , … bitterness, fragmentation, confusion, volatility, indolence, vulgarity, …

salaciousness?

naturally.   , … vulgarity, suicidalism, cannibalism, …

cannibalism?

of oneself.  , … cannibalism, madness, all sorts, are all unavoidable aspects of the ongoing human experience and thus ….

but what about the other things?

the other things?

love, peace, harmony, cooperation, justice, camaraderie, generosity, forgiveness, nobility, happiness, communication?

absolutely, those too.  except communication – communication i’d define as the totality of everything we've said and are going to say and haven't said and are not going to say.

including autocannibalism?

autocannibalism might very well be the supreme form of expression.

true. let’s become practical for a moment. how does one get through the day?

great question. i’d say by being happy, volatile, salacious, forgiving, raging, resentful, horrified, depressed, cooperative, harmonious, indolent, suicidal, noble, every form of mad, and eating oneself.

sounds like a tall order. i mean for each day.

i wouldn’t be prescriptive about it. you know, allow each day to happen. twig in the river stuff.

what about those calm happy people who are calm and happy every day?

eliminate them.

isn’t that a bit harsh? and what about those raging volatile ones who are only raging and volatile? don’t they get a bit tiresome?

eliminate them too. i’m interested in the repletions – the holographic monads who, by being holographic, are not monads and yet are. anarchy remains and must remain a theoretical experiment until society is replete with repletions.

it could tolerate some non-repletions?

that remains to be seen but let’s assume the non-repletions through the usual principles of conformity don’t necessarily become repletions but at least aren’t douchebags, douchebags being defined as calm and happy every day or raging and volatile every day. anarchy requires individuals entire, but entire is too often taken as a subset of entire. a repletion is innately all of humanity and thus justice is actualized by the parts autocorrecting themselves by containing the whole. no law! for law has emigrated to its natural home before it had to be institutionalized – distributed throughout the soul. i am judge and judging, jailer and jailed and jury and defense and prosecution. all this institutionalization ... wholly redundant and tiresome. totally fourth millennium bce. plus you have to work!

what does this do to diversity?

consummates it. extends it everywhere. yes, if one isn’t weeping when one wakes up, laughing mid-morning, screaming in the afternoon, and beatifically mute in the evening, what are you?

or presumably mute upon waking and screaming in the evening. what does it do to productivity, action, volition?

does that matter?

good point. let’s talk more about eating ourselves.

yes. we’ve eaten others enough. there are many many humans. there are not only too many of us but too much of each of us. let’s eat that excess. let’s become the first species to learn how to effectively use ourselves as a fuel source without annihilating ourselves. this puts our natural violent, destructive, and barbaric orientations to good use. finally.

what does this have to do with being a sadoo?

now we’re into the exciting stuff. everything. as many sadoos have pointed out – sadoo rianchada, sadoo ghar-zahhi, sadoo g9^e,k, sadoo ÿ©, sadoo to name a few – sadoos are all about everything. a sadoo is everything in a something made nothing.

or nothing in an everything made something.

exactly.

but i thought sadoos skirted around definitions.

we skirt, we trouser. our sartorials are flexible, so are our prepositions.

how committed then are you to any of this?

about 11 parts.

out of how many?

that is a question. if i had to come up with a definition of sadoo, it might be an aspect that questions out of how many?

i see.

or i count. and the counting’s never done because there’s so much of us. and then we’re eating ourselves so we’re subtracting. we’re this then we’re that so we’re dividing. these are just the simple operations. we’re mathematics really. words are just excuses for more numbers.

hey, thanks sadoo kalinotot, it’s been really good.

hey fukky, as always.

maybe bump into you in terengganu sometime.

you bet your dingleberries.

artbrutifactica

a submission has been sitting rarely on my mons the last few months, from a sadoo ginveda of raruraresasn, who presents a philosophy of outsider art.  after discussing the work with some of my siblings in sadooity, i, fukky, have decided in consultation to post it on our sadoo management site, as it’s more than unprobable that there may be minimally some and occasional overlaps and linkages between sadoo ginveda’s concepts of outsider art and the myriad practices of sadoos, recognizing that, as always, i, fukky, make no claim to agree with the following thoughts as i make no claim to agree with anything.

