tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59175433359256648342024-03-12T18:32:38.691-07:00Counterforces and Other Little Jokeslittlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.comBlogger325125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-49844918925057361892022-09-26T11:33:00.003-07:002022-09-26T11:52:54.891-07:00a shamelessly subjective recollection with scholarly implications<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMxUraFI-d-aRU-oosJOuTqOaxlT8Dxpo0oS3fwxW4WH_n8Z2dUT3Kx3IW0BojXQPX27RPpBs4T2QHkvh_zRuLknyU6EK4_yb442gBpBbDPRJqdurK84reqiDHSspQLX1qwSJRLYA0MyQrn_LW6YZKE-d17pFfJcj1lucLJHiUKsoKO2Wtuzeapfo9/s1196/story%20one,%20alt.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="764" data-original-width="1196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMxUraFI-d-aRU-oosJOuTqOaxlT8Dxpo0oS3fwxW4WH_n8Z2dUT3Kx3IW0BojXQPX27RPpBs4T2QHkvh_zRuLknyU6EK4_yb442gBpBbDPRJqdurK84reqiDHSspQLX1qwSJRLYA0MyQrn_LW6YZKE-d17pFfJcj1lucLJHiUKsoKO2Wtuzeapfo9/s400/story%20one,%20alt.jpg"/></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgOUcVxK4L_K6nwtXcdHFJu6u_DPaRH3gAT9EpYflsOQQT0ZpS6PUWr-IgLe6lCBWmiGNSz_Cin5Mme2H6NucpgNZuzjhbG5YgTjG27bCKAzzwZFp2rSdaIkJSMcUQsiTiEqmFtCdpoDxvovOXA5-vtl6oSDYdG_ALcV2YpXvOg1cyvm4HWfZ8CrNx/s1196/story,%20two%20.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="819" data-original-width="1196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgOUcVxK4L_K6nwtXcdHFJu6u_DPaRH3gAT9EpYflsOQQT0ZpS6PUWr-IgLe6lCBWmiGNSz_Cin5Mme2H6NucpgNZuzjhbG5YgTjG27bCKAzzwZFp2rSdaIkJSMcUQsiTiEqmFtCdpoDxvovOXA5-vtl6oSDYdG_ALcV2YpXvOg1cyvm4HWfZ8CrNx/s400/story,%20two%20.jpg"/></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt4pkFWGthZRYi4OR5BFLuMZWAa6tyMz-kgnxOcbRpG6XuM6XUk4ODQiM5HeegtKNi6L8Tv1aU0AWFAcbXSVnTS8PmLTJKy85OgaonaWg321J9se0h6aZ9NHavJ9GT_zAoNHHc18AfqwKQGEbufktpEtTpkkxcukTirs0u6mb4Wmyly5dYPXMvMkdK/s2016/story,%20three.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="1512" data-original-width="2016" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt4pkFWGthZRYi4OR5BFLuMZWAa6tyMz-kgnxOcbRpG6XuM6XUk4ODQiM5HeegtKNi6L8Tv1aU0AWFAcbXSVnTS8PmLTJKy85OgaonaWg321J9se0h6aZ9NHavJ9GT_zAoNHHc18AfqwKQGEbufktpEtTpkkxcukTirs0u6mb4Wmyly5dYPXMvMkdK/s400/story,%20three.jpg"/></a></div>
The arrival of Rosh Hashanah put me in mind of the time, very long ago, when my freshly arrived in graduate school self discovered not only Elie Wiesel's novel <i>The Gates of the Forest</i> from which the above Hasidic tale is taken, but some of the most beautiful and astonishing books that the Bollingen Foundation ever published in its Bollingen Series. The twelve volumes of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough's <i>Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period</i> were no more than a prolegomenon to the research he had contemplated on the relationship between early Christianity and the mystical Judaism exemplified by Philo of Alexandria, but that grand finale never got beyond a single essay on Justin Martyr. The dozen volumes, however, contained an evocative array of subjects, such as "Pagan Symbols in Judaism," "Fish, Bread, and Wine," and above all, "Symbolism in the Dura Synagogue." Dura-Europos was a strategically important outpost garrison town on the border of the Eastern Roman Empire. When it fell to invaders, an accident of the defensive wall that had been hastily reinforced preserved the wall drawings from the world's oldest known Christian house church, and elsewhere along the wall, a Jewish synagogue that contained a spectacular array of floor-to-ceiling narrative paintings of key moments in stories from scripture. Goodenough interpreted these in terms based on his earlier hypotheses about Jewish hellenistic mysticism of which the philosopher Philo was only the most prominent interpreter. I found it all emotionally intoxicating, especially when I paged through the illustrations in volume 11 without realizing that the synagogue art was mostly reproduced in the color illustrations while the bulk of the black and white ones were examples of parallel models from what Goodenough and most other folks called Greco-Roman paganism. Here, without further commentary, is some of the stuff that set me on my ear back when I was suffused with excitement without much accompanying understanding. It still gives me an emotional rush, even if I have intermittently revisited the topic over the years and have a slightly more nuanced set of opinions about the whole topic. (There have been a host of other archaeological discoveries to render the picture even more complex than Goodenough thought it was.)
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<p>“Is this trip really necessary?” was a motto on World War II posters intended to remind U.S. civilians who were putting up with gasoline rationing, along with restrictions on buying tires and new cars (there weren’t any), that they had better think twice before wasting their limited travel resources on trivialities, or even on ill-thought-out trips for essentials.
When it comes to art, of course the trip is necessary. Reproductions, whether in books or in high-quality digital versions online, aren’t the same thing on several levels, even for art in the age of its technical reproducibility, to use the contemporary translation of Walter Benjamin’s oddly rendered phrase about “the age of mechanical reproduction”— movies may be viewed more on tablets or phones than in theatres, but most of them were designed to function on a much larger screen, just as photographs intended for exhibition were created with a particular scale in mind, and were certainly not meant to be viewed in the internally illuminated form online viewing gives them—even in the case of digital prints.
<p>So I feel strange recommending the notion that there are shows that ought at least to be looked at in online images accompanied by whatever curatorial statements originally accompanied them. But for a variety of regrettable reasons, the shows I am writing about here didn’t get the coverage they deserved, and this is their final week before closing.
