KYLE
BELLUCCI
JOHANSON

Dear Whom It May Concern,

I regret to inform you that I should like to tender my resignation as Professional Artist effective immediately. I hereby give notice of my intention to leave ART.

Attached to this email you’ll find a thing that came to me several years ago from the future. At the time of its arrival in the spring of A.D. 2016 I recall intense feelings of hopelessness and optimism. This is a thing with utility and poetic content. A relic (of) immanent becoming.

Nostradamus, a super-positioning stone for scrying spacetimematter of a universe after capitalism, is the past and future collapsed and clandestine, hidden in a past of when ‘becoming’ is, arriving from some medieval future. A before and after subjects and objects.

When there is no longer any hope, what is to be done with optimism? How might it be used?

There is no future of your ways of occupying and territorializing time and space and matter, and no future for us who, through planned obsolescence, have been inflated into useless surplus people. Our thoughts and labor have no value, and our identities are exchanged more lucratively than gold, oil, wine, and paintings. We’ve undergone a conversion, transmogrified by His Eminence, Father Milton, who made us Human Capital in exchange for our dignity. We can never be enough to be desirable and there will never be enough of us to possess.

Artists might understand this horror story more intimately. Many of us have professed to be prophets for a profit, articulating and situating culture, politics, theory, and belief; and letting them be sold at auction for some bread.

Nobody studies art to learn how to write professional e-mails.

Drawing this resignation is absurd. There is no authority to address, no Chief Executive Officer of the ART VVORLD, and if there is he has done a very thorough job of hiding.

If ART is not interested in, or capable of, facilitating emancipation and community, while posturing as if it is, resignation becomes the only rational posture one can take. Resigning from ART, and resigning to a non-art that is not necessarily not there. We have already been made ghosts, and may as well haunt the apparatus and drive it mad, towards a more generic kind of sanity. Reformation is only an option for con-artists.

Physicists don’t know if this universe can accommodate free-will. Quantum physics reveals determinate causality is not everything. Despite His Eminence’s apologetic rhetoric, there may be more to emancipation that believing one is “Free to Choose.” However, while the “free” part of free will seems easy to derive out of quantum physics the “will” part isn’t - nothing in physics itself clearly identifies how personal agency comes into existence. Whether we live in a block universe of finite games and finite timespacematter, or a radically unfolding superposition of endless possibilities, the question must be asked, “What is to be done?”

This question is posed to you, Whom It May Concern, out of a concern for justice, and for life, together.

It begins with resignation, but this is just a preview.

Immanence and becoming.

Madness is one of few sane postures for such a time as this. There is absolutely no free will, there is free will absolutely. Free to choose with nothing to choose from. There is no future and we are still here. Is the “what is to be done,” non-framing a structure of feeling together? We might be strangers but we are never really others. Concrete is abstract like that and abstraction often is so rigid. Is alienation only a possibility when we draw borders, steal land, enslave, violate, build frames, invent perspective and articulate language? In pastfutures without all that ART has no supremacy, but community is terraforming as we speak, under our feet amongst our mutual dislocation. Whispering through cracks in the façade, clandestine. Stones are not written in stone. We are almost now here, nowhere, un-knowing where we find ourselves in these new and very old dark ages. It might feel terrifying. There is no sound in outer space so our screams won’t be recorded. There is no upside-down in outer space. There is no “West” in outer space. It’s disorienting. And yes, this could be seen as a dialectic if you frame it that way. That way if you frame it. Frame it if you that way. If way it frame you.

Do people love metaphor more than people, because of an aesthetic pleasure in thinking, “This is like that,” and detest solidarity because it insists we acknowledge, “I am like you,” or maybe even that, “We are We, “ and can never completely be separated, and more terrifying still that we might even depend on we for survival? Is it because a metaphor is an object for possessing? This ritual practice insisting arbitrary things are similar when they aren’t, and insisting people are insurmountably different when we cannot be. The calcium in our bones is from the same stars being born at the dawn of the universe, and somehow the manifestos of humanities past no longer seem as hyperbolic or naïve.

Immanent becoming can’t be held in one’s hand because it isn’t an object. It is under the skin, the hand itself is held by it.

Resigned to be Yours,

Kyle Bellucci Johanson