CLOAK/1.10

The hum of incubating art forms, television the mother, father and the muse of them, fixing some emission of the limitless in space the tribute and the goal,
with art they pay the toll to pass through into the beam again.
Recording You recording Me, the necessary triangulation of interest, the elusive apex of an interested spectator—
the abstraction television makes of audience and caring.
Opium of the parents' age, their lifetimes' curvature upon the down slope of its artificial gravity—action lovers miserly in real participation, their children follow, breathing tiny-voiced asbestos motes of other people's loss.
One family I know has a child with a photographic memory so they make him read TV Guide every Friday night and then all the next week they just ask him.
Here they've invented an art movement—Disciplinism.
Concerned with the disposal of waste, the question of waste and of big private spaces, the mathematics of crowding and ruined environments, end product of a mania for continuing without any recourse to the new or the fresh, refusing to replace or repair, until everything is gone—
prefiguring some vast and general consuming, a finished Discipline-based piece is:
  • scraped on with brush stumps and unclean rags
  • clawed forth with blunt chipped tools
  • filmed with failing batteries to suggest obscuring flames.
    • The Last Sandwich—the ages layered like cold cuts on a roll, piggy-piled too high by greedy eaters—a cliff of upper ham protrudes.
    This student carves out the contents of cartoon frames on fifty-foot squares of beach and photographs them from the lifeguard's chair, using the angle of the sun for shading, beach detritus for details, and half-buried on their sides, mid-stride, background pedestrians, human extras, stuck in the drama of tides.