<p>Of course, it remains the case that most of us will only experience almost all of the world’s art shows in whatever form of documentation the galleries and global biennials choose to put online, just as we used to be limited to whatever was shown on the paper invitation to the opening or in the print catalogue describing the exhibition. And seeing a digital simulacrum of the whole show is still better than having no idea at all of what it looked like.
<p>Thus I am pleased that Sandler Hudson Gallery has provided an online catalogue of William Downs’ curatorial efforts in “An Empty Space to Fill (Phase Two.)”:
<p>https://issuu.com/sandlerhudsongallery/docs/_an_empty_space_to_fill_phase_two_
<p>It is obvious, just looking at the juxtaposition of artworks, that Downs has thought about the interplay of palette and the visual rhythm of internal composition in deciding how to make this exhibition a coherent experience. He also assembled a range of styles and perspectives on art and on the world that it would have been interesting to analyze, given but world enough and time. (Just as writers are always looking for the perfect reader, I suspect curators are always looking for the perfect viewer and/or critic, the one who will get out of the show everything they put into it.) I’m truly sorry that the chance circumstances of the month of August allowed this show to slip through the interstices of art journalism.
<p>It closes on September 3, so friends living in metro Atlanta still have a number of days to see the show for themselves, in person.
<p>Even more so do I regret the disappearance without commentary of Douglas Baulos’ “Night’s Hand on Your Shoulder,” curated by Lisa Alembik for Swan Coach House Gallery. Balios’ citation of quilting strategies and animal symbolism in the composition of symbolic portraits and other elaborate pieces of mysterious imagery deserved the kind of unpacking that I wasn’t capable of tackling even had I been given the opportunity. And once again because of the vagaries of the accidental gaps of August, nobody else took up the challenge either.
<p>I am posting a couple of detail shots here more in the nature of a teaser than elucidation of anything. But again, friends inclined to make the journey can see the work itself, and read Alembik’s acutely perceptive curator’s essay, at the gallery through September 8.
littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-86635565067329876952021-12-06T08:38:00.001-08:002022-02-18T05:22:43.900-08:00this one could use about fifty bibliographic footnotes, but for now, here goesIn an M.A. thesis I was never able to turn into something publishable, I remarked that Joseph Campbell’s <i>The Masks of God</i> was a flawed effort at encompassing the whole field of mythology that needed to be corrected in very fundamental ways but not discarded in its entirety. Reading some survey texts written for a general audience (and I get more general all the time as the decades pass since my doctorate), I am recalling some of the passages in volume one, <i>Primitive Mythology</i>, a title that already suggests some of its difficulties. But its grounding of the impulse towards emotionally committed storytelling in basic human characteristics and the even more basic biological characteristics that underpin them seems like a reasonable starting place for reframing without reductionism.
<p>
As a much-derided twentieth-century thinker once wrote, when physics explains the nature of light, nobody expects that as a result there will be no longer be any light.
<p>
In fact, we probably need to think more about the relationship between our hard-wired tendency to jump to conclusions and our childhood penchant for making things up that we know aren’t true, alongside things that we wish were true but right now are not, and things that we think explain the full truth of things (but really don’t).
<p>
Reality stays constructed that way in the grown-up world, and the greatest dilemma of human societies may be the way in which that tendency to construct stories is exploited and expanded for purposes of social domination on the one hand, and individual gratification on the other. Few people grasp the reasons why they not only distort their own perceptions of the world around them, they fail to see the consequences of those distortions. Even when they are grasped, nobody ever grasps them fully. The best mystical traditions were devoted to uncovering those distortions, even though most of what is called mystical is as blindly unaware of its distortions as the hardest-nosed rationalism, which is almost always devoted to excluding as much of reality as it can manage.
<p>
A science of the imagination really ought to be possible that would be devoted to eliminating the most commonplace and curable distortions, while heightening the awareness of the inevitability of distortions and their useful emotional functions, and trying to cultivate more satisfactory versions of them. As it is at present, the human ability to imagine things that do not reflect the world as it ordinarily is has too often been divided up into unpleasantly sterile categories: on one hand, fantasies that placate the starved demands of the inner child that has never left us (and usually do so with embarrassing simplifications); on another, hypotheses for future social and/or technological scenarios that take into account all the factors except those unfulfilled infantile needs; and as a corollary of the latter, fantasies of all sorts that are regularly taken for the hard facts about how things are and how things have to be.
<p>
These differently distorted visions of the world can’t be cured by the ordinarily recommended methods. I gave examples of these in an earlier draft of this, but then decided to put my concluding paragraph into practice.
<p>
The best of the world’s mystics really were trying to break apart the ossified structures that had become tools for self-destruction of the species, and to replace them with connective forms of awareness that would be both supple and rigorous. But of course they didn’t use those terms, and the frameworks they used were shaped by the cultures in which they lived, even as they sought to reshape those cultures. And their practical insights were turned into superstitious repetitions of meaningless practices almost as soon as they had been articulated.
<p>
And what, exactly, lay beyond the margins of their merely practical insights is something that is barely open to exploration, much less comprehension. But they taught us that it is our job to explore it and comprehend it. Some of them said that that task is the only reason that we are here, though that assertion always was open to contestation and/or interpretation. The contestation and/or interpretation sometimes led to bloodshed, which is the way we humans like to resolve our disagreements a large part of the time.
<p>
We have more pieces of the human puzzle available to us today than ever before in this present cycle of civilization (and probably than in all the previous cycles, but we’ll never be sure) but the pieces need to be put together in a different order, or put together in the first place. And all the flaws and predilections of our mammalian inheritance combine with our inventive capacities to make things up that make us feel better or lend us a competitive advantage, creating prevailing forces that make that happy outcome unlikely to happen.
<p>
One place to start might be by cultivating an awareness of people’s many triggering mechanisms, and framing discussions in terms that will not set off antipathy right from the start. But almost nobody seems to know how to do this, even though the tools with which to learn how to do it are readily available.
littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-22223776292260198392021-07-19T02:08:00.001-07:002021-07-19T02:08:14.170-07:00an explanatory footnote to the previous post<p>I have no particular enthusiasm for Eugene Thacker. But I am struck by his remarks on the relationship (even though it is an inverted relationship) between mystical theology, the experience of the sublime, and "the fantastic" and contemporary attempts to grasp the age of the hyperobject and potential planetary extinction.
