A recent upsurge of requests for a history of the Atlanta art scene since 1960 (of which I know at first hand only the past quarter century) has reminded me of how I came to conceive the Counterforces blog in the first place—it was originally intended to be the prototype for a magazine, whose time may now have passed, to coordinate recognition of the perennially unrecognized outside their own communities—what Art Papers was intending to do and to some extent still does, within the limits of art that is most likely to be approved by the world's collectors and curators. I wanted to find the art all over the world that was so culture-specific and sometimes so idiosyncratic that no one but an insider of the culture could explain why it was such an extraordinary work, preferably in terms that would make sense of it to readers from other cultures.
This approach would have had something to do with Paul Rabinow's anthropology of the contemporary, and something to do with the condition that Grady Harris presciently termed Besiderdom—for some are insiders, and some are outsiders, and then there are the besiders, a pun on "B-siders," referencing the sometimes perfectly good song on the flip side of the top-selling 45 rpm single—the song that nobody ever heard of, even if it was more interesting than the hit. (The term is obsolete in the age of the mp3, of course, even though the age of the CD produced more than one no-longer-B-side song on the misnamed CD single that turned out to be the really cool stuff next to the commercially inflected main event.)
I never fulfilled my goal of traveling to the world's lesser-known artworlds and putting together a Besider Biennial under some more dignified name. (Thomas Pynchon's preterite Counterforce of the overlooked, insulted and injured, poised over against the self-anointed elect of the global economy in Gravity's Rainbow was my inspiration for the name of the blog, but Counterforce was already taken as a blog name by a Chinese blogger.)
A problem with any such venture is that the efforts in the world's marginal art scenes have so often been underfunded, and the artists have too infrequently made a virtue of necessity by incorporating the arte povera approach into their practice even in the decades when that sort of thing was trendy. Plus the problem that the provinces are sometimes provincial, just like the blinkered mainstream; pre-digital networks, isolated individuals were more likely to be polymathic and interdisciplinary by virtue of having to substitute their own research and ingenuity for enriching intellectual encounters, but they too suffered from the restrictions of what resources could be acquired on a limited budget.
This realization first came home to me long ago when I was invited to be a visiting critic in Shreveport, Louisiana in a year when everyone in town was envious of the sculptor Clyde Connell for achieving national recognition in her old age, and wondered how to get the same fame for themselves. One problem was that Connell fit into a certain national discourse of the moment, and they didn't, whether their work was any good or not. I wondered if there were a way for Shreveport artists to make themselves more interesting to a national audience than they seemed to be at that moment, to make Shreveport known as more than the hometown of Leadbelly. Much has changed there since then, and the town has become a popular site for moviemaking, among other things.
I went on to other geographically isolated but not always unrecognized smaller art scenes, continuing to ask myself the question of how some scenes contextualize themselves successfully and others never do, how some scenes over-congratulate themselves for their accomplishments and never quite address the issues of how they fit into the conditions of a rapidly changing global context, while others slip smoothly into the world of the dominant discourse.
Twenty years on, the issue has been explored tangentially in global biennials, and indeed the institution of the global biennials itself has been deployed as a possible way of addressing the problem in the larger cities of less economically dominant or emerging-dominance cultures. (There are now some two hundred biennials, and the supercool and would-be supercool curators know which ones they wouldn't attend no matter how good they might become, unless their best friends were curating them.)
I knew things had changed when the video showed up of the two Turkish artists wandering through Anatolia asking passing shepherds, "How do you get to Tate Modern?"
Soon thereafter an artist from Skopje produced a video consisting of his monologue on what kind of work he should make to get himself into a global biennial.
The problem I haven't seen addressed is that there are so often single works by single artists that deserve to have gotten global recognition—or sometimes, in the case of Kate Kretz's Blessed Art Thou, have achieved global fame without getting the artist into a single major exhibition or even sold to a collector.
How to contextualize such works and such artists is one of the problems I eventually walked away from on the grounds of being too much an outsider (or besider in Paul Rabinow's sense of the term as well as Grady Harris') to be able to diagnose the difficulty and find a solution.
I do recall a moment in which an official representative of the New York artworld managed to misinterpret a significant moment in regional art—not at all his fault, since we misinterpreted it as well, it having been an urban intervention avant le lettre.
In 1989, our little Thursday Night Artists group of six or eight artists tried to find a new alternative space to follow up on a successful storefront intervention in a freshly gentrifying intown neighborhood (The Reliable Art Show, in the space vacated by the Reliable Paper Company in the then still mostly working-class neighborhood of Virginia-Highland).
Evan Levy got us the raw-space top floor of what was then called the IBM Tower, Philip Johnson's newly opened and much hyped One Atlantic Center.
Art in America managing editor Richard Vine, whose wife Naomi held a top administrative position at the High Museum, served on a panel during the Floor Fifty exhibition in which he dismissed the alternative-space show as a useful place for beginners to show work that wasn't yet ready for galleries.
