Project Native Informant

Kenneth Bergfeld

I, Spider

PNI, London

“We sit within our net, we spiders, and whatever we may catch in it, we can catch nothing at all
except that which allows itself to be caught precisely in our net.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak
 

I, Spider was a net, to paint across not knowing. I thought I stood on the shores at the past of painting, where forms of wildness brought on by memory become a path and multiply.

I, Spider was a net, to paint across not knowing. Interior assembling of forms behind deafening blindness, the white of the eye; nothingness. No mild hallucinations stricken by the sun (that eye of God) on the back of your eyelid. 
Have you tried licking the eye of God, again?
An eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned! 
In blindness and intoxication I saw paintings inhabited by faces.

In the suburbs of Cologne: That green canoe – belly up – laying on its back. 
Creature in defeat, 
stretching out across the wall behind my improvised easel: a ladder with sawed-in-half drumsticks bought by a former self, attached with string and 3M-packaging tape.
And in that belly resides: Magic as wisdom, emerging as a whispered spell.
The human body united to the landscape, 
The human body united to the landscape and times long past.
Painting took me inside myself and the voyage - gliding through color - changed me or at least promoted and revealed alternate selves by projecting me into colored landscapes. 
Remarkable splinter, 
William S. Burroughs 
walked in color
in the back of my mind: 
“I was walking down the boulevard when I looked out I was seeing all the blues in the street in front of me, blue on a foulard…blue on a young workman’s ass…his blue jeans…a girl’s blue sweater…blue neon…the sky…all the blues. When I looked again I saw nothing but all the reds of traffic lights…car lights…a café sign…a man’s nose.”

I, Spider was a net, to paint across not knowing.
Messianic angel, 
Walter Benjamin, 
where theology hammers down into the cracks of not-knowing. You saw this in language as much as in dance and I wish for this “mimetic faculty” to live in the act of painting as well!

I, Spider was a net, to paint across not knowing.
My eyes, however strong or weak they may be, can only see a certain distance.
I live and move within the house built on the frenzy of my sin.
Invite the Spider, destroyer-protector!
I, Spider was a net to paint across not knowing, I wish no human hand could wash away in single motion.

I can only sail that sea of color all the way round.
The angel’s fingernail, rainbow-like, as the interior of a shell of a blue mussel as I stand at the shore.
And the colors deepen and gleam as the world draws its breath.
I know now that it - I, Spider  - was not about possessing, but about being possessed 
by the forces that ran through me and this work unifying us eternally.

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