Jimmy Raskin investigates the figures of the Poet and his counterpart, the Philosopher, and proceeds to anatomize their delicate relationship on the path to the Overman. Embodying a spirit of playful non-knowledge, unlearning, and productive confusion

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Jimmy Raskin, The Prologue, The Poltergeist & The Hollow Tree, Foundation 20 21, 2005.

"When Nietzsche called for the artist as the new ideal, Jimmy Raskin responded and not a moment too late here in the 21st century. This book is a beautiful collaboration of the visual and the philosophical. Jimmy Raskin is the tightrope walker in his revisitation of Nietzsche's classic Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This thought-provoking book is a eulogy to one of the masters of existential thinking who questioned every aspect of being.

Combining text with drawings, collages and a series of stunning diagrams, Jimmy Raskin's highly original book investigates the figures of the Poet and his counterpart, the Philosopher, and proceeds to anatomize their delicate relationship on the path to the Overman. Raskin's interest in the existential condition of the Poet as a metaphor for the artist in general confronts the modern Philosopher's quest to become Poet. The book manifests the stakes of this problematic merging and rigorously traces the thin line separating these two fundamental forms of Being. "The Poet's madness was something I had to salvage," says Raskin, "for the Unknown is only possible when distance collapses." 

 Today the Overman has been turned into a process, a mere method, so it is the Poet's failure that we need to learn more about. Identifying the precise location of this failure is the ultimate aim of this lyrical text, which mourns the fact that the Poet does not survive any longer without the Philosopher. And one of the problems of the Philosopher, as Zarathustra finds out in the prologue, is that he initially fails to entertain his audience."

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Jimmy Raskin, The Lisbon Lecture, Sequence, 2012.

"In 2010, Anthony Huberman’s major group exhibition, “For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there,” ended its touring engagements at Culturgest, Lisbon. The show brought together artists whose work considers curiosity and understanding as discrete and often mutually exclusive ideas, and was dedicated to “the inquisitive mind and to the pleasures of finding our way in the dark.” In the spirit of exemplifying this probing mindset, Jimmy Raskin was invited to deliver a lecture as a parallel project to his work in the exhibition, Confrontation At The Hollow Tree (Inseparability vs. Simultaneity).
The Lisbon Lecture, inspired by the exhibition’s thesis – “Embodying a spirit of playful non-knowledge, unlearning, and productive confusion”– explores the paradoxical nature of Arthur Rimbaud’s modern poetics, Roland Barthes’ notion of The Misfire (a failed poetics), and the use of the irrational dimension in language as a guiding doctrine in the work of the poet. The artist presents Rimbaud’s poems with great flair and insight, and proposes an imaginative and unique route to productive confusion.
This sixty page, limited edition volume reproduces the original lecture complete with script and diagrams illustrating Raskin’s dissections of different ways of Being. The book, further, shows how failure, as such, can be channeled to play a significant role in the creative process, and manifests certain palpable pleasures in finding one’s way in the dark."

CONTENTS
Introduction
Letter to Miguel Sequeira Wandschneider
The Cone
The Rimbaud Paradox #1
The Rimbaud Paradox #2
The Rustle and The Misfire

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Jimmy Raskin, A Letter to Miguel Abreu, Color Pamphlet, Sequence


"Jimmy Raskin's letter to Miguel Abreu begins: "It is time to reveal to you my next series of manifestations for Fall/Winter 2008." This book documents the letter he wrote in June of 2008, hoping at the time to clarify the reasoning on why he should now take 'the next step.' Raskin's work has been defined by a 15-year examination of the prologue of Friedrich Nietzsche's 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra.' Raskin argues this pivotal event of ‘The Death of The Poet’ and a simultaneous ‘Reconstitution of The Philosopher-Poet’ takes place within the prologue of this tale, and in turn, a direct link to the methodologies of the contemporary artist at present. To ensure Raskin himself is ready to leave behind his prolonged attachment and step out of the prologue, his text ends with an unexpected vision of The Pure Poet: a braying donkey from the poem Bottom by Arthur Rimbaud suddenly appears at the prologue’s border…"