<p>
I need to refine my own thoughts on these topics, and have promised analytical essays for too long a time. Thacker's observations are enough to spur me into motion, I hope. I hope.
littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-32376308025210665912021-07-19T01:41:00.003-07:002021-07-19T02:00:46.832-07:00summing up one philosopher's take on any number of my past topics, by excerpting a Eugene Thacker interviewThe old maxim “All things come to those who wait” is self-evidently not true (my all-expenses-paid invitations to the Helsinki or Riga Biennales haven’t showed up yet, for example) but some of the topics on which I have been promising for years now to write my own reflections are dealt with, albeit obliquely, in Daniel Beatty Garcia’s 2019 interview with Eugene Thacker for the culture-and-fashion site and print magazine <i>032c</i>. I have strung together some highlights that I think are obviously relevant to the several topics on which I have been writing for the past few decades, initially in Art Papers magazine but more recently in my joculum.dreamwidth.org blog and counterforces.blogspot.com. (I thought I included a brief discussion of Thacker’s books in my 2015 “History of Religions and Cultural Fashions Revisited” essay in Mihaela Gligor, ed., <i>From Influence and Confluence to Difference and Indifference: Studies on History of Religions,</i> which you may download free of charge from Cluj University Press, or you can download just the essay from academia.edu, though you may have to sign up for a free account. But on consulting the text I discover that I only cited some of his companion philosophers on the same subject matters. Never mind.)
<p>
https://032c.com/monstrous-thoughts-philosopher-eugene-thacker-on-the-new-golden-age-of-horror
<p>
[The sentences set off by triple hyphens are Daniel Beatty Garcia’s responses to Eugene Thacker’s remarks.]
<p>
For me, the most interesting horror criticism isn’t necessarily academics from film studies writing about horror films. I’m more inspired by theologians writing about religious experience, for instance. They aren’t talking at all about horror film, but there’s something in what they are talking about that resonates with the kind of films that I’m interested in. …if you look, say, at mystical traditions, they’re simply using the terminology of religion or theology to talk about the same structural issue, which is a horizon to human understanding. ---In that sense you could say that the ancestor of modern horror is negative theology.---
<p>
....
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And you see some of these motifs historically: in Tarkovsky, in Ingmar Bergman’s films – <i>Through a Glass Darkly</i> especially – all the way back to German expressionism.
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It’s also there in a lot of Asian horror. There’s a lot of film coming out of South Korea that I find really compelling. There’s a recent film called <i>The Wailing</i>, and another called <i>A Tale of Two Sisters</i>. Both of these not only have that slow horror feeling about them, they also explicitly deal with a dilemma: is something supernatural happening, or is it all in my head? You have a split between the scientific and the religious, or the psychological and the supernatural, and an uncertainty that’s held all the way through to the end. That’s really hard to do, and it’s another example of just holding or inhabiting uncertainty and confusion and not trying to resolve it too easily.
<p>
---That sustained uncertainty – what the literary critic Tzvetan Todorov calls “the fantastic” – and that slowed down dread seem to be spreading. Part of the movement comes from the other direction – other genres incorporating horror tropes, directors like Nicolas Winding Refn using the Giallo horror aesthetic.--
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Absolutely. Crime thrillers <i>like You Were Never Really Here</i>, Lynne Ramsay’s film. These are out of genre, but you can see how they’re importing that same sense of slow, almost lyrical dread. There’s again this zoomed out sense that these characters aren’t really making decisions. There’s some other nebulous set of forces, and the human beings are just puppets. That it’s leading them to some end.
<p>
Sometimes this is expressed visually. I just watched this TV show, <i>The Terror</i>. It uses a technique you see a lot in film in which you cutaway to the landscape. The contrast is between the smallness of human beings – the intensive little human drama happening aboard this ship – and then this vast indifferent landscape that is surrounding it. Again, there’s some resonance between that sort of experience and earlier accounts of mystical experience or religious experience.
<p>
---Couldn’t this experience of our smallness in front of the vastness and incomprehensibility of nature be a positive one? Poets have called it “the sublime.”---
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Of course, for some philosophers like Kant there’s a happy ending to the story, because human reason is able to recognize this limit and then say, “Well, okay, that’s off limits, but within this domain we can obtain a certain level of mastery.” It’s interesting to quote somebody like Lovecraft in juxtaposition to Kant, because they’re both talking about that distinction between the world in itself and the world as it appears to us, but Lovecraft goes all the way, and says that there is no moment of redemptive reason.
<p>
---Bruno Latour has an interesting take on this. He points out that if new research into the Anthropocene shows the nonhuman world to be marked at every point by us, human influence has “scaled up” to the extent that we are no longer so small compared to nature. So experiencing the sublime, that feeling of being dwarfed, becomes impossible. What this shows, for him, is that what we took to be an unreactive or indifferent nonhuman world was in fact sensitive all long, and that we are enmeshed in it at every point.---
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There’s some interesting things in those kinds of theories, but they are still heavily anthropocentric. I think one of the lessons of the Anthropocene is that there seems to be a species-specific solipsism that we’re so stuck in that we’ve actually named an epoch after ourselves.
<p>
---What are Anthropocene theories missing?---
<p>
They usually ignore two kinds of indifference at work. The first is that we can call the world whatever we want and measure it however we want – there’s still the unbreachable opacity of the something-else out there reacting or not reacting. The second kind of indifference is more specifically contemporary. If you look at the tradition of the Gothic novel, there’s a tension between science and religion, and often that boils down to a conflict between the rational and the non-rational. Now added to that is something we could call “cold rationalism.”
