On Drawing Bunnies

Make classic shit out of nothin’, that’s what I specialize in

• Lloyd Banks

I feel dandy as fuck. Life is life. Life’s ok. You learn to take life and serve it to yourself in a lovely platter. That’s called pretension.

So here I am, a dandy pretense. Ungrateful for the bountiful nothingness that surrounds my existentialism in such a way that I can consistently and without effort forget that, insofar as I am a biological machine, I need to maintain a certain level of pre-established entropical-habits to create a pseudo-platform for my pretension. There are moral consequence that we can consider but fuck it for now.

Keeping on, life gets boring with all this pretension. Even if the pretension is an ongoing luxury. But I was pleasantly surprised and I forgot myself yesterday when I accidentally ran into a Ray Johnson exhibit. I was in an art gallery so it wasn’t an unreasonable incident. Just unexpected.

I didn’t have anyone to thank. Somehow, society provided the opportunity. From Johnson’s dependence on the USPS to the government and foundations that support the art institutes. Me walking into a Ray Johnson exhibit was a blessing mixed together by public funding and the nothingness that I had to thank.

Ray Johnson is a personal hero and an inspiration. His artistry wasn’t dissimilar from Andy Kaufman. The medium of art was indistinguishable from the medium of life.

I learned about him in college. About 15 years ago.

It was for a class on aesthetics. It was an advanced course, and so I had already been through a couple philosophy classes before that. At the time, my medium of art was writing. It’s what attracted me to philosophy. It’s the only kind of writing where art and life are, if successfully done, “supposedly” indistinguishable.

There is no walking out of a theater or an art gallery after you’re done experiencing philosophy. If done right, philosophy will change your reasoning for good. It’s paradoxical. A book or a plate of food may have the same impact in your life. Somehow your palette/aesthetics changes after an experience of art. But for your reasoning to be impacted and altered carry heavy consequences for every other aspect of your life. And even if other types of art have a strong impact on your, it’s likely that the impact is somehow philosophical. To abstract one type of experience from one kind of medium and relate it to other experiences and other mediums relies on reasoning.

After having gone through a couple years worth of philosophy courses and seeing my writing style evolve from graded paperwork, Ray Johnson inspired me to see writing as a medium that can say a lot about nothing in an artful way.