The Magic In-Between
"There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in."
--Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”
THE MAGIC IN-BETWEEN
by Marcus McDougald
In an ever-polarized society, walls of division climb as high as they descend deep, and are bordered by chasms of distrust. Fear of the other, fear of the uncomfortable, fear of the unknown, fear of what we might find in the dark corners of ourselves—hearts like lump coal, full of potential warmth yet remaining dormant, hidden beneath layers of ash. A hallmark of Western civilization lies in its wedges, driven between us, activating fault lines in the human soul. We’re split at the seams, widened by echo chambers and digital shouting matches, locked in a dissonant dance where no one hears the music. Asynchronous flailing. The gaps between us grow deeper, filled with suspicion and anger, turning shared spaces into trenches of blame and shame. But what if those cracks aren’t empty? What if they're where the real magic lives?
As creative beings, we’re living in a cut-and-paste world, nomadic scavengers of meaning, hunting for fragments in the noise. It’s all fragments—bits of life diced up, rearranged, stitched together to make something hum, something buzz, something that pulses like a raw nerve exposed. This is the magic in-between: the quick cut, the rough edit, the reckless choice that turns scraps into something felt. It’s not the land of the moderate or the centrist. No, this fertile gap holds much more. Dialetheia.
The photographer’s feed, the poet’s cut-up, the curator’s contradiction—all wired into the beating heart of this remixing world. It’s a search for something greater—a way of harmonizing disparate parts amid the endless division.
ACT ONE: KULESHOV’S GHOSTS--JUXTAPOSITION
Lev Kuleshov, Soviet filmmaker and theorist, saw it first. A man’s expression beside a bowl of soup. The same expression beside a woman, then a coffin. Chop, splice, repeat. Kuleshov’s montage didn’t just show—it resonated. The power wasn’t in the image alone but in the charged space between, where the mind, desperate to make sense, invents stories and emotions. It was an alchemical process—transforming base images into something alive, something that speaks to the hidden parts of us. Kuleshov’s ghosts are everywhere now, flickering between Instagram carousels and TikTok edits, stitching moments together in a perpetual search for coherence. As Kuleshov carved meaning into space between frames, Duchamp found it waiting in objects miscast and repurposed—a testament that art lives not in what it is but in how it’s seen.
ACT TWO: DUCHAMP’S FOUNTAIN--READYMADES ROLL
Marcel Duchamp, art’s elemental prankster, flipped convention on its head when he placed a urinal on a pedestal and called it art. Fountain (1917)—a porcelain joke, a middle finger to tradition, a quiet explosion. Duchamp wasn’t just creating art; he was making a point. Value lay not in the object alone but in its audacious placement and the physical, mental, and emotional space surrounding it. Eventually, he coined the term “readymade” for items whose meanings expand when placed in new contexts.
Fast forward to Supreme’s crowbar: an everyday object rebranded as an icon. The Supreme logo stamped on cold steel. Duchamp’s influence blurs lines between street and gallery, making the mundane strange. It’s not solely about the object but the environment, not the function but the story. Abloh and Supreme understood: even a crowbar can scream, “This is art.” And in that scream lies a call to see the divine in the discarded, the sacred in the profane. Duchamp cracked the edges of form itself, but Burroughs took a blade to language, letting words bleed into new shapes, each cut a rebellion against coherence.
ACT THREE: BURROUGHS’ CUT-UPS--LANGUAGE HACKS
William S. Burroughs, the godfather of punk, didn’t just write; he hacked language. Cut-ups were his weapon: words sliced, shuffled, reassembled into something alive, unpredictable. Inspired by Brion Gysin, Burroughs turned language into a game of chance, a roulette wheel of meaning. It was a method of freeing expression, abandoning the straightjacket of linear thought and Cartesian literary dogma to touch something raw, unfiltered, and unexplainable. He wasn’t merely remixing text; he was searching for authenticity in the seams, trying to uncover a hidden thread within the rigid restraints. Deconstruction.
