Transcendental Stupidity
The following is a conversation I had with Margarita Gluzberg to accompany her exhibition ‘Implicate Factory Outlet’, 30 May - 5 July 2025 at Alma Pearl in London
Sacco And Vanzetti Factory Remnant Mix 1, 2025, One set of colour pencils used in its entirety on paper, 112 x 77 cm
Sean Steadman: In previous conversations we have spoken about the history of modernism and how we both feel it's still an open project in some way, and we are both interested in the relationship of spiritualism and mysticism that threads through modernity, which is often less emphasised against the background of rationalism, secularism and formalism. We've discussed how making art is a way to acquire knowledge about the world; insight into how it really functions.
Many people see art as the opposite, as a set of 'illusions', which can sound deceptive or conceited. Illusions presuppose stable objects and perceivers; however I'm in favour of the world view that everything is one giant set of relations, containing a multitude of 'world models' (as the AI people would say) or perspectives. Isn't it that we want more illusions! So we can orient ourselves by comparing different models? Art seems to really expose how heterogeneous the pathways into knowing the world are; there's a strong libidinal aspect to it. The logician Gregory Chaitin thinks that at the root of mathematics and logic is a kind of cosmic Eros. Does any of this relate to what you have been thinking about in the run up to this exhibition?
Margarita Gluzberg: I suppose I'm interested in a desire to make some kind of radical connection... with other humans and their work, dead or alive, and so I try to find ways, like reading philosophy, to actualise this. And such desire for connection, as you describe it, is maybe that 'cosmic Eros' and maybe I operate through its internal logic. Which is why we're having this conversation.
Perhaps art production in itself can do this to a lesser degree for me, though it occupies the largest proportion of my time. But in a way I spend all of my time in dialogue with myself and others, as well as being lost in abstract thinking. Art objects become the remnants of the activity. They are essentially slightly stupid, a kind of transcendental stupidity.
They are the leftovers of thought materially constructed through aesthetic and, at best, ethical choices. But they are only leftovers.
SS: This idea of 'leftovers', as you put it, is interesting. Art is a kind of digestion process perhaps, despite being characterised as a top-down or centrally controlled activity; the genius, or author and so on. I would agree with you, and about illusions, I feel very strongly it's illusions or relations all the way down. The 'process philosophy' perspective is very appealing to me.
I would say that through making art which is, as you say, a kind of farming or filtration process, the artist has to just embrace the illusions that are generated by all the constituent parts of the process. Art is ultimately a tool to change our perspective or aspect onto the world. I would even go so far as to say the artist should willingly be parasitised by the illusions that come from the process.
Going on a bit of a tangent here, but it's my strong belief that beauty is objective and that it is just radically weirder than you could imagine, containing really deep paradoxical laws or functions. So I have a kind of jumbled emergentist/process/platonic view! There are dynamic forms that the artist discovers through this weird, and as you say, stupid 'method' of art making. But as far as I can tell it has genuine epistemological valence. These techniques are timeless, the first science or medicine, shamanism.
MG: I think perhaps this very last point you refer to, shamanism, is the delusion-illusion I'm talking about.
I am deep into Bataille's book Inner Experience, which to me is a kind of manual for radical intimacy. And I want to deploy this radical intimacy as a mode or model for being and making work... Like never having an off button, a deep immersion. There is always a high probability for failure to reach an ecstatic level (and Bataille writes of his own failure episode of this...), but the intention is there.
I'm very interested in your point about beauty being objective. I agree. But I think of this in a slightly different way, in terms of production of affect. It's physical experience, which of course is mediated by culture, but it's also the structure of sensation.
I am obsessed with why we can feel emotion from a set of musical chords. I frequently cry from certain chromatic permutations, no lyrics.
Is a minor key naturally sad? Music is very direct in this but I think it relates to the visual also. I experience complete aesthetic pleasure from certain visual permutations. I think of this as a kind of objective experience, a structural emotional explosion that is a constant. And here lies the main point, it's the eternal question of the constant in relation to its physical manifestation. Implicate and Explicate, Substance and Accidents, thinking and remnant.
The drawings I make are a very minor part of this picture, they are remnants in multiple ways, but as I said: to me all the art objects I am drawn to are remnants, remainders. They are indeed leftovers, only half digested by the author usually.
Song of a Captive Nightingale, 2009/2010/2013/2025, Sound Installation 7 original 78 rpm shellac/gramophone records with turntables
SS: I always thought the minor key being sad is that it mimics a cry of pain or fear from the ancestral environment. But art or music has an ability to formalise this aggregate/statistical propensity in the brain and produce a more pure or distilled mimicry.