outsider art

sadoo ginveda of raruraresasn

let me begin by saying i consider all true art outsider art.  while shakespeare, to use a classic case, may have had the capacity and conditions to appeal to the masses, his craft enabled him to mock his audiences without most of them realizing it or any of them being able to prove it.  which is why he kept his head.  a more obvious case:  although van gogh now hangs in the world’s most prestigious museums and commands some of the most expensive prices in the art world, the average citizen – and the very definition of citizen is average – would, in person, find van gogh challenging, boring, and probably impossible.  he painted from the outside – or we could say, to refer to mysticism – the inside:  the inside that most insiders avoid.  this avoidance puts them in the crowded inside, as to step truly into the inside is to to leave the crowd, enter the void and then, by the insiders, be experienced as an outsider … an experience that inevitably affects and sometimes kills (artaud’s notion of van gogh being suicide by society describes this process well) the true insider.

you will say – so let’s just acknowledge it at the outset – this inside-outside insider-outsider true-false stuff is binary and so false.  admittedly, binaries are always more nuanced in life and become polynaries.  yet this is not the point.  certain creators may be sufficiently oriented to multiple worlds so as to be able to move between them (i don’t speak of the common artist whose primary orientation is recognition and money but of those who manufacture something distinctive and powerful from their horrible freedom and vision).  look at a classic and relatively unknown outsider – vivian maier - whom the insiders refuse to accept to any significant degree although her photos are far more striking and original than many of those we see at most galleries.  what i speak of is art that arises from a human being gifted with sufficient vision and distance from society that it cannot help but disturb, provoke (or more commonly be ignored, mocked, misunderstood).

what i am saying is that art always arises from a lack of concern about what concerns most – comfort, reputation, security, prestige, remuneration, possession – and rather leaps into the voids of a self-world relationship and forms from that formlessness.  a great sadoo – laurie spiegel – removed herself from the music scene in the 1970s for this reason.

the movement from void to establishment is well known.  we see it tediously and catastrophically in religion (jesus to the vatican, lao tse to a daoist priesthood, the rig veda to lululemon), but the movement in art may be no less tragic.  we’re unlikely to have any establishment built based on pessoa’s the book of disquiet – part of the brilliance of the book is its devastating ability to subvert this possibility – but we see it in minor ways with artaud, jarry, blake, acker, weil and in major ways with various other names and works. 

the establishment does not adjudicate what is art.  it adjudicates what is acceptable for its purposes.  and the terms of acceptance are the same as any guild – whether it be scholarship, postal work, or politics – compromise, force, conformity.  that art makes it into the establishment is not due to any thanks to the establishment, which accepts anything that sufficiently pays once the cost in blood has been laundered.

of course, outsider art grew from dubuffet’s idea of art brut –

those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere – are, because of these very facts, more worthy than the productions of professionals. after a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade.

what i’m advocating is what i call aesthetic mysticism or the hallucinogen arts as the root of all arts.  many sadoos have written about the former.  an academic such as philip wood has written from the scholarly voice about both.  the works of aloïse corbaz are vivid portraits of the imagination and the range of human experience – a unity of creativity, for she cured herself by ceasing to fight against her illness, by choosing to cultivate it and make use of it instead, a more powerful and effective way than those the scholarly and therapeutic industries offer.  to have a career as an artist – from formal education through the necessary grant-writing, networking and promotional verve – is antithetical to the creative spirit.  the void does not understand it.

society is tyrannical and selfish, made up with institutionalized virtue, fashioned with processed blood.  it takes the products creators have paid for, often with their lives, often with poverty, exile, and humiliation, and, laughingly, banks, sells, and buys them.  this is why the artist is the new saint – something nietzsche foreshadowed and those like pessoa, artaud and genet readily grasped and articulated. art brut of course has not only birthed the human world but is its continuous mother and society’s relentless disregard for it highlights a continued spiritual misogyny which modernity – regardless of its isms and readymade virtues – conveniently embraces in the emerging paternalistic egaliarchy.

