more theory-minded thoughts less likely to stir up trouble

I have written a temporarily postponed post that I believe I should save for a more propitious moment. This one is less intellectually defensible but less likely to irritate people since it can be dismissed as a piece of whacked-out off-the-cuff fantasy.

Someday there will be time to have arguments but right now there is too much to be done.

Patrick Harpur, in his maddeningly elusive "history of the imagination" The Philosophers' Secret Fire, resurrects the Eastern Orthodox (among others) notion of "spirit" versus "soul" as opposites that nevertheless complement and complete one another: "Not only purity but order, clarity, enlightenment are spirit's watchwords.... but soul is always at its side, obscuring, muddying, and muddling. For soul favors the labyrinthine ways of slow reflection, not rapid thought. Things cannot be made straight because they are intrinsically crooked and ambiguous, cannot be spotlit because they are intrinsically twilit; cannot be wiped away because they are harnessed to a long history whose traces cannot be kicked over." (That errant extended metaphor, like the divagation of this parenthetical aside, illustrates the point I am about to make.)

In reality, each side needs the other to achieve anything like depth or profundity; highbrow spiritual abstraction without the messiness of a recalcitrant materiality becomes dry, detached and generally uninteresting, while lowbrow soul without the ordering principle of style or a sense of doing things well turns quickly into sloppiness. (This is why Lowbrow's meticulous attention to a sense of craft and/or craftiness makes it a two or three generation art movement, while bad art remains merely bad art, and not the Bad Art of the show of that name that changed the art world at the end of the 1970s.)

Or as Immanuel Kant put it, "Concepts without [physical perceptions] are empty; [physical perceptions] without concepts are blind." (That's my combo of the old translation "Concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind," because I don't like the unstylish lack of parallelism in the new translation. Plus I want to distort Kant for my own purposes here.)

Okay, so all this is a commonplace: Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian, all that stuff. It doesn't mean anybody has quite gotten what it all means. "You say I am repeating something I have said before. I shall say it again," as T. S. Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets.

I want to say it again because I want to revisit the idea of the carnivalesque, not that I remember that much of what Mikhail Bakhtin actually had to say about it. Maybe I just want to rethink the notion.

I want to do this because the closing event of the Art of Such n Such's "Inspire! Incite! Ignite!" is coming up on Friday November 12 (http://www.artofsuchnsuch.com/) and I have been trying to get my head around the larger implications of all this stuff without complete success ever since the opening night. (The multi-artist, multi-state assemblage of mostly non-sexual transgression that is the wall-sized Peep-O-Rama—a structure constructed by Jeffry and Nanette Johnson to house the dioramas' transgressive weirdness—deserves a critical commentary all its own, independent of the fire sculptures and the many varieties of performers and purveyors of puppetry and possible prevarication.)

Since I not going to get round to writing this rethinking, check out what these folks did in Austin: http://austinist.com/2009/10/09/art_outside_interview_the_art_of_su.php

And those of my readers within driving distance of Atlanta can always tool over to Eyedrum on Friday night at eight p.m. for the festivities: www.eyedrum.org for calendar and directions for those of you who need either one.

Meanwhile there are other art reviews to be written which also raise the issue of craft and the carnivalesque, at least implicitly. I shall get at it.

the global, the local, and this coming weekend in Decatur

Right now I am mostly writing art reviews and posting vast theoretical speculations on joculum.livejournal.com, but life is thought globally and lived locally (the old slogan evinces a firm grasp of the obvious). So for those readers who need to know that the Atlanta artworld holiday-sale season is beginning post-Day of the Dead, be aware that Decatur's Beacon Hill Studios will begin the process with a fundraiser that should be as memorable as last year's, which featured the first Atlanta screening of Sara Hornbacher's video meditation on architecture and Walter Benjamin that premiered at a conference in France and has since found its way into the wryly titled Greater Decatur Quadrennial.

Anyway, those who are looking for ideas from me should go to my joculum blog or to burnaway.org and artscriticatl.com, and those who are in need of information should read the following:

Art 4 Art’s Sake

Beacon Hill's Artists Open Studio Tour & Art Benefit for Decatur High School’s Art Programs

Beacon Hill Artist Studios
125 Electric Avenue
Decatur, GA 30030

Friday, November 5th, 5 - 9 pm

Saturday, November 6th, 3 - 8 pm

$10 suggested donation at door.

