“It has no identity.

It exists but is not something.

Something forty years ago Godard said, “not a just image, just an image.” Even longer ago Barnet Newman said: “-What I want with the paintings? I just want the paint on the canvas to look as beautiful as it does in the can.”

Two artists that might not conventionally be bunched together but what appears to connect them is a sortof grand modernist belief in something, should we say “pure”, and something pure cannot issue any kind of responsibility, it’s pure because it cannot produce responsibilities, it has no relations, it’s not a subject, it is a warmachine. Godard’s “just an image” is an image void of moral, ethics, politics, it is an image that is void of identity, of life, and yet exists, similar to Newman’s paintings. It is my conviction that we today must re-issue Godard and Newman’s observations although not its modernist pathos – no there’s no essence around, not since 1969 [Kosuth], even less after 1971 [Nixon dissolves gold standard] and so on… This is not a matter of searching for an essence, universality, something “pure,” on the contrary it is rather about the production of its possibility as potentiality, to make “it” show up, force it out, smoke the shit – because only that which is “pure,” that which is not subject, that which is just an image, thing, movement – only that which is absolutely irresponsible, worthless, can change how change changes. It can of course only be an endlessly short moment/an eternity, because the moment when this some something produces extension, is granted relations, location, context, it is nothing else than conventional and inscribed in capital, NL, politics, ethics and moral. But just before that, art can be an accelerationism [accelerationism must be kept strictly libidinal] capable of anything, it’s not an openness it’s absolutely open, it’s unconditional at the last instance, it is as pure as simple existence, it is and fucks the rest. And you know what, to start off it sure is capable of setting our entire political economy on fuckin’ fire.”

Marten Spanberg

For the whole article visit http://imathens.wordpress.com/2014/08/14/set-it-on-fuckin-fire-marten-spangberg/