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Every day you can look at <i>The Guardian</i>, and there’ll be some article with a lot of facts and data about the amount of biomass we consume, or the sixth mass extinction, or whatever. We’re inundated with this big data level of horror. It’s not so much a failure of science – the science works almost too well. What it reveals to us is exactly how indifferent the world is to all of our attempts to master, or control it, or produce knowledge about it. Authors in the early 20th century like Lovecraft and other “weird” authors already understood that the more horrifying path was not anti-science, the non-rational. Far more horrifying is what science will reveal.
littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-60168909768969775942021-06-17T01:52:00.001-07:002021-06-17T01:52:31.945-07:00Welcome to my world, or discovering the extreme self before the extreme self was cool, or even digital<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8qb8Qh5Pzbw/YMsIOjqdzLI/AAAAAAAADQ4/oLvEqURC7vMVuk658l8AhJe2Lxn4RAgrACLcBGAsYHQ/s0/faster%2Bthan%2Bwe%2Bthought.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="397" data-original-width="546" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8qb8Qh5Pzbw/YMsIOjqdzLI/AAAAAAAADQ4/oLvEqURC7vMVuk658l8AhJe2Lxn4RAgrACLcBGAsYHQ/s0/faster%2Bthan%2Bwe%2Bthought.png"/></a></div>
Today is the official publication date (in Europe, but not in North America) of “The Extreme Self: Age of You,” the followup to “The Age of Earthquakes” that Hans Ulrich Obrist, Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar compiled with the collaboration of a slew of artists and designers.
I’ve ordered a copy despite the fact that the shipping costs as much as the book, because (and this is increasingly characteristic) I am afraid that by the time it finally becomes available through Amazon US, I’ll have moved on to other research areas, even though this is a research area that it is impossible to move away from because it is me and how I do things in this rapidly altering era, and you and how you do things, and maybe you more than me. I remember how by the time Ernst Bloch’s “The Principle of Hope” finally became available in English, nobody, me included, felt like reading it anymore, because the circumstances that had made it seem urgently relevant had been altered beyond recognition.
I joke about “you more than me” because it has just now dawned on me that although I now spend more time online than immersed in the daily-changing stacks of books that surround me, my perceptual habits haven’t shifted, just the media involved in them. I have always been influenced by the accidental juxtaposition of unsuspected relationships, books put next to each other like windows left open on a laptop screen that were originally part of completely separate searches, but that now suggest previously unsuspected causal connections that have to be evaluated as to their actual relationship to one another, because pattern recognition. (I love that now-already-dated idiom in which implicitly obvious ends of sentences are left off, making it incumbent on the reader to fill in the blank. In this case the part left out takes up roughly five thousand words, but they are words I have written so many times in the past that I assume anybody who has read this far already knows the drill.)
And since I thought I was finished writing this, before posting it to the Counterforces blog and Facebook I checked my e-mails and discovered an online exhibition that opened in April that I had somehow overlooked, from Museum of Design Atlanta, “The Future Happened: Designing the Future of Music.” The “About the Exhibit” essay by Sarah Panzer does an excellent job of explaining the premises behind what I’ve written in this brief essay of my own, although it does so in terms of a completely different topic. “Examining innovation in design and technology that deepens our relationship with music, we open our eyes to new and radical narratives that have the power to transform our ways of being in the world.” https://thefuturehappened.org/About-the-Exhibit
littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-51869839832132959542021-05-14T04:33:00.005-07:002021-05-14T04:33:58.029-07:00An updating slightly rewritten from my Facebook post, a companion note to a 2015 review of "The Age of Earthquakes"Nothing like starting out the day with news from Hans Ulrich Obrist of the imminent publication of "The Extreme Self: Age of You," the pandemic-delayed book on which an exhibition was based that premiered in Toronto just before the pandemic and is now on display in its co-sponsoring venue in Dubai. I am sure that if I searched further I would find the art magazine coverage that more au courant friends read back around Christmas 2019, when I was otherwise distracted.
I like the irony that an exhibition and book premised on the problem of extreme change (the followup to "The Age of Earthquakes," about which I wrote on this blog when it was published in 2015) should have had its schedule delayed by the extreme change of a planet-wide pandemic, such as was prophesied, at more or less the same moment, by William Gibson's novel "Agency," the second novel in the Jackpot trilogy.
And as I have pointed out repeatedly over the past twenty-five years in other contexts (and less often in the half-dozen years since the first Obrist/Coupland/Basar collaboration), Hans Ulrich Obrist and Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar are excellent diagnosticians (slickly hip, but that is the root of their excellence) for a widely distributed global socioeconomic class. The extreme self is not the same experience for former members of that class for whom even basic Skype connections are intermittent in between bombing raids. But it has close relatives among less prosperous populations in countries where almost all banking is conducted on mobile phones because the economy does not support readily accessible bricks-and-mortar bank branches.
Anyway, I'm embarrassed that I didn't know about all this back when it first became news a year and a half ago, but for those of my Facebook friends who also didn't get the memo, here is a review: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/art-and-architecture/article-age-of-you-charts-the-development-of-the-extreme-self-at-the-museum/
I also recommend the website of the institution in the United Arab Emirates that will be hosting the exhibition through August 2021; it is most instructive to peruse the perspectives of the world as seen from a country that a few of my friends know well, but that I know only through the blurry lens of my frequently bad internet connection.
littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-21863746451639621092021-05-14T04:09:00.004-07:002021-05-14T05:05:40.355-07:00On the Fantastic, and Other Endless Enigmas; another post written years ago, but never made public until today<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fKo04IkWE4A/XN2Qvz4JmNI/AAAAAAAACn4/bXRsp6vS_tkbHZLJ-cSUl0jNLdoe0pE5ACLcBGAs/s1600/71HlfOQ8LrL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fKo04IkWE4A/XN2Qvz4JmNI/AAAAAAAACn4/bXRsp6vS_tkbHZLJ-cSUl0jNLdoe0pE5ACLcBGAs/s400/71HlfOQ8LrL.jpg" width="327" height="400" data-original-width="981" data-original-height="1200" /></a></div><br />
I am amused by the fact that now that nobody sends me review copies of anything, I find myself promoting more books at my own expense than I was ever able to when I had access to venues that published book reviews regularly.<br />
<br />
I promise, not without cautionary footnotes to my promise, that I’ll pass along my opinion of this book once I read it. (It comes from David Zwirner Books, the catalogue for an exhibition that the gallery staged in the autumn of 2018.) One of the authors is Dawn Ades, whose <i>Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and</i> Documents [“Documents” being the name of Bataille’s Surrealist magazine] is another one of those books gathering dust as it awaits a proper reading ten years after I bought it. The parts I have read have validated some of the things I was already doing. <br />
<br />
One of my perennially postponed projects is a re-investigation of “the fantastic,” and its function across societies. Rationalists of the functionalist school have no difficulty with the fantastic as entertainment—people need impossible fantasies as an escape from the restricted world in which they really live, whether those impossible fantasies be tales told around a campfire in past or present times or CGI-assisted multiseason series suitable for eventual binge watching by people with access to the appropriate viewing media. <br />
<br />
What these folk tales or tall tales gone wild have in common is that nobody takes them seriously, even if they choose to dress up like characters in the series. Such tales fulfill a different need from, say, romcoms or their print-media relatives, in which the stories of improbable romances include conventional tricks such as “meeting cute” that sometimes, once in several blue moons, happen in real life. Americans were charmed when a princess from Hollywood married the ruling prince of a real-life principality sixty or so years ago, back in the days when “Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you” were song lyrics on prime time television. More recently they were delighted when another Hollywood personality found her charming prince, albeit one that is a bit more distant from assuming a throne. (This led to a couple of sick Game of Thrones jokes.)<br />
<br />
Ernst Bloch wrote three thick and sometimes ponderous volumes (<i>The Principle of Hope</i>) trying to puzzle out the relationships between pure escape from reality and the possible futures that lay behind imaginary Lands of Cockaigne and, later, behind political revolution that made possible some ways of everyday living that previously had existed only in fairy tales. Given Bloch’s commitment to styles of politics that his fellow Marxists decided were beyond the pale, it would take considerable re-visioning to make <i>The Principle of Hope</i> worth taking up again, just as, in a completely different register, Joseph Campbell’s <i>The Masks of God</i> is no longer a viable guide to the meanings and functions of world mythology, even though Campbell did his best to incorporate everything that the human sciences and the so-called hard sciences had discovered about the human condition at the time he was writing. <br />
<br />
Nevertheless, the problems remain that Bloch laid out in one language and Campbell laid out in another, diametrically opposed one. How and why people in all cultures expand the counterfactual into the openly impossible is worth contemplating, with slightly less highfalutin terminological obfuscation. “Wouldn’t it be nice” has been transmuted again and again into “Once upon a time,” but “they lived happily ever after” has not always been part of the equation. Stories that begin with “What if” are frequently another genre altogether.<br />
<br />
One of the areas that interests me in particular is the point at which the acknowledged impossible blurs or shades into the only way to approach possible reality. Bloch can only cope with the political and social side of this, but the side that Jeff Kripal, Michael Pollan, and a host of others have been dealing with in recent decades is of equal interest. If narwhal horns were considered material proof of unicorns in past centuries (which leaves the origins and functions of the remainder of unicorn lore unexplained) and dinosaur fossils in time-weathered rock gave rise to tales of monsters of all sorts (which leaves the gory details of those tales likewise unaccounted for, beyond the love of humans for the pleasurable shudder of considering dreadful topics), are hallucinations likewise an adequate debunking explanation for all sorts of stories that lay claim to truth, or do our “explanations” exclude by arbitrary definition all sorts of so-called paranormal phenomena that seem—sometimes—to have some amount of cognitive value? (We might consider the unpleasant fact that even our most self-assured perceptions have only “some amount of cognitive value”—the difference being that we very rarely misinterpret sets of perceptions that we describe as, for example, “the glass broke because I knocked it off the counter,” even though every once in a while the glass fell to the floor for some other mundane reason that we didn’t notice.) Should the paranormal be redefined, not without deliberate jokery, as “the new normal,” or the normal that most of humankind has acknowledged all along, even if it was always interpreted wrongly? Should we be redrawing the boundaries of human existence differently, even though the prospect creates deep discomfort in skeptics and believers and genuinely puzzled inquirers alike? <br />
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But like I say, that’s one of those awful topics I’ll probably never get around to unpacking properly, or even evaluating how other people have been unpacking it. As my friends can testify, I tend to leave lots of stuff firmly packed. <br />
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A less consequential subtopic I’d like to explore but probably won’t is almost the opposite, why there are so many Facebook groups that can simply post images under the topic “Bizarre, Peculiar, Odd, and Strange,” or “Weird and Wonderful,” or “Spooky, Weird, and Cool,” and sure enough, despite some missteps and stupid mistakes of aesthetic taste, most of the images evoke a small shudder or surge of delight or charge of emotional energy of some more difficult description, in spite of their lack of anything resembling an accompanying story. I suspect it has something to do with the same triggering mechanisms that allow many people to respond with a surge of positive emotion when they see particularly adorable pictures of cats online, even when in real life they regard cats as destructive predators causing the extinction of endangered species. <br />
<br />
Campbell has some, but only some, useful things to say about this in the early pages of <i>The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology</i>, in which just the outdated wording of the title serves as a warning of problems to come.<br />
littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-42754277860956678712021-05-14T04:04:00.001-07:002021-05-14T04:07:02.959-07:00written long ago, but never posted, for reasons I no longer remember. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-k99obOccrto/Xe49ENRmdLI/AAAAAAAACzI/TsVC726QzI46nV2bfpHMhiR3ld8vPBHxQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/the%2Bend%2Bof%2Ba%2Bworld%252C%2Bwith%2Bangel.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-k99obOccrto/Xe49ENRmdLI/AAAAAAAACzI/TsVC726QzI46nV2bfpHMhiR3ld8vPBHxQCLcBGAsYHQ/s640/the%2Bend%2Bof%2Ba%2Bworld%252C%2Bwith%2Bangel.png" width="640" height="356" data-original-width="1075" data-original-height="598" /></a></div><br />