Reception: Part of Decatur Art Walk
Friday, November 5, 5 pm - 9 pm

Open Studios & Demonstrations:
Saturday, November 6, 3 pm - 8 pm

Beacon Hill Artists:
Sarah Collman, Rebecca DesMarais, Rodney Grainger, Tony Greco,
Ron Holt, Sara Hornbacher, Lynne Moody, Patty O'Keefe-Hutton, Jo Peterson

Guest Artists include:
Mario Petrirena, John Roberts, Steve Sachs, Helen Durant, Candace Hassem,
Jill Ruhlman, Judy Parady & Tom Meyer, Suzy Shultz, Melissa Walker,
Richard Walker, Andrea Emmons, Stephanie Kolpy & Matthew Sugarman,
Brian Randall, Stephanie Smith, Karen Tunnell, Eilis Crean, Nancy Hunter,
Elizabeth Lide, Terence Monaghan, Kathy Colt, Teneisha Jones, Valerie Gilbert,
Gena VanDerKloot, Michelle Jordan, Xenia Zed and more.

Directions: The Beacon Hill Artists Studio are located at the corner of
W. Trinity and Electric Ave. in downtown Decatur. (The studio entrance
is on the backside of the building off Electric Ave.) Parking is available i
in the rear lot and kitty-corner across W,. Trinity in the county government lot.

For further details contact the studio director, Rodney Grainger (404) 210-9846

Art also plays a role in all of this, but for now....

I am still trying to absorb the implications of the Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal functioning as the keynote speaker at the Symposium on Compassion Meditation on the second day of the Dalai Lama's visit to Emory and at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in ten days' time, both events following his October 17 New York Times op-ed "Morals Without God": http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/morals-without-god/?src=me&ref=general
—an essay copiously illustrated by images from Hieronymus Bosch, incidentally.

The Dalai Lama, as one might expect, was fascinated with the notion that empathy exists in species that have the mirror-recognition capacity (i.e., the capacity to recognize themselves in a mirror, an ability thus far discovered in dolphins, elephants, apes, and humans) and wanted to know if self-recognition and empathy was possible in other species. De Waal opined that dogs seem to have a certain empathic capacity without the mirror-recognition facility, and certain birds, suggesting that the link between avian and mammalian species would be the reptilian, where crocodiles share the capacity for proto-empathy in that they nurture their offspring. (There was much else said about all this, some of it leading one audience member to remark that they could have used an evolutionary biologist up there among the psychologists and primatologists, to straighten out the details of which species possessed which capacities and why.)

The keynote address to the AAR will also be on empathy in mammalian species, the subject of de Waal's latest book. The panel discussion was on how empathy evolves into actively self-aware compassion in human beings and whether there are practices that can heighten compassion by inducing changes in brain physiology.

The Dalai Lama's visit was inaugurated with the presentation of four new science textbooks from the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative, a project to make all 20,000 Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns literate in the basics of contemporary scientific disciplines. Paging through the new books on Evolution, Cells and Genes, and, I believe, brain physiology (I didn't see two of the four titles), I reflected that this was uncompromisingly serious material, introductory but not oversimplified, and that I rather wished I could buy copies and refresh my own knowledge with the English text on the left-hand pages.

The most promising candidates from the monasteries will be sent to Emory to pursue advanced study in physics, psychology, et al., having completed the advanced course of study in Tibetan Buddhist academic institutions. The intent is to create an intensive dialogue between Tibetan Buddhist knowledge of the mind and body and the scientific disciplines as presently constituted in world society.

The Dalai Lama was once again fascinated by the results of experiments conducted with compassion meditation techniques in terms of measurable changes in the amygdala and other physiological as well as psychological results. The aforementioned skeptic in the audience suggested that at the very least the variables of age and cultural experience of the research subjects should have been factored into the experiments.

Whatever one thinks of the adequacy of the experimental parameters (and it seemed to me that the mere fact that the research subjects were motivated to enroll in the experiment was a variable to be considered, though control groups given standard cognitive-psychology methods were used as well as meditators), what seemed most significant was the fact that three different universities (Stanford, Wisconsin, and Emory) have considered secularized forms of Tibetan meditation worthy of study as behavioral modification techniques measurably affecting brain physiology, and that the spiritual head of the world's Tibetan Buddhists was eager to absorb any and all such materially based insights into the structure of Buddhist education.

