New Writing: limited edition book
by Travis Jeppesen on June 2, 2016
Travis Jeppesen: New Writing
183 pages, black and white
Signed, limited edition of 50 copies
Published by EXILE in 2016 on the occasion of the exhibition Travis Jeppesen: New Writing, June 2016.
50 EUR plus shipping
Please email info@thisisexile.com to order.
National Palace Museum
by Travis Jeppesen on May 17, 2016
Seoul
by Travis Jeppesen on May 15, 2016
Robust rot of quietude, fuel my doubt so that my wisdom might have a baby all over yr face.
Today I wear nothing except what the dark lord expects me to – I am a virus.
I haven’t even arrived in Japan yet.
My stomach has a curious name – I evolve a method, try and stick to it.
Suddenly, the world.
At the Wallace Collection
by Travis Jeppesen on April 28, 2016
The floppy-titted multitude of holding on
- When pictures stood still and the mind
had to make its own motions ——– orgy
of dissatisfaction shows me yr ruler, the whistling baby –
until time denounces itself – shadow of a planet’s despair.
New Writing II
by Travis Jeppesen on April 24, 2016
New Writing @ Exile
by Travis Jeppesen on April 23, 2016
The purpose of ALL writing should be to create an entirely new language every time one sits down with pen in hand.
Unafraid of “asignification” (meaninglessness.) Because, like writer’s block, it doesn’t actually exist. (New language = new meanings.)
To work in something like a trance state, letting the body guide (glide.) Because the body has its own language. Not completely severed from mind, of course – that’s impossible. But to allow the body to take precedence over mind, in the total machinery – the body-mind machine.
Not just any machine. What I’m most interested in is motion, movement. That’s always been the most important thing. From a to b, hence: line. I have this body here, and it’s really good for nothing other than pure motion – forming ways across the scape. The scape, in this case, being paper. Hence: vehicle. Body-mind vehicle. Trance poetics of vehicularity.
Vehicularity being an automaticism. Because 1.) all writing is, and 2.) I’m a machine.
New writing necessitates other ways of reading: stroke, rhythm, movement, gesturality, systematicity, resistance. Poetics of indeterminacy (M. Perloff.)
Nature also has many forms of writing. The waves (as V. Woolf recognized, translated.) The clouds in the sky.
My writing is not contemporary. Because it is produced outside of time, a state of trance mindlessness, it comes from the past and the future, is detached from the now. Resist belonging: I don’t belong to this time, neither does the work.
To go outside language, into nothingness – approaching a state of perfection.
Poem about the dryness
by Travis Jeppesen on April 22, 2016
Surface rumble is my fucker giraffe.
To be an austrian so lightly.
Can you touch/fall apart the sky?
Oh to be bi.
To fuck a goose and not be afraid.
Aren’t you inside me not and then what the hell.
All different flavors of ice cream – yeah, that is something to really get bisexual all about.
But then the goddamn sun it wouldn’t quit shining, and so I shot it.
Shot it so I wouldn’t have anything to do.
The goddamn sun and its minerals.
Why can’t you face it (what is only seeming.)
The light forecast fell apart right over the bog, a child’s voice in the tetherance.
I forgot how to have an ant.
Do you want all misty-eyed to rot the tomato version whose blanket furs.
Grant to the distant iota.
The way paper bag shivers.
Shivers in the lightning rod’s dim virginity.
Whatever night meant before it rotted.
I got on the ceiling in order to imitate a fan, suddenly all was mediterranean in its too-night sheen.
Aren’t you bothered by the feathers, she might’ve asked me.
But reverse snobbism cool-window’d out the hopes that populism weaned.
And zeros danced on the balcony to christen the devil buddha’s fried crispy remembrance bra.
Against Unity
by Travis Jeppesen on April 20, 2016
The world had its own ideas once, and now it has run out of them. This is why we love it so: it’s alive. An animal, to be sure, and lodged in the free-floating that is an apparatus we might grasp on to even while it is eating us raw.
Our virtues had been forgiven and forgotten, a place on the strand offered to us, whence we might withdraw, unblemished by the limits of our placedness. A stance from which we might shout. Hardened generation of time’s siftliness.
He saw himself as a river, and that is how it got introjected. Introjection is projection backwards, internal. Spines with strings attached, suspended from clouds. The sun gets injected into the brain.
It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to dream properly; in the meantime, we have the violent act of translation to carry us. The inadequacies. There is a corollary to lust here which remains perennially unexplored. Were we to traverse the possibilities, crossing them out one by one as we trespass our way through them – suddenly yr foot is stuck in the sand, so deeply there is no choice but to detach it from yr body – the process completes itself just as the shore empties of its human occupiers. Yr time, you learn eventually, belongs to the machinery of someone else’s longing; the “other” is all those who endeavor to convey yr meaning.
You immerse yrself in the task of definitionality: the splatter-spatialization of all languages, human and other. The symbols with their intentions, bleeding all over the climate. Two figures: Hermes Hermaphroditus. (Splatter-Sprache.)
We are confronted with a map of the present and it frightens us into being, a cartography too real, because within its coordinates a photographic likeness of all our mistakes has been implanted and the green of the poisoned skies hums its radiated forecasts at us – the sort of dream that won’t allow you to sleep. The body without unity. Shattered glances that become a pool for the spectators to swim in – the spectatorial pool… And now, the grayness has returned to the sky, marking out a familiarity – a rat-object known by all the rest for the shrill of its squeals. Pretty soon it will swallow what’s left of us. (Ode to a poet who was recently swallowed by death.)
