Portrait of a Cardinal

“But in so far as the subject is an artist, he is already liberated from his individual will and has become a medium through which the only truly existent subject celebrates his redemption through illusion. For this above all must be plain to us, to our humiliation and our enhancement, that the whole comedy of art is not at all performed for us, for our improvement or edification, any more than we are the actual creators of that art world: but we can indeed assume for our own part that we are images and artistic projections for the true creator of that world and that our highest dignity lies in the meaning on works of art – for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” Pg32 The Birth of Tragedy, F.Nietzsche

Francesco Alidosi, Cardinal priest of Santi Nereo e Achilleo in 1505 and Cardinal Protector of England in 1506; where he was a protector of Desiderius Erasmus and patron of the arts; a man that as Cardinal Pietro Bembo stated in 1508 "Faith meant nothing to him, nor religion, nor trustworthiness, nor shame, and there was nothing in him that was holy.”

He is the apparent subject of this small (79 cm x 61 cm) portrait oil painting that embodies not only the radiant joy of ambiguity, but also the historical reality of cruelty and perverse innocence through Christian reason.

While confronting the painting as art, as an explosion of beauty, craftsmanship and romance, you as a viewer are invited to explore its elaborate perspectival intensity by physically engaging with it, by creating a bond between you and the subject that goes far beyond any judgemental or rational urge; by holding his hand; a hand frozen in time, a hand that as history tells us, psychopathically murdered dozens of honourable Venetians without any reason but the God he created; this fiction was his masterpiece and his tragic input on society, it was an action of creation that allowed him to become “the monster” and to obtain orgiastic pleasures through extreme violence and probably extreme love.

Again, while appreciating the painting you transcend its historical baggage and enter the mesmerizing cosmos of the artistic impulse, of the psychology of form and colour, of the philosophy of the aesthetic and visual quality of the piece, where the painting does not belong to the material world any longer, it has travelled through the deepest and darkest corners of your perception. When confronted, analysis by categorization (history, iconography and technique) dissipates completely, it becomes irrelevant, thus is avoided subconsciously in order to let the piece seduce and take over your rational being. This artistic impulse, quasi-Dionysian, induces the world you were part of into a deep and calm coma; ultimately numbs reality and morality in order to go far beyond good and evil, correct and wrong.

This phenomenon of confrontation with the utter beauty of the object is not a sublime experience, art is not sublime; the artistic (here I refer to the Dionysiac experience) is all-inclusive rather than alienating to the viewer as a sublimating object. The sublime needs critical distance, whereas the artistic demands a closeness of experience.

And by saying that this painting is all-inclusive, I am not contradicting myself, but reiterating that a single piece of utter beauty embodies every aspect of existence as a condensed product. This immeasurable amount of complexity, which is indirectly being injected into your brain, deadens your being and clears your soul; the separation between the reality you live in and the historical fiction you are envisioning disappear in order to give way to their amalgamation and sudden destruction.

Ultimately, this insignificant portrait is nothing but an officially anonymous painting by a Renaissance artist called Raphael, one piece between the many he produced during his lifetime. I fell for it; I fell for an intensity that I have never encountered in any action of creation ever since.

Act 1.

When we love or kill, we look at our own selves, at the tragic action of creation, at the juxtaposition of our exhausted superego and our lowest and more primitive longings. This ephemeral truly creative action is re-enacted by art and architecture as a badly dubbed copy filled with Apolline material pretensions that “mirror” the suffering of the action… that is seen either as impure, sick, evil, uncanny, sadist and unchristian [KILL]; or as good, pure, virginal, beautiful and Christian [LOVE]. A human creation can’t be reduced to politically and socially correct beauty because it is the children of an impulse, of an extreme, of proto-civil actions that go far beyond ethics… this tragic act can only be captured in those great rhetorical-lyrical scenes in which the passion and dialectic of the protagonist swelled into a broad and mighty torrent; in the end it is only graspable in the act of failure, and the acceptance of that failure, not as an moral torment, but as a beautiful enlightenment; not as a lucrative product but as a painful reward.

Act 2.

We do not only rejoice on the death of the morally pure individual, we as a mere audience that is chastise from the utter pleasure of heroic existence, cannibalize the few remains of this, once beautiful and eternal, body; now deformed to sublimation by rapid ingestion. This heroic existence, of the being that surpasses all human temptations by embodying them all, is the ultimate action of creation. Thus, the hero only exists within the realm of tragedy, within the sphere of suffering and slow death; within the body of self-created fictions. We have to fictionalize the extremes of our existence in order to materialize them; truth and falsity are irrelevant, because they are mere earthly concepts that are immovable due to of their inherently paradoxical attitudes.