The degree to which different senses are qualitatively so different, despite in the brain their signal is so uniform (just impulses across a sodium ion channel in neurons), is very weird to me, how the experience of taste is so different to sound, for example. I've often wondered about the aesthetic experiences of animals. I've heard bears often just sit looking at sunsets for a long time, and it's believed that they just find them beautiful.
This links with you mentioning ethics before, beauty having a bearing of 'what one should do' and seeing the whole biosphere as a more conscious system. To quote your last answer, that would be a 'radical intimacy' if the consciousness of animals was fully absorbed by the culture at large; it may even be a Copernican scale revolution. Your drawings to me seem very much to sit in this more universal space of information, or 'remainders' as you say, perhaps not an exclusively human one. Also, thinking about it, even the most conservative or classical idea of artistic 'skill' or 'mastery' is one where a certain reflexive or mechanical ability takes over and the artist becomes a conduit of 'remainders.'
MG: I want to return to Bataille's Inner Experience again, I really don't seem to be able to switch off from its drive or find a better way for saying things than its author, and it has become a kind of manual.
'Life is never situated in one particular point: it passes rapidly from one point to another (or from multiple points to other points), like a current or a kind of electrical stream. Thus, where you would like to grasp your nontemporal substance, you only encounter a slippage, only a poorly coordinated play of your perishable dreams.'
And this connects to the 'remainder' idea, a perishable dream. Your question about the difference in individual experience of taste, colour, sound is really central. Because this differentiates the experience itself from its description. We have a consensus in the description of 'bitter', we find ways to analyse its properties, we find its chemical constituents but the actuality of its sensorial impact on each life form is a complete enigma.
This is why I return to the idea of art production being this transcendental stupidity, a scrambling in the dark for common elements of language that actualises itself in perishable shiny things. It's very hard to define these processes exactly because language tends to be an approximation and I'm not sure how to escape this approximation. There is approximation in almost anything we do or make, so perhaps when objects and images are 'assembled by the machinery of their skill' it's the most precise way that something comes into existence?
SS: Yes, I like the characterisation of making art as scrambling, it certainly feels that way, if it's going well in the studio. To make art you make a leap of faith, do something and just deal with it! But the perseverance and adaptation become the work itself; a recuperation of all the mistakes becomes its own strength and identity. I'm not sure if you know the Taoist term wu-wei? It roughly translates as 'effortless action' or 'doing without trying' and is even likened in some texts to a kind of drunkenness. By acquiescing to stupidity, the world starts to present itself more faithfully, disabling a more functional 'grabbing and getting' way of interacting with the world, and letting things pass through you.
This I guess is when the rare moments of channelling happen, when the artist just witnesses the work assembling itself and it's better than their 'ideas' or intentions or even contradicts who they think they are. As an artist you have to acknowledge the fact that both within you and within the relationship of the world and your inner experience, an intelligent, congruent and complementary process that has its own will and goals: it's just whirring away. That's the 'transcendent' part as you put it.
MG: I think you talking about 'channelling' is really important to all this. I actually believe in setting up the possibility of channelling intentionally. Maybe structurally. I call this process by another name now, influence. Influence in the material sense, when you are mechanically absorbed in a process. I suppose it's a possession. But it's not my intention to romanticise any of this. I'm not abandoning myself rather controlling a process.
It's like it used to be with tuning into shortwave radio, you hoped to find something good, something essential. Sometimes you got amazing Jungle, sometimes just noise, sometimes nothing but blandness. In Soviet Russia people looked for uncensored information. But you have to have a radio in the first place and find the right bandwidth. You have to have the basic tech. So when I adopt a certain system to make work, like using old Soviet pencil sets for example, the hope, in a very basic way, is that some form of material resonance will come through.
SS: A kind of skillful passivity perhaps? Referring to the radio, and needing the right tools for the job, I love this, because the methods, tools, technology all come from happenstance and not top-down control; it's all about serendipity. This is ultimately 'organic' in its structure and shows conducting a semi-random search in possibility space is often more fruitful than grandiose ideas or theories.
Which makes me think about your second point, about labour. I see your drawings in some sense as tide pools, and chromatic mineral deposits of this meditative state of being open through making. They are both absorbing and transmitting at the same time. We spoke about how they are like seeing your own retina in an eye exam, the mechanism perceiving itself.
MG: All things as chromatic mineral deposits. This is a good place to end I think.