And then time was little more than the matter the substance that we would have forgotten had we not all been there counting wasting away the idle hours that knew no heroes only the losers among us could ever succeed at fathering up to speed the low-level countenance that was, at best, a present to the heart… but too many people had had their excitement driven out of them by outside forces whose voices resounded a basso profundo an allegiance to the absolute bottom, yeah that was the thing we thought we knew when it mattered to be a collectivity, the thing to be asserted – and me, I was lost before I even got a chance to find myself, a ceramic object submerged in the sand – found by someone else, the stranger, the bomb, the loss, what was left of the feeling of love…
There are two artists in the mindeye of the socius’s inner rot and only two, but projection and introjection infrequently collide, and then the work that bursts out of it is an animal, and the sand I am walking upon is more alive than the foot I gave birth to in the urethral splat of godliness that is lacking a proper name.
“This is truly the life-force,” she said, but she was looking at someone else. He had a vagina that looked just like hers, and someone took a bath in it, there were marble ruins all around, a police officer arrived mid-submersion to inscribe an anti-signature into his labial folds in a language that cannot be spoken.
The lexicon consisting wholly of ambivalences. In the village whose entire architecture was constructed from word-formations, its inhabitants pathologically illiterate.
Which language are you currently speaking. As I stare out at the world, the language floats away. A self-broadcasting that floats. That floods. Here, on the other side of the void. In the land made of orifices. The ground swallows you as you are walking. The ground is made of god. Absent father who put you here without celebrating. Pre-selection, to be drawn upon: worldvoid. To die without thinking what’s coming next. Without thinking.
Why can’t life perspire in the same way I do – because there’s no true freedom, that’s why – this neo-romantic cult of the lost macho adolescent, sexless and private in his guise – arid sounds that can’t be unhatched because the shell is shattered. Fear that you might one day run out of things to die for.
What is death but a person to go inside, another species.
There is an animal inside that speaks to me in the rot’s language. When I stand in the sand and hear the sirens shrieking, I will take off all my clothes and become an inanimate object for you.
Life has meaning insofar as it eats our fears for us while we’re standing in the sand dreaming. Were we to translate the sky into a language you might recognize, would you actually take the time to read it?
For some, research entails staring at a blank white wall until it collapses.
Represent one kind of freedom and it is there there before you you are dying a large stone a rock having replaced yr foot and the desire to escape the knowledge that you can no longer be a part of this and everyone out there, they all want a thing from you a thing you are tired of giving, and so why go on living you ask yrself but no, perhaps that’s not it either and there you are lost once more and there are children everywhere, the dispersal, mixed variables scattered about –
At the end of the sun, the rain, stars raining down upon all yr fears, an ideological snowstorm of fuckography, this is not me I am not the entirety that spells out that forms a riverscape for me to collect my weepery, yeah a giant genital forecast me on top of the world and no more lies, no more victors, who is there now to represent our fears.
Faciality is a graveyard you can swim in. The corpses all boats of joy.
Inanimacy as the liberating factor. In the days before gender.
The hermaphrodite came over to map me. But it ended up getting mapped instead. The void was made of paper. The better to make ashes with. Erasure happens on so many levels, one has to do little more than breathe before awareness kicks in.
There’s my name in another language. The ache of definitionality. I want to own this day so bad. So tell me why I am speaking – to deliver a message?
Me in countless versions, the language of the multiple – my selves and their inherent otherness – I as an army of ghosts, I as a flood. I framed while simultaneously leaving the container: anti-signature.
The river bled into a sea. Actually, the sea feeds the river. The key to all this being the way in which we fall. The bottom-up direction, the reverse spill. Staring at the world is great; it makes nothing happen so lightly. Without force, speculation becomes a constancy; it never ends. Never wanted a body – just a presence. A heart so fuckless as to be pure.
Wake up in the haze of days, yearning to be an escaper. Dog with three heads won’t let you. He’s all quantity, no qualities. Outwit hermetic dog-god, be humanity’s savior. It’s not just a fantasy. We aren’t the products of the sunless world, the endlessness of time, the triumph of the unknowing, the light that knows no time. All the seeming that goes into each effort. Erased by a cloud of ink while three heads bark in simultaneity. Whinnying lightness: a horse that floats. Air is like water – each time you breathe, you drown…
Wash the blood off yr meaning.
My god is a dead fucker whose face has wheels on it. You need something from me? I’m gonna teach you how to be the universe’s whore. I don’t want something; I own it. No and not really; both at once. When I was a serpent, the gods were after me constantly. Yeah, I had an entire army of unknowing backing me up. Performing raids on the superfluity of the quasi-real, which is clogging all the drains. Quit fucking owning me, I will give you a prize. No one really knows for sure how deep to go; the stature of the situation we now find ourselves in. Wrench apart yr claws, the legs of you, to reveal the entrapment of the ideal. Every sex act a mapping of the impending era that has arrived in order to be destroyed.
From Michael Müller: Who’s Speaking? Forthcoming from Hatje Cantz, June 2016.
New Writing
by Travis Jeppesen on April 13, 2016
The Green Ray
by Travis Jeppesen on April 12, 2016