tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post7415192607569225262..comments2023-11-22T06:38:33.507-08:00Comments on Counterforces and Other Little Jokes: argumentation, threelittlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-46696577114578186082008-12-01T07:33:00.000-08:002008-12-01T07:33:00.000-08:00We keep arguing past one another...my point was pr...We keep arguing past one another...my point was precisely that the art wasn't very interesting in terms of the conceptual issues I keep raising...and in terms of the ones you yourself raise; and the work that set out to pay homage to precursors showed instead how 20th-21st century consciousness doesn't seem to be able to enter into the life-world of those precursors, which is what we might expect. <BR/><BR/>No, your show wasn't about beauty, and I didn't say it was...it was about the intersection of skepticism and belief, of mystery and deception, of what constitutes adequate grounds for forming an opinion, of how we come to judge our own decisions on such matters...more later.<BR/><BR/>And I specifically said that one of the circle makers acknowledged having something to do with the sacred, so you are accusing me of the opposite of what I said about them in the very beginning.littlejokehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-12907137301055221142008-12-01T07:31:00.000-08:002008-12-01T07:31:00.000-08:00This comment has been removed by the author.littlejokehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-76999264460599249932008-11-30T12:01:00.000-08:002008-11-30T12:01:00.000-08:00also: i would counter your statement that the circ...also: i would counter your statement that the circle makers (whoever/whatever they are) have nothing to do with the sacred (whatever that is, another discussion) but that cosmograms do. They are interesting precisely BECAUSE they are trying to be sacred (that is, a site where certain kinds of energy, the human and the inhuman, meet -- from THAT meeting comes a certain sort of beauty, both human and/or an unbearable Rilkean sort of beauty, if i can put it that way.... ) and that they are, when they do report, self assuredly trying to manifest SOMETHING....except for the discredity Doug and Dave who were mostly trying to manifest another pint.<BR/><BR/>o.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-52811809233073133882008-11-30T11:42:00.000-08:002008-11-30T11:42:00.000-08:00well. I guess this is a place we have to jump off ...well. I guess this is a place we have to jump off in different directions Jerry. I have nothing against beauty per se...but given my druthers i take 'interesting' over 'beauty' most times. I suppsoe your argument must of necessity be, that they are co-terminous. <BR/><BR/>No, the most 'interesting' thing about the crop circles TO ME is precisely NOT that they are beautiful, though they generally are -- but there are some which are not classically beautiful but which are just as enigmatic as the 'sacred geometry' ones (and in what way is 'sacred geometry' different from a standard Euclidian text book beautiful proof? or is it any different?) -- and the sacred geometry ones are not interesting because they are beautiful -- they are interesting precisely because they are enigmatic as to origin and anonymous as to their creators ..viz see: the secton on the acheiropoieton in the catalog essay. Beauty fits in there somewhere i suppose but it was not th jumping off point for the show. that is, that was not the curators criterior for the show. If someone chose to judge it on something it was not attempting to accomplish (not that it was successful necessarily in another direction) ...well, it may be a productive mis-reading but that's about it.<BR/><BR/>and at this point is precisely where things get interesting and the narrow gate appears.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-61881502207136409892008-11-30T10:29:00.000-08:002008-11-30T10:29:00.000-08:00"Two Thousand Words That Do Not Mention the Econom..."Two Thousand Words That Do Not Mention the Economic Crisis of 2008" is the relevant post, October 1, vis-a-vis Duchamp and Darwin and other topics relevant to our discussion here, Robert. <BR/><BR/>I guess I could add the odd relationship between art and belief; what crop circles and cosmograms have in common with each other and not with alien abductions (which I type each time as "abjections") or other such topics is that they are visually pretty. <BR/><BR/>Cosmograms are gorgeous. Crop circles are gorgeous. Psychogeographies are non-visual, but by that very fact are neither pretty nor ugly except when they are projected as a fiction like the Bodmin Moor Zodiac, which is actually quite gorgeous considered as a zodiac. <BR/><BR/>So your show is exactly about beauty, or that is its main linkage. Crop circles and cosmograms have no other point of commonality of which we can be certain, the one not being associated with the sacred and the other, traditionally, being about nothing else. <BR/><BR/>You can, of course, bracket the aesthetic dimensions and talk about the ways in which both embody fictive meaning, which is a strategy I have used in the past and present to link really bad novels with great ones because both of them deal with the same phenomena and have parallel structures that outweigh the one's aesthetic failure and the other's graceful success.littlejokehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-63199138793375927722008-11-30T10:17:00.000-08:002008-11-30T10:17:00.000-08:00My argument was precisely that "beauty is in the e...My argument was precisely that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"...that the makers of the sacred geometry presumably see no divergence between their productions and the gorgeous stuff that their forebears produced. Which others may not consider gorgeous at all. <BR/><BR/>And of course the point is that it is and ought to be both about hoaxes and about contemporary belief and about the intersection between the two in belief-ful fictions. <BR/><BR/>You may be reading this in reverse order, as I am, since I say at the beginning of this sequence that I didn't like the show because its belief-ful parts seem to be a descent (as Kali Yuga would lead us to expect) from their forebears and its belief-less parts seem to succeed neither as concepts nor as aesthetically compelling objects. <BR/><BR/>By the way, I have written frequently that Duchamp's artworks are precisely retinal pleasures; Duchamp couldn't make an ugly artwork to save himself, even if he pretended he could.