Today, it’s in the memes, tweets, the churn of digital culture, where text and image are endlessly cut up and re-shared. Burroughs’ rebellion lives on in pixels, in every meme reworked, every thread cut and pasted into something new. Language doesn’t just inform—it explodes, fractures, mutates. The cut-up is a way of seeing past the surface, of finding the message beneath the static. It’s the space between words, the pause between breaths, that makes room for the heart.
ACT FOUR: DJ SPOOKY’S RHYTHM SCIENCE--THE BEAT GOES ON
Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, calls himself a “rhythm scientist,” blending sound, data, and culture into an endless remix. His book Rhythm Science lays it bare: the DJ as curator, as media manipulator, as the one who turns noise into narrative.“We live in a cut-and-paste world,” Miller says, “and the DJ is the quintessential artist of this new information era.” With the proliferation of content and technologies, there exists an endless sea of source material. The public domain, alone, is a bottomless well of opportunity.
Enter J. Dilla, the prodigal beatmaker, whose unquantized, raw beats didn’t just loop—they breathed, turning every hiccup into a heartbeat. Albums like Donuts don’t just play—they speak. They’re conversations across time, dialogues in rhythm and texture. Dilla and DJ Spooky share this: an understanding that art isn’t about perfection; it’s about finding magic in the off-axis, the unexpected, the burnt ends, the socarrat, where things aren’t perfect, but they’re deliciously real. This is a spiritual rhythm, in the pushing and dragging, where we find not just sound but soul.
ACT FIVE: OBRIST’S GREAT BRIDGE--CURATION AS CONNECTION
Hans Ulrich Obrist, the relentless connector, curates not just art but conversations. His exhibitions are spaces where art, culture, and criticism collide. Obrist doesn’t just hang art on walls; he stages dialogues that unfold in the cracks. His work isn’t just about showing art—it’s about reaching for something larger, an invisible bridge between people, ideas, and time.
Every social media feed is a mini-museum, each post a piece of some larger exhibition. The comment feeds come to life, like ignited gasoline. Often without an engine to propel. A structure fire. Obrist’s vision echoes through our daily curation of life—a process of selecting, sharing, and reshaping. We are all curators, picking through digital debris, telling stories that aren’t just about what we see but about how we see ourselves in the in-between. The gaps aren’t voids; they are bridges where we find our humanity reflected back, unguarded and raw.
APOTHEOSIS: THE MAGIC IN-BETWEEN
“There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” – Leonard Cohen
This has been an invitation to occupy the space between words, to dwell in the fractures of these concepts. My hope is that this isn’t merely an article but an attempt at curation, a collage stitched in search of something worth discovering. The magic isn’t in the words themselves; it’s in the gaps that ask you to linger, to question. It’s in you.
Love exists in the spaces between—between dogmas, between political parties, between image and observer, between poet and reader, between DJ and dancer, between two lovers. It’s in the cracks and overlaps that we find what connects us. What exists in the gaps is us.
This is kintsugi for the soul—the art of mending with gold, honoring fractures, and seeing beauty not in spite of them but because of them. Like ancient craftsmen filling broken pottery with gold, we find magic in our flaws and divisions. Each scar tells a story; each break an opportunity for reinvention, and in that golden seam, we see the divine shining through the damaged.
It’s the space our souls occupy as we co-create with this life force and the universe. It’s where duality dissolves into non-duality, unity; the fragmented becomes whole. Oneness. This impulse is more than art; it’s an act of deep knowing. The rhythm keeps moving, shifting, breaking—and the real magic, universal magic, lives waiting to be tapped. What then, exists in the space between, and will we meet there?
With Love, M ❤️🔥🌞
Citations:
Kuleshov, Lev. "The Principles of Montage." Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, 1949.
Burroughs, William S., and Brion Gysin. The Third Mind. Viking Press, 1978.
Tomkins, Calvin. Duchamp: A Biography. Henry Holt and Company, 1996.
Abloh, Virgil. Insert Complicated Title Here. Koenig Books, 2019.
Miller, Paul D. Rhythm Science. MIT Press, 2004.
Bangs, Lester. "The Genius of J. Dilla." Rolling Stone,
2006. Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Ways of Curating. Faber & Faber, 2014.