The outcome of the scientific education of 20,000 practitioners of a sophisticated Buddhist system of psychological education and theoretical debate will be fascinating to witness. Leafing through the textbook on evolution, I found myself thinking that standard Buddhist notions regarding conditioned origination would be reinforced by the shifting degrees of reproductive success found in changing environmental circumstances. The Dalai Lama has pointed out that the Buddha insisted that when a doctrine has been found to be contradicted by the facts, it must be discarded. Thus traditional Tibetan cosmology is to be replaced by contemporary models of the universe, for example.

At the same time, what John Blofeld wrote some decades ago regarding Tibetan Buddhism still obtains: the practice is culturally specific, even though it encodes a level of psychological insight that Blofeld had not discovered elsewhere. He was fearful to discard what seemed to be extraneous aspects, lest they turn out to contain some key element he didn't understand was such. This hasn't changed among American adherents.

Thus at the North American seat of Drepung Loseling monastery, there are an impressive array of teachings and empowerment ceremonies by visiting Tibetan spiritual teachers, all of them arisen from the circumstances of a culture at the far end of the Silk Road where practices and beliefs from Isfahan and Alexandria mingled with those of India and Central Asia. The cultural differences matter; for example, the colors of the robes that were meant to make the monks physically unattractive to laypersons turn out to be enormously appealing to American audiences. There are issues of cultural collision and fusion to be addressed that lie beyond the immediate challenge of reconfiguring Tibetan Buddhism for its historic adherents while preserving the essence of Tibetan culture in the diaspora. (A two-day conference on this latter topic is in progress as I write this.)

But the experiment of bringing a formerly isolated spiritual practice into the twenty-first century is one that raises so many compelling intellectual and existential issues that I am truly delighted to see it taking place. These confrontational times scarcely seem propitious for the rise of a radical religious empiricism, but that is what seems to be evolving at a speed I wouldn't have thought possible.

Antakya weighs in with its 2nd biennial

Having missed the 1st Antakya Biennial altogether except as a concept, I am thrilled to learn of the second one. Antakya is one of those contested cities and districts whose history fascinates me. Under its colonial name of Hatay, the district found its way in fictionalized form into one of the Indiana Jones films, but its actual history is as improbable in its own fashion as anything in Indiana Jones. Today the city is undergoing the same transformations and tensions of globalization as anyplace else.

What interests me also is that there are fewer international artstars than one has come to expect (Renzo Martens and Cyprian Gaillard head the list); most of the artists in the biennial are Turkish, but the international co-curator alongside the one from Istanbul is a Bulgarian living in Brussels, who is organizing parallel events for the Biennial in Sofia and Brussels. (That both curators are female is no longer an event out of the ordinary; neither is the notion of a curator from one country living in another, but the mix of regionality and trans-European location is intriguing to an untraveled provincial like myself. We are used to the same fifteen curators being brought in with great fanfare rather than a just short of homegrown international biennial that nevertheless undertakes its own brand of border crossings.)

Here is an extract from www.antakyabienali.org regarding the biennial, which seems to be addressed simultaneously to the citizens of Antakya and to a global public (but not particularly to a global artworld, most of which will most likely ignore the event):



"'Thank you for your understanding' is the title of a work by artist Simon Kentgens, which will be shown in the 2nd Antakya Biennial. It refers to the signs we often see in the city, when public or private interventions obstruct our common spaces.

"In the context of Antakya, 'Thank you for your understanding' is a way to address the relationship between the city and its inhabitants, but also between the biennial and its local public, as a mutual effort for understanding and working together. More generally, 'Thank you for your understanding' explores the im/possibilities of finding a common ground on which we can stand as public - both in the exhibition and in the city.

"Today, our world remains fragmented and our individual efforts dispersed behind the unifying façade of globalization. Discovering what could be truly common means finding solidarities and shared sensibilities that are not based on the reigning form of universality today: capitalism. In the 18th century, aesthetics seemed to promise such an alternative - a universal common ground or "common sense." For Kant it was in beauty that such a common sense was to be found. Even though beauty in the classical sense is not a category we would assign to art today, can we nevertheless take this example and imagine art as proposing such an alternative common space, a commonality beyond the market?

"Starting from the aesthetic grounds of our common existence, the Biennial will focus on the particular case of Antakya as a city in the process of rapid globalization and transformation. The city as the spatial model of the way society is organized and functions today is one of our common grounds of experience as human beings. Following David Harvey we will claim that the question of what kind of city we want cannot be separated from what kind of people we want to be and what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. Therefore the remaking of ourselves through changing the city is one of our most fundamental, human rights.