<BR/><BR/>Whereas the fundamentalist Painter of Light wouldn't know real Painters of Light if they, and not their paintings, came up and bit him on the ass. Nor can he discern the difference between biologically and mathematically informed beauty and sentimental sappiness. (You will recall my quarrels with the author of <I>The Art Instinct</I> about all of this, on one or another of my blogs, don't remember which one.)littlejokehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-86241479286884291462008-11-30T07:30:00.000-08:002008-11-30T07:30:00.000-08:00For some reason that last post got mixed up with S...For some reason that last post got mixed up with Sloane's log in to counterforces...wouldn't want her to take the blame for my ramblings/mis-spellings/misreadings....<BR/><BR/>oRbAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-71069116597957345032008-11-30T07:22:00.000-08:002008-11-30T07:22:00.000-08:00let me make a guess jerry and surmise that you did...let me make a guess jerry and surmise that you didn't like the show, seemingly on the basis of several aspects. (btw: as a nota bene, I will say that under many circumstances, hell, let's just be po-mo enough and say 'most' circumstances, the only way we can read is to mis-read. But once we embark on a path of mis-reading, intentionally or not,there is no clear path out, unlike irony or sarcasmm which tend to burn theleselves out or encapsulate themselves in untouchable [and hence inability to touch] positions or subjectivities. All that is then left is what eve sedgewick calls 'paranoid reading' -- and viewing of course. I would say that the charge of sarcasm hefted at artists in the show -- minus one or two perhaps -- devolves more to re/viewers.)<BR/><BR/>On the charge that the show is not 'pretty' enough: fair enough. But since when did beauty become the prime criterion for judging shows after, um at a bare minimum lets say Duchamp, or even some dozen of art movements in the early twentieth century. Perhaps I should have invited that 'Painter of Light' to come in and pretty the show up...but then, according to your Nietzsche quote, that wouldn't have been any sort of truth at all. But I wonder what, then, the truth is that the show presents, that something more 'artful' would be better presented to hide us from the horror?<BR/><BR/>One could say that [whatever this 'thing' is under discussion] is a very narrow gate indeed, wherein 'beauty' as traditionally conceived may not be adequate to the task (the bringing of mathemes into the discussion brings both clarity and muddiness into the situation, so much so that no point going there w/o causing even more misreading/confusion).<BR/><BR/>In fact, if I maybe so presumptous (and who's going to stop me?) as to quote from the Maillaissoux book again:<BR/><BR/>"If we look through the aperture which we have opened up onto the absolute, what we see there is a rather menacing power -- something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities,yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fierciest storms, then the eeriest bright spells , if only for an interval of disquietening calm ... We see something akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceivable for phsyiss, since it is capable of destroying,without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity even a god, even God."<BR/><BR/>so I guess 'art' must be protecting us from that 'truth' .. but thenwhatever happened to that bromide that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'.<BR/><BR/>But the other criticism is even more baffling: that is, the show should have either come down on the side just doing a 'hoax' show or it should have just tried to have a beautiful 'sacred geometry' show that we could get lost in (whatever that might mean..some new agey version of thomas kinkaid perhaps?) Well, doing either of those things wasn't what the show was about...if anything, and I'm speaking from a curators pov, it was about that narrow gate which you alluded to jerry and then dropped (as the de-cons know -- and this wasn't a de-con show OR a cynical show) re: belief and unbelief. I guess for some beauty makes (pick one) those go down easier. but again, it wasn't about hosting a pretty show.<BR/><BR/>And also there was some peculiar comments about how much greater the original phenomena was than anything in the show...welll, DUH! of course....it wasn't trying to recreate the phenomena, it was an artistic response to it...and while I'm at it, I think that katy malone's part was one of the more successful (if we even want to speak int those terms which reviewers do) in combining all the elemest of the title --- which was also very ugly, perhaps hence carrying the greatest truth eh?<BR/><BR/>ok, i grow weary but one last thing: I believe that if there is an appearance of a Great Mystery along the line of those which are revered from the past, it will have to GO THROUGH and come out on the other side of something that looks 'like' the american/western thing, replete with hypercapitalism. It won't 'manifest' as Loki or buddha, or whatever -- except a mask to be thrown away. (And btw it is simply not the case that all of the more incredible circle formations have been England).<BR/><BR/>One thing that can be saidd about mis-readings: they are very productive, a good thing....and when all is siad and done, mayb ethe ONLYthing.<BR/>oRbthe wild radishhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05965214820387784888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-37686713758435731762008-11-29T22:24:00.000-08:002008-11-29T22:24:00.000-08:00The manner in which you present your opinion of th...The manner in which you present your opinion of the show is interesting. The use of the blog and your exposed phases of personal associations & thoughts.I enjoy its well thought out honesty and how,in doing so-slyly continues the theme of the show...by the very thought provocation it shows in its frustration. These posts read almost as if is your orchestrated belated entry into the show itself. I am wondering if you consciously did this as a sort of winknudge, but then i decide it doesn't matter...<BR/>you did it.it exists.just as crop circles do.<BR/>great writing,sir!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com