And now for something completely different....<br />
<br />
From book three of John Crowley’s four-book Ægypt Cycle of novels: <br />
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<i>When the world ends, it ends somewhat differently for each soul then alive to see it; the end doesn’t come all at once but passes and repasses over the world like the shivers that pass over a horse’s skin. … But though the world ends sooner for some than for others, each one who passes through it—or through whom it passes—will look back and know that he has moved from the old world to the new, where willy-nilly he will die: will know it even though all around him his neighbors are still living in the old world, amid its old comforts and fears. And that will be the proof, that in his fellows’ faces he can see that they have been left behind, can see in the way they look at him that he has crossed over alive.</i> [John Crowley, <i>Dæmonomania,</i> Book Three of the Ægypt Cycle, © 2000]<br />
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<br />
— I have been struggling with how to define the end of a world ever since RIBOCA 1, the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art presented under the title “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More.” I quote the John Crowley passage above (and post as accompanying illustration “The End of a World” book title in a film still from <i>Wings of Desire</i>) because I have been pondering the subtitle of William K. Klingaman’s 1989 book <i>1919: The Year Our World Began.</i> There are those who would say that his subtitle was wrong already by the end of the year his book was published, but that’s true only of Europe; I hold for those who favor 1979 for the start of the passage time, but the end of the passage time—well, that’s open to contestation up to this very moment. Yet it feels ever more evident that the world that began in 1919 and persisted, despite great changes, in 1989 is not the world in which we now live, even if some of this year’s anniversaries seem eerily familiar. (December 21, 1919 saw the culmination of the roundup for deportation of anarchist immigrants, when they were put on a chartered ship and sent off to Russia via a Nordic seaport with forcible transport across the border.)<br />
<br />
One of the things that keep defeating me in my efforts at definition is the difference between fundamental transformations and transformations that have enormous, seemingly permanent effects that nonetheless turn out to be transitory. Cambodia has been put back together as a different but recognizably Cambodian society even though it has gone through several near-total upheavals in the past half-century, just as Western Europe was put back together after World War II as a set of sometimes dramatically different societies that were nevertheless related in some major ways to their prewar modes of being. In some ways, Europe and the United States are undergoing more fundamental, possibly lasting transformations at the moment than in any time in the previous century, and the world as a whole is undergoing more fundamental transformations, between the spread of the digital revolution and the consequences of climate change. More so than when Marshall McLuhan first proclaimed it, it seems that a change in media often creates a genuine change in consciousness and self-definition. Granted, a sufficiently drastic change in material circumstances would seem to do the same, although the other way round is equally demonstrable, as a shift in what is considered significant, and what is perceived consciously as a result, has dramatic consequences for forests, aquifers, and air quality, to name only three material systems. <br />
<br />
But that's quite enough of that.<br />
littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-3533058924396114742020-05-22T07:27:00.002-07:002020-05-22T07:28:45.765-07:00"When we with Sappho"—further notes from a time of global pandemic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4u5sKdsOWgw/XsfhHOuUA7I/AAAAAAAAC90/rlMB180pzYk0mH6T793kkKKAqhW5PWpMQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/if%2Bnot%252C%2Bwinter%252C%2Ba%2Bfacebook%2Bpost.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4u5sKdsOWgw/XsfhHOuUA7I/AAAAAAAAC90/rlMB180pzYk0mH6T793kkKKAqhW5PWpMQCLcBGAsYHQ/s640/if%2Bnot%252C%2Bwinter%252C%2Ba%2Bfacebook%2Bpost.png" width="640" height="467" data-original-width="930" data-original-height="678" /></a></div>Watching an American poet contribute an online performance to the newly virtualized Riga Biennial of International Contemporary Art brought home to me again just how much the pandemic has accelerated a worldwide cultural process that we might once have described as already moving at warp speed, before that fossilized metaphor was ruined by recent history. <br />
<br />
It made me realize with renewed melancholy just how much is going to be lost for no better reason than that nobody can make sense of it in terms of their own very different experience—although we can hope it will be a broadly planet-spanning experience, there are reasons to suppose it might not be. Some things will be lost without anyone noticing, no matter what happens next. <br />
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This has happened before, however, and for more reasons than I want to cite, attention spans being what they are. Most of Greek and Roman literature got dropped when the literate classes stopped buying scrolls and started buying the newly developed codices that connected separate pages between covers so you could jump right to the part of the book you wanted without having to roll that one big long sheet of papyrus from one rod to the other rod. <br />
<br />
That, plus changing tastes in literature, probably had more to do with how Sappho’s poems got lost than the burning of the library of Alexandria or deliberate censorship. But that’s why we have a wonderfully evocative set of little quotations pulled from later grammarians’ commentaries on how weirdly the ancestors contorted their poems. Will large parts of several thousand years of global literature survive similarly because they were transformed into internet memes and ascribed to the wrong writers in the process? Or will they be captured as bits of online performance arbitrarily preserved in future media, and extracted by later generations who will spend years finding out who actually wrote what? It is pointless to speculate. <br />
<br />
Kenneth Rexroth wrote an amazing erotic poem called “When We With Sappho” that starts from an epigraph of one of those evocative little ancient fragments, but I’m going to make you look it up instead of providing a link to the surprisingly numerous sites on which you can read his poem. <br />
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littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-61282853011610034482020-04-13T11:19:00.000-07:002020-04-13T11:35:50.056-07:00What one does while waiting out a pandemic: a note meant to be more provocative than it appears<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5hE7X05WP2U/XpSsnePKFyI/AAAAAAAAC70/liZM-dZJBUQWsu-zxZjeHoP01BmvztWWACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/fathers%2Band%2Bsons%252C%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5hE7X05WP2U/XpSsnePKFyI/AAAAAAAAC70/liZM-dZJBUQWsu-zxZjeHoP01BmvztWWACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/fathers%2Band%2Bsons%252C%2B2.jpg" width="214" height="320" data-original-width="333" data-original-height="499" /></a><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zfIvXUfqEts/XpSsKwkycQI/AAAAAAAAC7o/DOLaT4VEcW8SSK-osIWl_TKzWw3Q48XqACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/more%2Bclassics%2Brevisited.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zfIvXUfqEts/XpSsKwkycQI/AAAAAAAAC7o/DOLaT4VEcW8SSK-osIWl_TKzWw3Q48XqACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/more%2Bclassics%2Brevisited.jpg" width="208" height="320" data-original-width="324" data-original-height="499" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MO_7fxz2-u8/XpSsIFZF6II/AAAAAAAAC7k/JnkwEwe4OOwUe6qeheNrppLOm0LNrGSbgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/fathers%2Band%2Bsons.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MO_7fxz2-u8/XpSsIFZF6II/AAAAAAAAC7k/JnkwEwe4OOwUe6qeheNrppLOm0LNrGSbgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/fathers%2Band%2Bsons.jpg" width="240" height="320" data-original-width="300" data-original-height="400" /></a><br />