"Finally, the Biennial will experiment with its own form as a global, temporary, exportable structure. Instead of negating its role as a universalizing agent, the Antakya Biennial will try to challenge it specifically by offering a common space for both international artists and the local public."



The description I have since found at http://ferhatozgur.blogspot.com/ confirms my beliefs regarding the biennial's intentions (and provides much better information regarding Antakya's condition as a zone of multiple cultures, religions and languages):
"Antakya is a place where the streets and even the shops still do little to encourage a hectic consumerism. The banks of the river and the hills outside the town offer benches to contemplate the view but no cafes or restaurants to capitalize on it. The many historical and architectural sites continue to be part of the daily urban life and cultural heritage programs have not yet turned the city into a museum. The only museum has no shop and it is even difficult to find postcards from Antakya. However the city culturally, socially, spatially and economically going through a rapid transformation. A new airport is being constructed, most of the big old houses are being turned into hotels, each day a new souvenir shop or tourism office is being opened instead of small ateliers and etc. Just recently a big shopping mall construction has started in the outskirt of the city, which will definitely change the social, and public life of the inhabitants and understanding of the public space. And inevitably these transformations are followed by gentrification process (or we should say concurrently) in the city center and Antakya Biennial is also a result/part of this transformation. The Antakya biennial finds itself in between the needs and ambitions of the growing and developing city, and the foreign, often nostalgic, gaze. But between the drive towards globalization and its reverse but inherent demand for local difference, is there something of the old universal we can rescue, some common ground that can unite us, while still respecting all particularities?

"...the 2nd Antakya Biennial is aiming to explore the social and cultural structure of today’s society through Antakya and build a discussion platform for Antakya inhabitants to question these changes and to invite them to take an active part in remaking the city—in other words remaking themselves....

"The biennial will also expand internationally and each of its editions will collaborate with different partner countries. In 2010 these are Belgium, Holland and Bulgaria. Under the umbrella of Antakya Biennial, parallel events co-organized with local institutions will take place in Brussels, Amsterdam and Sofia. They will extend the questions we pose in Antakya and confront them to different local contexts.

"Antakya Biennial is the sole international art exhibition in the region. As a result it has a stronger impact on the locality than most other biennials. This is why Antakya biennial proposes a structure that is much more locally oriented. Such a structure will be a more challenging but less standardized framework for the collaboration of local and international artists and organizations on the grounds of the biennial. However, Antakya biennial is not simply a "regional" event. Instead we see the biennial as a global laboratory for artistic and intellectual exchange that has its starting point in the local situation of Antakya but reaches out and exchanges experiences with other locations since the specifics to Antakya mimics the global transformation."

It will be interesting to learn how the citizens of Antakya respond to this highly public presentation of contemporary art. Since two of my friends are fluent in Turkish, I suppose I could find out in detail.

In lieu of the much more ambitious things I wanted to post

It would be good if all of us knew our specific neurological deficits. There are so many ways of being miswired that most of us are compensating for lacks, and also using additional capacities, that we don’t even know we have.

I suspect that curators and specific types of artists don’t get along because they view the world differently…not that they are differently acculturated, they just don’t see the same things the same way even when they are using the same language.

It would take entirely too much time to unpack the meaning of this proposition. It isn’t particularly materialist-reductionist, but it seriously modifies the social-reductionist side of things.

Perhaps the point is that nothing can ever be reduced to anything else. Far from being explicable by simpler causes (although we do like to disguise the causes that embarrass us or that we don’t even wish to know), we are usually so encapsulated in our own imprisoning partial viewpoints that we don’t even understand what it is we don’t understand.

Convergent Frequencies, The Sartorialist, et al.

So, okay, let’s ask it: Is The Sartorialist an August Sander for the twenty-first century?

Being practiced at condensing conversations, Scott Schuman brought up August Sander almost at the utterance of the words “art critic” by the gallery manager introducing me to him last night. And being as how a traveling show of Sander portraits at the Goethe-Institut was one of the first exhibitions I reviewed for Art Papers, I responded viscerally and positively to the reference.

Actually, the globally famous photographer and blogger also brought up the names of street photographers and such projects as Bruce Davidson’s East One Hundredth Street, but only to compare them with Sander’s practice, and with his own, which is something like a blend of the two.