What makes the being surpass himself, is the creation and consequent destruction of an element that overcomes him completely, an entity that goes far beyond of his mediocre human comprehension; the creation of what he yearns for and what he will so eagerly desire that at the end he will, not only kill for, but murder.

The need for a clear and tangible appreciation of the heroic being, forces the individual towards a crime of passion. He commits murder in order to finally face what he thought was unfaceable, in order to tame the mystical beauty of the hero he once romantically created, in order to become a civilized animal on steroids that knows without knowing and feels without feeling. He sees himself reflected on the Tragic Hero because the later is a re-enactment of the death by strangling of the unjudged mystical existence he, once belonged to; his punishment is to watch his cold-blooded crime on repeat without acknowledging the action as death, but as creation.

The Salton City is a dreamy real state development that was realized yet not materialized; it is plastic surgery gone wrong; it is after all a disaster (for some a blessing) that everyone tries to avoid, forget or accept, either by a delusional idealization of its past by living its present (this includes ecologists) or by looking away; by looking at what makes sense and will never deform into a monster; the emptiness as an anarchical playground.

There are different types of inhabitants in the City, ones are all year long locals; they love the idea of the Salton Sea, however they avoid its reality by freezing it in time. They have nothing else but this Sea, thus they take a either freakily positive or accepting position on the clearly dysfunctional and abnormal Salton Sea. This hyper-normal attitude can be caused by the lack of a critical comparison of the Salton Sea/City with other Seaside communities; by the acceptance of the horror due to the over-suffering of the situation and feeling helpless about it (this is a pessimism hidden by a thick layer of positivist dementia); or by living in a denial that unlinks the inhabitant from the actual reality of the situation.

However, there are other (temporary) citizens living in this failed real state conceived city, people that did not see the glory of the Salton See through their own eyes, but through the eyes of their relatives and the press. They stay in Salton City during the winter for six to eight months a year. Retired northern Americans and Canadians that came in searching for tranquillity, a warm climate, cheap land, house offers, and for the vastness of the landscape (they avoid the sea, in fact the boat has been substituted by the motorized vehicle). Those elderly couples, which I call Tapperwared snowbirds, due to their tendency of avoiding communal “schizophrenic-like” events, are able to critically understand the Salton City because they don’t habituate the area during the whole year; therefore they acknowledge its reality and choose to consciously avoid it.

There is a third type of inhabitant, the drifter and the RV settler. They are modern day nomads that don’t emotionally engage with the site they occupy; they are mere users of the space and of the taxing bubble. By drifting from site to site, those caravans avoid taxes and a site-specific dementia that would make them fall in love with a distorted image of the, now distant, average community once they belonged to. A drifter becoming a sedentary inhabitant in a Salton City-like community is the equivalent of finding your future wife in a transvestite brothel; it is sacrilege to the politically and socially correct and coherent suburban values.

“Once you get off the bus in Salton City it never gets back to pick you off”

The Desert - Intermediate 1 - Arizona/California Desert Trip

Outsider: a person who does not belong to a particular group .A person who is not accepted by or who is isolated from society.

Renegade: a person who deserts and betrays an organization, country, or set of principles.

-The Desert is not historical; neither embodies history.

-The Desert kills history, as we know it in Europe and reconfigures it as a mere distorted shadow, ghost or past memory. In order to understand the myth of the Desert, we must look at what got lost in it.

Each grain of sand personifies and stages an epic battle between men and “The (titanic) Desert”; consequently a part of human history got burnt within its boundaries, within its mesmerizing peyote-like cryptic trips.

From the Spanish Conquistador delusional gold-rush adventures in arid Arizona, passing through John C. Van Dykes “land of illusions and thin air” where “the vision is so cleared at times that the truth itself is deceptive" and Michael Foucault LSD trip in the Death Valley; to the smuggling tunnels controlled by the Arellano Felix Organization and the one-percenters motorcycle gangs long and noisy drives on Highway 10; the Desert eats up and consumes human events, illusions and delusions. -

-The Desert is considered to be the land of the outsiders and renegades because it is its actual superlative; the Desert doesn’t even belong to itself, it cannibalizes its body after making love with its own persona.

-The Desert makes no sense because it rejects identity and genericallity; ironically it feels all the same. It is trapped within the beauty of tragedy.

-The Desert is loved because it can easily kill its lover; it is the ultimate sociopath; it is the materialization of Saturn eating its children.

-The Desert is the land of re-inventions and temporal creations; it is the only way of erasing oneself from history and memory; of living a present that lacks of past and future; of death without dying…

The Portfolio/Santeria Altar