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<i>I wrote this as a friends-only post for Facebook, the method I typically use to address a large but quite specific audience. Circumstances make me believe there is no way to post this there in the midst of immediate personal tragedies without seeming monumentally insensitive, so I am semi-concealing this meditation on Counterforces. </i><br />
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I write this right after listening to an NPR interview with a nurse who drove from Boise, Idaho to Harlem Hospital to volunteer for the Covid-19 ward, and feel more than ever my incompetence in the face of a tragedy that demands the simplest and least reflective responses, such as sewing cloth masks for those who need them. <br />
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On the other hand, I have been remembering recently the Polish émigré poet Czeslaw Milosz’ account, in his autobiography <i>Native Realm,</i> of being suddenly pinned down by the machine gun fire of the unanticipated Warsaw Uprising while walking to a friend’s house to discuss the project of translating T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into Polish, and then crawling to another friend’s house where he spent two weeks, hiding whenever the SS searched the building. He used the time to read a comprehensive history of the Polish peasantry, an activity that stood him in good stead when he became a cultural attaché in the foreign service of the Communist government installed by the Red Army. But that, as usual, is not the main point of this post. <br />
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I am probably the only person in Atlanta (not the only one in America, I feel certain) who has currently felt the need to reread, if not Turgenev’s <i>Fathers and Sons,</i> then Kenneth Rexroth’s commentary on it in <i>More Classics Revisited,</i> pp. 115-117, which I was able to find online. Gary Shteyngart’s 2006 recommendation of Turgenev’s novel (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5684676) withholds the salient episode to which I want to refer, and which Rexroth makes central to his argument, so consider this a spoiler alert. <br />
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<i>Fathers and Sons</i> was the first Russian novel that Western European writers of the 1860s took seriously. It presents the tensions between well-off, socially and politically liberal fathers on their estates in the countryside, and their socially and politically radical sons Arkady and Bazarov, back from university, sneering at their fathers’ insufficiently radical political and social views and identifying with the peasants, who regard the kids as a couple of buffoons. <br />
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The sons end up taking over from their fathers, Arkady becoming an enlightened landowner and Bazarov, more intransigently radical, becoming a country doctor who dies from accidentally infecting himself with typhus during an autopsy. Rexroth identifies this as a key episode in the greatest of Turgenev’s “ecological tragedies,” in which, according to Rexroth’s hypothesis, “Turgenev’s heroes die in the midst of their biota. In the final analysis that is why they die, not because they are political outcasts, impotent rebels, or superfluous men, but because something has gone wrong with their interconnectedness with the living world.”<br />
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Rexroth ended his analysis with this paragraph: “The years since <i>Fathers and Sons</i> have been years of revolutionary change and search for the meaning of life. The critics of each generation have concluded by saying, ‘<i>Fathers and Sons</i> is peculiarly appropriate to our time.’ Today we live at a moment in history of unparalleled incoherence, with ‘an old world dead and a new powerless to be born.’ …We are out of phase with the living world around us. We are all Bazarovs. Unlike him, few are innocent.”<br />
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littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-25473851249392833272020-03-31T05:42:00.000-07:002020-03-31T05:43:29.719-07:00A Prolegomenon to Any Future Art Criticism, with Apologies to Readers for the Allusion to Immanuel Kant<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nnmAYlVvgvw/XoM3kZbKoDI/AAAAAAAAC6s/ahtjPMN5AC0q163S-jAYNjAsWAry--cHgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/olafur%2Beliasson%252C%2Bi%2Bgrew%2Bup%2Bin%2Bsolitude%2Band%2Bsilence.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nnmAYlVvgvw/XoM3kZbKoDI/AAAAAAAAC6s/ahtjPMN5AC0q163S-jAYNjAsWAry--cHgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/olafur%2Beliasson%252C%2Bi%2Bgrew%2Bup%2Bin%2Bsolitude%2Band%2Bsilence.jpg" width="276" height="400" data-original-width="400" data-original-height="579" /></a></div><br />
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Olafur Eliasson’s “I Grew Up in Solitude and Silence” is a simple work of art that, like so many simple works of art, reveals more about the perceiver, the person who experiences the artwork, than far more complex works ever could. <br />
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As photographed in 1991 in Copenhagen, the work consists of a white candle fixed to the center of a circular mirror. In this photograph, which I encountered as a shared image posted without commentary, the lighted candle is thus the only thing reflected in the mirror against a nearly uniform background. Other iterations, shown in other photographs on Eliasson’s website, were situated in more complicated surroundings. <br />
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Seeing the photograph, I immediately thought of “burning the candle at both ends” and wondered if the idiom exists in other languages. Many other associations flickered across my mind: the doubling of the light by the power of reflection, for one; but above all the image conveyed what Eliasson’s title (which wasn’t attached to the photograph I saw) conveys: a poetic isolation in which the only thing mirrored is the candle and its own light. <br />
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Eliasson’s webpage (https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK101839/i-grew-up-in-solitude-and-silence) contains a quotation from a catalogue essay that is in many ways the quintessence of art criticism (I assume that the description in the following paragraph is Eliasson’s, and the passage in quotation marks is by Biesenbach and Marcoci):<br />
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A candle situated at the centre of a circular mirror burns slowly, gradually reducing in size. The reflection extends the candle into virtual space with flames burning at both ends.<br />
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'Here one’s perception is split between the experiential narrative of watching the candle slowly burn and the projected narrative of anticipating different scenarios about the object. According to the philosopher Henri Bergson, the mind tackles duration as a simultaneous process merging past memory and future projection within a continually unfolding present. Looking at the flickering flame, the viewer thus experiences three overlapping temporalities: memory, actual perception, and projected narrative. The latter is essentially an amplified, fastforward version of what happens in the present, but it summarizes any number of likely scenarios (the candle gradually becomes shorter as it burns; the wax drips on the mirrored surface; the mirror gets too hot and cracks under the candle’s increasing heat; viewers approach the work to look more closely and see their reflections in the mirror). At once absorbing and analytical, the work exists only for the duration of the burning candle, yet it calls up a roster of prior experiences and corporeal states.'<br />
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(Klaus Biesenbach and Roxana Marcoci, 'Toward the Sun: Olafur Eliasson's Protocinematic Vision," in Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, 2008, p. 190) <br />