Sander was looking for social typifications, and that required photographing significantly attired Weimar Republic individuals in settings that represented their environment. The results were haunting works of art. The Sartorialist is also doing something more art-oriented rather than simple trendspotting/coolhunting, but the typifications he seeks out are ones of creative style, not social roles. Even so, Schuman considers it important (as do I) to contextualize the place in which the styles were individually generated, so the backgrounds in his photographs count for as much as the faces and clothes.

Okay, I’ll drop the sociology of knowledge “typifications” verbiage regarding August Sander. Sander was convinced he could show how different people’s self-perceptions were revealed by what they wore, because in the Weimar Republic, clothes really did make the man. (It was the 1920s, and Germany’s women also went in for self-definition that revealed profession and social rank more than personal preferences.)

Fashionistas around the world are as often as not trying to project an image that has nothing to do with their day job, and sometimes is meant to disguise social rank rather than advertise it. One notable exception is the distinguished businessman or -woman, whose fashion sense is meant to convey a blending of personal identity with professional demeanor. The professions also generate fashion trendsetters, of course, adept at combining the expected dress code with subtle transgressions that make for a creative projection of individual style in a visually repressed environment.

(This is my opinion, not Schuman’s, and I may be dead wrong because I’m missing the alertness to subtle social clues and signifiers that goes into serious coolhunting. I imagine the skilled trendspotter can guess income level and likely place of employment no matter how clever the individual thinks he or she is at obscuring it. Certainly the blog comments on a Sartorialist photograph, pointing out $1200 sneakers, are from fashion-informed individuals who can probably also tell what came from a last-season thrift store discard and what's being worn as a personal statement. This is not my area of specialization. However, I can see that The Sartorialist incorporates a lot more analytical savvy into the mix than most fashion enthusiasts or academic theorists would suspect—it just isn't expressed in theory-heavy terms. People are always doing and saying more than they believe they are doing and saying; it's what makes personal style so revelatory in the first place.)

So here is The Sartorialist, traveling the world making on-street portraits of strikingly attired individuals, and everyone is trying to figure out how to get The Sartorialist to notice them.

The fact that Schuman's portraits, like Sander’s, are serious art probably doesn’t matter to most of his would-be subjects. The instant global fame does. Motivations differ, of course, and some presumably do care about the art as well as the fashion.

Knowing that nothing I could do would impress The Sartorialist, I opted for the best projection of my individual identity with a decades-out-of-date look for the disheveled critic: a black Franz Kafka in Prague t-shirt worn with my one threadbare grey jacket. (It is almost time to hit Finders Keepers in search of the new autumn jacket.)

I was not surprised to see that the art and design students who worship The Sartorialist had turned out in their Sartorialist-pleasing best. The level of enthusiasm was gratifying.

William Gibson has devoted his newest novel—the logical conclusion to the trilogy that began with Pattern Recognition—to the topic of secret brands, anti-commercial marketing, trendspotting, coolhunting, and such, and I confess that if I had had time and money, what would have delighted me most would have been to show up in a denim jacket with a Gabriel Hounds logo, which coincidentally sounds like it is very close to the baby-headed bird logo of Susan Bridges’ now-defunct Big Angel Blowout. I don’t think I’ll have one ready in time for Gibson’s book tour appearance at SCAD on Monday evening, either.

There is much, much more to be said in that regard, but it will have to wait for a later post. Barring misadventure, I shall write a review of the show at Hagedorn that will discuss individual works from The Sartorialist.

In the meantime, please check out "Convergent Frequencies" at Krog and Irwin Streets tonight (Saturday) or Sunday evening, before it goes away. Matt Gilbert's computer-altered videos, collaboratively produced with live performance by musicians and dancers, blends with Nat Slaughter's extraordinary sound pieces and Matt Haffner's wall murals in a one-weekend-only pushing of the boundaries for this Southern city. Kudos to i45 and Possible Futures for creating a kickoff event for the season that was the only possible followup to Hagedorn's spectacular reception for the Sartorialist exhibition. Crossing paths there with Caroline Hust, fresh from her $10,000 Kate Spade Award as a freshly graduated RISD textile designer, it was very nearly possible to believe that Gibson is still as much in touch with the subterranean social trends of his time as he was in the days when he ruled the world of cyberpunk fiction.

Actually, I do believe that, but what do I know?

I'm excited, but a little bit at a time

For those who imagine I have recently received a windfall, my grant will be disbursed in installments over the course of two years to permit me to continue my practice.

Just so you'll know. I am, of course, unimaginably grateful to Louis Corrigan personally and the new foundation, to which I have alluded obliquely in the previous post.