Discontinuities

 

Discontinuities
benjamin harubin 2025
16" x 11" 
acrylics and ink on cotton fabric

there is no sequence; no preferred place in history.  

every awareness is at its peak.

this is it.

The Present Is Not Timelike There
benjamin harubin 2025
11" x 8" x 2"
acrylics & collage on wood

artmaking is a kind of magical ritual in that it is a series of actions focused on achieving some particular goal.  it may seem like such things as art, magic and religion are a far cry from other kinds of focused actions such as in a lunar exploration program, but everything serves some tangible purpose.  a change in consciousness most definitely will affect the physical world (as if there really is a physical world separate from a metaphysical world).  as if you could tell.  yeah, but i read a book.  i like it but what does it mean?  meanings are temporary associations between neurons.  yeah, but if you found a watch in the wilderness and you had never seen a watch before, wouldn't you think that someone or something had designed it?  if, in days long ago, someone had found some random piece of trash from the twenty-first century - a piece of bubble wrap or a broken plastic robot toy - they would take it and put it in a shrine or a cabinet of curiosities.  that is what i am doing; gathering the amazing wealth of discarded bits from everyone all over the world - a word here, a piece of crinkly plastic there - and placing them in shrines.  they are reminders of the complex world market organism.  they tell stories.  they are portals to other dimensions, mandalas to assist meditation and lenses to focus the greatness.  anyway, stop asking me what it means because you don't even know what you mean when you say what you mean.  art may have no meaning but that it has important functions.  "how does it function?" is a more meaningful question to ask.  lol.  the nerve bone is connected to the other nerve bone.  let me untie it: art functions as communication across time and space, to unite the human race - or maybe untie the human race - from stubborn tendency to regard everything as black or white, left or right.  it's the philosophy of complexity.  and getting any kind of satisfying answer pales in comparison to the joy of further explorations of the unstoppable plenum.