When we we’re black

In my recollection of darknesses one of those really dark experiences was reading E.M.
Cioran’s The trouble with being born. This book made such a deep impression especially
because in that darkness there is no escape, no suicide, no nothing, I see Philip Guston’s
smoking men and remember Cioran’s favourite holiday: going through the French
countryside visiting graveyards and lying on a grave smoking, looking at the sky. I always
considered this an artistic thought, I imagined this smoking philosopher lying on a tombstone
as a sort of sculpture, maybe a performed sculpture. By smoking on a grave we no longer
conceal our bad behaviour, we openly confess to be playing with death. We face our black
lungs with a cigarette in hand. And the graveyard reflects us into the dark future. Creating,
smoke and ashes, those sublime shades of gray, dissolve. But what about blackness that
always takes a negative load, as coal, as the place of evil? Not to speak, to be blitzed with
silence, to swear to never speak again, like Andrei Rublev. The half price final solution (the
ultimate bargain), the haunting muselman, this living image of death that Agamben describes
in his Remnants of Auschwitz. The witness and the archive. Obviously we fear to lose our
resistance to death, our life force. We trace the black lines on paper with coal graphite we
remember, traces of time but never exact. And they’re erasable. The erasable life. Do we have
a naked life?
When we we’re black, like Woody Allen’s Zelig, who just adapted: a metamorphosis as an
artwork, being as smoke. Like Malevich’s Black Square, which was a sign not a painting. In
this sense the Black Square functioned as a symbol of hope and renewal. Icon of the truth of
being active. UNOVIS could still be a model in that sense, art school as a travelling institute,
being as smoke. We use other means of transport, metaphors. My understanding of the
concept grew when I realised that this was to be taken literally. Moving companies in Greece
are still Metaphores, transporters, bringing something from A to B. Black magic? I think not.
Materiality is not a lie, it’s just sometimes hard to deal with, the blackened vision, black out.
And we say everything was real untill the black out, when riots began, Burnin’ and lootin’.