‘Make-believe play is a fundamental and integral aspect of being human. Without it we lose the capacity for empathy, for problem solving, for creative thinking, for philosophy. Children do it all day with the most basic of things. Somehow as we grow older culture conditions us to do away with make-believe and to integrate into ‘reality’, a shorthand for cultural, economic, social, and political systems. The realization by the adult for make-believe play is the first step in peeling cultural conditioning from our minds and entering the echo-chamber of our ancestors underground spaces where an acorn becomes a diamond.”
Fenberger Diaries, Vol 5, 321ff.
“Was it not Donald Judd who first spoke of the paintings of Frank Stella as ‘specific objects’? The relentless push away from canvas and paint and seeing that way. Sometimes I wish to fall into the trap of the painted image. I want to be held in it and, for all intents and purposes, lost. I came across this painting the other day. It is by a German called Andreas Schulze. I say his last name by expelling extra air out on the first ‘Schu’. His signature on the painting looks like this.”
“…there will be a time when our monkey bodies merge with the electronic carpet that surrounds us. At this point will the monkey want to desire? Or squat down on the carpet and shit?” (Fenberger Notes, box 12c)
Dr Fenberger passed away on October 3rd 2000. On the eleventh anniversary of this moment his legacy takes a turn.
“I went to Mochizuki Police Station yesterday to renew my driving license. In a large, drab grey meeting room there were rows of tables and chairs. We sat down and watched a thirty minute film. A man spoke to us for one and a half hours about correct driving. I pretended to listen intently. I would often look up from the desk and peer at the man. Perhaps I even softly nodded my head, as in agreement. At the end of the lecture a woman entered and read out our names. We were given our renewed licenses. I drove fearlessly back home, stopping at each junction to look left and right.”
(Fenberger Notes, box 43, 13f4.)
It is 1956. The world’s first nuclear power station opens at Calder Hall UK.
My father came to Japan in 1950 when he was eighteen. His brother fought Japanese soldiers in Burma. My mother’s uncle fought British soldiers in Burma. I am proof that the asinine nature of states and the idiocy of statesmen fail, always.
From the film essay ‘The Hollow Men’. Two identical wooden carved cups sat for years in the bathroom. Were they made by this boy in 1979? Was I there in some other guise?
“The first things arrived today at the house. A large dark wood dining table with twelve chairs, the old sofa bed and a cabinet from 1824. They are pushed against the far walls for the moment, covered in cardboard. Furniture has the strange effect of making a shelter into a house, with all of the cultural and psychological baggage that comes with this.”
Found note (probably McDonald), 2011.
Painting as cream: Antoine Vollon, Mound of Butter, 1875.
“I am building a boardwalk across the forest, cutting timber and hammering in stakes. The work is hard but it brings a satisfaction very different to writing or excavating. I think that it is partly connected to the (ultimately selfish) joy of marking open space. There is a direct transfer of human energy into solid objects in three dimensional reality. Is this what the first humans felt when they began to build rudimentary shelters out of sticks? Is this the heightened sensation felt by the sitar masters of long ago as they manifest sound across the sunset?”