there is no art that is not outsider art.  it only makes it to the inside – or, rather, from the inside of the inside to its outside – by transactional movements, movements many creators are unable, genetically, to make.

let us modify creators, then.  as is happening.  let us give them pills and money.  let us give them lovers and dental plans and tenure.  then art will have been purchased and god – the question – will have evolved into what may be its next necessary stage:  a networked glyph around the neck of the hip.

not just outsider art but outsider thought. not a museum without walls but museums without museums. not classrooms without walls – classrooms without classrooms. for outsider art transcends boundaries, originating without them and without them as part of the vision or process.

what i want to see is humans free to create what they want in ways they want, aside and apart from being told what is expected, tried, acceptable.  i would like to remove names from art and ensure everyone who wants to create receives a base minimum annual salary providing sufficiently for living needs and a few modest luxuries.  i want to see the art establishment crumble on its coddled ass.  i want all intermediaries removed between void and perceivers.  i want the selfish greedy tyrants of techno-capitalism to work on rice fields for five years.  i want a new species.  i want a new earth.  for i am not impressed with the one given me and see no reason i should conform to it.  it has become solid, arrogant, fixed, dogmatic, fiscal and objective.  you say it is the given, the pragmatic.  but we heard the same shit 500 years ago; its name was god.

i would live in dream.

i have sought poverty through excess as the available means of poverty did not seem to me to fit the spirits of the age.  whether i have achieved it or not – whether it is possible to achieve i don’t know – i don’t know, for in this process i also have come to doubt the difference between poverty and wealth.

i believe in a society in which all – and the all is contextually and ethically maintained at levels at which this is possible – have access to nutritious food, adequate and symbiotic shelter, playful and beneficial touch and sex, and healthy creative materials, tools, and environments, comradeship and community, all appropriate to individuals, groups, and species.

dear fukky

dear fukky,

i’ve travelled around the world many times, built successful careers, amassed great wealth and possessed countless lovers, raised successful and well-adjusted children, and won the booker and pulitzer prizes for my fiction and poetry.  i’m now thinking of becoming a sadoo.  do you have any advice for me?

jaruna

dear jaruna,

advice seems unnatural for sadoos; we by nature are born into avolition and indecision and thus any advice not only spontaneously and inexorably calls forth its opposite, but its myriad partially overlapping possibilities.

let me say this another way.  there are many professions that are difficult and every profession includes its fair share of difficulties. sadooing is different. sadooing is impossible. how does one provide advice about the impossible? perhaps we could speculate that the best art is primarily about this – the impossible – but the best art is what it is by avoiding advice.

look at our ostensible namesakes – sadhus.  while they’ve lost a certain credibility in modernity, at least among swaths of urban sophisticates, they still generate substantial respect, emerge from hinduism, a recognizable and ancient tradition, and – at around 5,000,000 – participate in a large and often cohesive community.

but sadoos! we have never even gained credibility in order to lose it. being unseen as what we are, we generate neither mockery nor respect. unable to belong to any tradition – sadooing is a word, like dao or god, that is a gross compromise – it flounders, lost, indifferent, polypolar, drowning in the refuse, trapped in the weeds, in unmapped moats around time, emergent from nothing. its community is dispersed without ever having been gathered – have sadoos even met one another let alone themselves? the do in sadoo is a mockery! – sadoos don’t do; at most, being in bodies, they necessarily doo. they are not sea-doos or ski-doos, they are sad-doos – hardly depressive in that reductionistic and fragmented western clinical sense, but desolate and solitary in those other senses.

sadoos are undeveloped and experience undevelopment as a form of development. they wander not to or from or through or even of but wander. would you be this thing you cannot be? would you become what is an unbecoming?

soft and empty regards,

fukky

an unjustified work of justification

those who protest – particularly those who protest without an object, such as the majority of sadoos – have frequent need to justify themselves. to whom? to themselves? to some inhuman energy? there is no whom, not even an autowhom.  they just feel the need to justify.  not that such justification has any purpose, audience, or payback.  you could view it as a hobby of sorts, with little need for affirmation other than the doing of the hobby itself.