This was in fact true to some degree—the Thursday Night Artists weekly group attendance had suddenly grown tenfold as soon as word of the show got out, and the original concept morphed a great deal—the four coordinating artists were soon termed the Gang of Four by some of the newer members, and we were accused of elitism in spite of having made clear that this artist-organized exhibition was not the Mattress Factory, there being not enough room for three hundred artists to claim space, much less get past lobby security to install the show.
But the point of the show was less the overall quality of the work as it was the successful insertion of the Atlanta artists who had no gallery representation into the very center of corporate power at the moment, the building that possessed that year's wow factor, and the very height of that piece of architecture, such that developers barged in to use the immense windows to survey the terrain beneath them, refusing to pay the three-dollar admission fee charged on behalf of Art Papers, which at that time was still allowing the group to use its office as a meeting place. (This changed later.) It was a social and political intervention of significance only in Atlanta, so I don't fault Richard Vine for missing the point. (I do have problems with his later attack on Walter Benjamin as a man who was obviously worthless as a theorist because he never could earn a decent living, much less establish a professional practice in business or academia.)
Unlike the organizers of the Mattress Factory, whose slogan was "We know no one on Andrews Square" (a metaphor mostly for the Fay Gold Gallery that showed all the trendy artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring and a little later Robert Mapplethorpe), we knew the folks on Andrews Square and we wanted to do something different anyway.
Clyde Broadway's installation summed up the secret goals of many of the artists in "Floor Fifty," however; like the Turkish videographers trying to insert themselves into the financial success that comes with inclusion in global biennials, Clyde was both satirizing and celebrating the overheated art market of the Eighties that was about to be clobbered by the great recession of 1990.
Goghing My Way? depicted the artist as a hitchhiker in a formal suit, trying to be picked up by a chauffeured convertible conveying ukiyo-e geishas holding armloads of Van Gogh irises. (A Japanese corporation had made history at that moment for buying a Van Gogh at an astronomical price, though it was Fifteen Sunflowers rather than Irises, which had gone to another collector.) Broadway's painting was cordoned off by a velvet rope and priced at the selling price for the Van Gogh painting.
Dorky the joke may have been, but it was elegantly executed and summed up the mindset of the Eighties just as they were coming to a spectacular end that would be succeeded by the focus on globalism and diversity that was marked the following year by "The Decade Show" and prefigured that year by the controversial and perhaps—or perhaps not—misguided "Magiciens de la Terre."
Clyde, whose deliberately confrontational Trinity is the most popular painting in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, remains one of those transgressive painters who operates so far on the margins that he has very nearly fallen off the page. I have written about this "Floor Fifty" episode previously on this blog, back at the end of 2008 when i was establishing a theoretical basis for what turned out to be an effort displaced by the need to earn a living writing about the local scene on a week-by-week basis, plus of course natural inertia and lack of opportunity to look at shows relevant to the issues on which I like to reflect.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Other entanglements, plus my wish to complete long trains of philosophical thought on my other blog, have led me to neglect Counterforces, which keeps getting links to it nonetheless.
The death of longtime Museum of Fine Arts Houston director Peter Marzio, and the unrelated news that what might be termed Max Anderson's Thornton Dial retrospective from the Indianapolis Museum of Art will be shown in Atlanta, has reminded me of one of those utterly forgotten controversies that caused a huge storm at the time, as so many artworld events have.
Whether Dial's homage to John Lewis and the Selma Bridge would have been better served by being in Houston rather than in the city for which it was commissioned, I leave for others to decide. It was sited in its present Freedom Park location after having been intended for a more visually prominent space, and indeed it tends to be overlooked by drivers to the point that it rarely arouses even curiosity.
Anderson's longtime involvement with the work of Thornton Dial roused its own controversies, but this may be a case of all's well that ends well, although it has not ended completely and it has taken the better part of two decades to reach this point in the sometimes less than edifying tale of artworld reception of this extraordinary self-taught artist.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
long absences from this blog
I have been writing reviews, mostly on artscriticatl.com though some on burnaway.org, that explore (by implication) the theories behind a regionally inflected but globally focused art; what it would require, whether it is possible, whether it is possible for the world to comprehend the stakes behind the local in ways that would make the local of interest to all the world's other localities.
While I ponder whether it is possible to put all of this in a generalized blog post, I shall say that I am pleased with Adrian Searle's description in the Guardian of Turner Prize 2010 winner Susan Philipsz' work as affording "difficult yet accessible pleasures."
While I ponder whether it is possible to put all of this in a generalized blog post, I shall say that I am pleased with Adrian Searle's description in the Guardian of Turner Prize 2010 winner Susan Philipsz' work as affording "difficult yet accessible pleasures."
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
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
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
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
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.
—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.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
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.
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.
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