The Aforementioned Letter

Jonas Holdbeck (sometimes spelled Holbecj) was a Swedish man tied to the cultural circles of his birth country until his death in 1977. Unfortunately little knowledge of the man has escaped his immediate circles. I happened to “unearth” this letter while purposely seeking out the most obscure information on “critical theory” that could be attained through the wringer of major search engines. I had become interested in mundane writing through the works of K Goldsmith and set out to write a ballad based on bad search results. The following has nothing to do with that, but I think contains a certain sweetness that has been preserved through thirty years (one generation) of neglect:

Dear Friends and colleagues,

Our institutions are falling apart yet they are the only things that truly hold and attend to our messages. They circle us with meaning like we’re words in a word search and we come to live by those circled selections, our titles: artist, writer, critic, nothing man.

For so long we have pushed forward, the 60’s have strung out into the 70’s and we’re still pushing, what will the 80’s bring? The critique of the critique like we’ve never seen before. An atmosphere of inversion, a blown drum.

It’s time to go backward to throw a virtual wrench into the virtual machine. The dazzling displays and disease of networks is coming and with it a new brand of distribution. I imagine bubbles, floating abstractions surrounding, swarming, sweet metamers of oil and light bursting all over us. What is this radiant vision that haunts me in my last hours?

I imagine one bubble in this puzzle to be the critique, but it is just that: a bubble, an unstable isolation of its own entrapment. We look, we see, we speak from inside ourselves. Words like plasma arrows romancing the ears of our people: the others, the others, the seeing, hearing, speaking, and breathing of similar breaths.

Let me give you an example: In colorimetry, metamerism is the matching of apparent color of objects with different spectral power distributions. Colors that match this way are called metamers. A spectral power distribution describes the proportion of total light emitted, transmitted, or reflected by a color sample at every visible wavelength; it precisely defines the light from any physical stimulus. Yet, it does little to describe us. The human eye contains only three color receptors (cone cells), which means that all colors are reduced to three sensory quantities, called the tristimulus values. Metamerism occurs because each type of cone responds to the cumulative energy from a broad range of wavelengths, so that different combinations of light across all wavelengths can produce an equivalent receptor response and the same tristimulus values or color sensation.

The distillation of art has lead from surface to object to event to many wonderous color sensations. The point of critiques has become useless except as a rhetoric onto itself. In other words: a dying ordeal.

Friends I will not live long and will hardly be remembered.

Goodbye.