not infrequently, i, fukky, receive submissions from sadoos around the world containing such justifications and occasionally – based on whim and the market price of aubergines – i include some.  today i’m pleased to include a piece submitted by sadoo ledlpoo some years ago and misplaced, who communicates with us from the region of vidange in the republic of wolfless, justifying.

an unjustified work of justification

by sadoo ledlpoo

recently, as happens from time to time with most sadoos, i questioned my existence and the general and specific stupidity of it.  what an inane occupation i have, i say to myself.  no one’s heard of it, no one knows what it is, i don’t know what it is, the very definition of it is to not know what it is.  yet here i am.  i’ve tried to be many other things and all of them have failed.  i was very good at many of them and could possibly have been renowned in 2 or 3 of them but to succeed there has to be an energy, a collaboration, between the environment and the singularity that enables success.  i never felt that collaborative energy until i became a sadoo.

that’s because there’s no environment to deny or affirm you, an evil voice says.

that’s not true, i reply.  the environment is the world.

the world!, the evil voice snorts. who goes and works for the world? you’re just an autistic solipsistic narcissistic sociopath.

maybe. but a lot of people i met in business and the academy were those too.

at least they made money and had careers.

not having to worry about money is, i admit, desirable. but a career i never understood.  what i like about being a sadoo is that there’s no goal, no line, no advancement or demotion, no annual review, no conventions and politics to follow and negotiate, none of the silly social scrimmage and promotion necessary in everything from a convent to an ngo to a brokerage house.

in particular, i realized when i was called to be a sadoo that i was to devote my life to experimenting with developing a practice of madness – of reasoned unreason. why this? i began realizing in my second decade of experimentation that this was to potentially contribute to an art that bridged the vast and harmful gap in our society between reason and unreason, sanity and insanity.  for in all the diversity claims and progresses in our culture – valid and necessary as they presumably are – we may be regressing in psychic diversity, with increasing bifurcation between the powerful educated classes determining what is normal and an underclass of taxonomized categorized clinicized individuals.  whereas i have seen no evidence that the former is any less clinicizable than the latter – only that the former build and maintain power over the statements that circumscribe most lives.  my practice is an embodied protest against this privilege.

pious fucker, aren’t you, the evil voice says.

maybe.  it’s a crapshoot.  i may be misguided.  i may fail, though failure and success, good and evil, yes and no – all these value binaries – aren’t normally part of a sadoo’s vision.  i’m not out to change society or to target specific individuals.  i began developing this practice long before i had opted out from conventional society.  it was as i developed the practice that i found i was not only opting out, i was being opted out.  my practice was incompatible with those worlds as i would have had to side with a side.  there are academics of course who side with people such as myself but, worthwhile though this may sometimes be, i find the siding problematic.  they want to have their cake – privilege and defining – and eat it too – appearing to be empathic toward those who aren’t in the privilege and defining game.  there needs to be an embodied cost to one’s position and the stereotypical academic position of having a lifestyle on the right and a discourse on the left has always struck me as contributing to the bifurcation, as a gross hypocrisy which tenure and the lickspittling masses monolithically maintain.

so you're just opting out.

i don’t think i’m opting out.  protest – even through the silence of a desert father or mother against growing institutional christianity – may have its merits. and who’s to determine this.  it may, it may not.

i think you’re crazy.

naturally.  thank you.

my practice has demanded anonymity or at least heteronymity or patanymity and embodiment and has resulted in relative poverty, obscurity, loneliness, and a range of engaging and occasionally debilitating struggles. that seems to be expected.  i try to record at least some of the results of my now 25-year-long experimenting in forms appropriate to the source sensations, in dialogue with myriad traditions across time, space and disciplines but without much regard for protocol or status.  if many of them are fairly raw, fragmentary, undeveloped, i feel that the practice thus far has withheld the possibility of pulling my research into anything resembling a finished book, a system, a product.  the internet is the perfect venue for these publications and i thank fukky for facilitating this blog. i hardly aim for any unity or enlightenment – neither of which i believe exists … i don’t aim.  i place my body in a certain situation of not-knowing and record the sensations that occur.  this situation i sometimes call polypolarity and it is my practice as a sadoo.