bio and introduction

Long a denizen of Brooklyn, veronika (nee, and as corroborated by the now ghostly kerry) was born and raised in Saint Louis, Missouri, which she left in a hurry eventually to study fine arts and architecture at RISD, then practice architecture in NYC for over a decade, then study art history at Columbia University leading to an M.Phil there. Alas, her dissertation on a recess to care for her dying mother in Saint Louis morphed into poetic prose and watercolor diagrams aspiring to autonomous art, as what she uncovered in her research transcended an academic finding, while remaining grounded there, stridently challenging existing categories and modes of discourse, recovering the status of certain kinds of art as instruments of knowledge -- a seismic shift with notable tremors, however fleeting, objectively registered and locating a dangerous fault line indicating the need for an inconvenient and emotionally charged relocation of the center line, whatever denial exists in the highest, most medium, and lowest of places.

She might not be right and even if right she might not win the fight, but Marlon Brando's Terry taught her in the epic film On the Waterfront -- we're all Red Hook, Brooklynites -- do NOT take the sizable payoff to play it safe and bow out. You've got the talent, training, and you're fighting for something that's bigger than you are. Get in that ring and contend, and if the powers that be punish you for it, philosophy is now a public performance, and the people will make them pay for tyranny and injustice, eventually. The seed of a flowery, fruitful, air purifying tree may seem to be inert, but it will likely wake up and come alive when she's about six feet under. 

Yes, she recognized in retrospect her mission as a Robin Hood to rob from the sacred stash, cannibilize the canon, chew, digest, regurgitate and feed a flock of baby birds dying to fly as high as the sky in a celebration, roughed up refinement, and consolidation/expansion of the vernacular tongue, which not only filters out the all the more toxic for being over-sterilized waste, but doesn't peter out at the thousandth plateau. Her painting practice did achieve autonomy and now goes its own way, and they commune productively. 

In short, if she'd been, say, self taught holed up as a hermit with a day job maybe in clerical work or manual labor, instead of, as indicated, loaded with degrees and in practice lacking all the common sense that her thought at least venerates, it would all be the same. She is the philosopher as performance artist who gets all the angels to dance on the head of a pin, or Giotto does, and she arrives there the way Pierre Menard arrives at Don Quixote -- here man's fiction is woman's reality, she fulfills his desire, but fear not. The finding of the beloved is just the beginning of another quest for her.