5
Apr
2016
0
mattress guts harvested

productively procrastinating Pierre Bourdieu

Anti-Responsive unreading of Pierre Bourdieu via weed pulling, dirt hauling, mattress harvesting and form making!

Habitus = “durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of operations necessary in order to attain them.” — Pierre Bourdieu

I am pretty sure I get it but I had to read this ONE sentence about FOUR times before it started to sink in to form any actual cohesive meaning in my mind. Hmmm, this sentence is on page 5 of 309 to be read and textually responded (paper) to by Tuesday at 3. 

Bahahahaaaaa…forehead palm plant…OMG, this is going to be a slow WTF does he mean kind of book. Pierre Bourdieu you are a convoluted dastardly philosophically important bastard! Why could you not have just said, “somethings are stupid nonfunctional non intentional habits that we act out within the frame as we are framing cultural compliances and constitution?!! You know, just as all your friends jumped off a cliff, so to, you, without thinking, will fling yourself out over the rocks edge because you, like myself, are habitually  in practice and perception herd beasts from our ear lies days, and our mothers told us so!” OK, well that is oversimplified with vast omissions of a translation of Pierre’s dastardly mind cramping quote.

12931203_10153967545058726_3141939833376804429_nSOOOOOOO! I opted for weeding my yard, then shoveling, hauling, dumping and spreading three yards of garden soil with a huge component of bullshit, over getting past page 5 of Pierre’s text. Having read the table of contents, it seems relevant and important, but I am pretty sure that one sentence may have permanently damaged my brain. So all day Saturday was spent trying to remediate my cognitive trauma through yard therapy. Should have scrapped and painted the house as well! But alas, I have limited capacities and I subscribe to “In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed.” Plus it has been my number one goal to do my doctoral studies non-frenetically (damn that sounds like such a legit rational for procrastinating Pierre).

Alas the extent of the cognitive impairment from the initial textabation on The Field of Cultural Production infringed on Sunday as well. At that point, full on remediation was in order and I had to break out my bodily icky art practice as a mechanism of productive procrastination. So the morning began with trolling the back alleys in the the Heart of Lubbock for defunk and discarded sun-bleached mattresses. As I stumbled upon each, I eviscerated them, wrenching their flesh and foamy flab free from their structural springed frames and stuffing the visceral content in to the back of my truck. I may have issues.

12919740_10153969666598726_1003041447579266887_nFrom there I continued my therapeutic cognitive intervention by stringing up the domestically engendered contents for further rendering.

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Certain materials bounce around-sit-bounce around-sit, bounce around and sit mullingly in my head for years before they work their way down into my finger tips to locate themselves in real space. Not so much notions for the final form but the source material serves as mentally malleable metaphorical activating mechanisms. When the pieces finally work their way out of my body, they just sing. Last week i fidgeted with the guts of a few mattresses and it wasn’t there, yet. As a matter of fact, the materiality rebelled against my forced prescription of its spatial organization. Now, this week, it is totally whispering to me–my hands and materials coordinating in a way that causes me extreme delight [don’t worry, these are non-audible voices]. And I am a slut for formal cohesion and simplification.

How long have the domestic mattresses’ materiality been tugging on my mind? Hmmm, i think i collected my first stack in Housto 2009. They just sat flavidly in BOX 13’s courtyard waaaaay too long before i had to dump them lest someone perform a hoarding intervention. Here in Lubbock, hoarding of materials is not required. I just troll the alleys with my box cutter and strip the flesh from the domestically discarded tainted carcasses left out by dumpsters. I don’t have to collect the entire beasts, just its viscera and flesh quilted surfaces. I am so excited to see where these disgustingly icky metaphorical materials take me in toying with the breaching of domestic thresholds of gender.

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I do formally like the contrast of the black clips, particularly the way the foam rhythmically swells and contracts according to their hold, but they will go away. And the work will be sewn, women’s work. Hmmm, then again wooden clothes pins might work nicely though the foam is a tad thick for them to function effectively. Or perhaps even metal clips (reminiscent of bed springs) could be deviced??. This has not fully been resolved in advance of the materializing forms…eventually they will tell me how to bind them (recall this entails no audible voices).
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What I find especially fascinating as I deconstruct each mattress is how different they are despite their like purpose and sameness–repetitiveness of similarity and difference.

12794595_10153970212333726_7024893822407094754_nOh I must be healed because I totally shamelessly forgot to finish reading that dastardly bastard Pierre!

Not really, I simply decided I was ahead of the game and chose to give myself a reading break and pick back up on next week’s book. I suppose I should be ashamed but nah–I upped my resell value of my domestic abode and made great progress on work for an exhibition proposal I am formulating! And most importantly my hands still work and did not fall of or complain too loudly. AMEN!

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admittedly I have actually begun reading and naturally it is totally relevant to my research direction, double damn. Now to play catch up as I slug my way through Pierre’s thick textabation of cultural production, of habitus agencies…sigh

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