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—This passage from Biesenbach and Marcoci is valid as far as it goes, in that it describes what they experienced when they looked at the artwork. There is in fact “memory, actual perception, and projected narrative” going on when a viewer looks at this artwork (and further complexity is added when the viewer knows the title of the piece). But the assumption that the viewer experiences only “projected narrative” is too simple. My immediate response involved memory (of the commonplace saying) and a series of less than fully formed associations, any one of which could be followed in metaphoric directions. Not one of them involved the future state of the candle, although that would have come into my mind soon after the awareness (which I did have) that for the viewer to stand in a position in which they were reflected in the mirror would change the artwork and add a new layer of possible meaning. In a photograph of the work, of course, this cannot happen.<br />
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None of this has anything to do with what Henri Bergson was talking about, and reflects the fact that Biesenbach and Marcoci were perfectly capable of writing as though the first thing that popped into their profoundly educated heads was the only possible interpretation of the viewer’s experience of the artwork. <br />
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But the more likely immediate experience, which I suspect was not only mine but that of the person who posted the photograph on social media, is “Oh, wow.” <br />
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In other words, whether in a photograph or, I suspect, in situ, the immediate experience is of a simply arranged set of objects that evoke unconscious associations with emotions attached to them. Only afterwards does the experience of wordless wonder (or inarticulate expressions of amazement) give rise to thought. <br />
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I also suspect, though, that this artwork is more difficult to stage than I initially assumed; the candle would have to be a dripless one in order to remain for more than a brief moment in the condition seen in the photograph, and this would ensure that the imagined outcome of wax dripping onto the mirror is a hypothesis of a future that can exist only in Biesenbach and Marcoci’s imagination. But this is how we experience not only the imagined future but the perceived present; we make our best guesses of what it is we are experiencing, based on what we remember of what happened in the past. Our best guesses are quite often wrong. My own guess here, based on the photograph of pristine perfection I initially saw, was itself wrong; one of the work’s other iterations, in visually cluttered surroundings, features a candle that is already dripping wax down the side. But that means that the pristine moment of aesthetic amazement captured by the photograph is an artwork that belongs to the realm of photography, not to the realm of installation art in which such elegantly ordered permanence is always a fiction. <br />
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The question is, do art critics have any business explaining all this? Should they sound so smugly magisterial when they do it? <br />
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Is art criticism limited to commenting upon the gasp of admiration when we first see the image or the work itself—with, at most, the further notation that different viewers will have radically different experiences of the work once they are done with gasping admiringly? Art journalism, certainly, has column inches enough to say no more than that. But how far ought the critic to go in awakening the viewer to the potential depths of their first simple experience? <br />
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I’ve spent more years wrestling with that than I care to think, and I still don’t know the answer. The temptation is always to say “Oh, wow,” and settle for that. <br />
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littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-36160980854562371762019-03-07T07:38:00.000-08:002019-03-07T07:38:15.067-08:00Beat Generation anniversaries and autobiographical reflections<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NvQ8fKp0i-M/XIE52SlmezI/AAAAAAAACj4/qLrzwzFJndcV88hOsm69tzfybpUF5ioTgCLcBGAs/s1600/ebay%2Baesthetic%252C%2Bcity%2Blights%2B.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NvQ8fKp0i-M/XIE52SlmezI/AAAAAAAACj4/qLrzwzFJndcV88hOsm69tzfybpUF5ioTgCLcBGAs/s320/ebay%2Baesthetic%252C%2Bcity%2Blights%2B.jpg" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="768" /></a>. <a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-inHxACcF87g/XIE52qnv-3I/AAAAAAAACj8/cIEdRVgcxDIdfsiLcQ7AbgjJI4Bbfv6lgCLcBGAs/s1600/ebay%2Baesthetic%252C%2BJack%2BKerouac%2Bhouse%2Bplus%2BGrace%2BCathedral.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-inHxACcF87g/XIE52qnv-3I/AAAAAAAACj8/cIEdRVgcxDIdfsiLcQ7AbgjJI4Bbfv6lgCLcBGAs/s320/ebay%2Baesthetic%252C%2BJack%2BKerouac%2Bhouse%2Bplus%2BGrace%2BCathedral.jpg" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="768" /></a><br />
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These vintage photographs of City Lights Bookshop, Grace Cathedral (both in San Francisco) and the house in which Jack Kerouac died are representative of what others have called the Ebay Aesthetic—photographs haphazardly rephotographed not quite in focus against the background of the scrapbook from which they were removed for the occasion. But the occasion in this case is not Ebay but the solution to a minor mystery.<br />
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After a Facebook friends-only post requesting reminders of which 2019 anniversary it was that people had told me I should curate a show to commemorate, I have learned that the impetus in question was the upcoming fiftieth anniversary (on October 20) of the death of Jack Kerouac as a disillusioned 47-year-old curmudgeon taking care of his invalid mother in Saint Petersburg, Florida. I now realize I would rather prefer to honor the hundredth birthday (on March 24) of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who as of this writing is anxiously hoping to be present at his own party, but either way, this is a great year for anniversaries of significant figures of the Beat Generation, of whom some are still with us and others flamed out before their fiftieth birthday.<br />
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I eventually realized that Beatness was an American version of neoromanticism ramped up to warp speed and that I probably had more in common with their precursors and near-contemporaries in England, or with Kenneth Rexroth, who was oldschool bohemian but emphatically not Beat, as he never tired of reminding us even as he celebrated the surviving Beats and brought them to UC Santa Barbara for his Poetry and Song class fifty years ago. (I vividly recall Gary Snyder discussing the transformative aural quality of Asian mantras while seated informally on the edge of a desk in a carefully de-geometricized room of standard-issue classroom furniture.)<br />
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On the other hand, Ferlinghetti has recently produced the two volumes of <i>Americus</i>, a highly allusive epic of our contemporary moment that is so suffused with presupposed knowledge that it probably requires extensive annotation for most readers under the age of fifty, and a good many of those over it. The Beat Generation was always a literary generation, presupposing enthusiasm for the work of extremely educated rebels who knew and subverted the standard curriculum even as they managed to be as streetwise as they were capable of managing. <br />
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Feeling frustration that I had missed out on its classic moment by virtue of having been only between five and ten years old when it was happening, I read with fascination the accounts of it in John Clellon Holmes’ <i>Nothing More to Declare</i>, which extracted the best lines from Kerouac and Ginsberg, the latter of whom described himself as “a great rememberer, redeeming life from darkness” and whose watchword was “Widen the area of consciousness.” I still follow the latter admonition, but went on to discover other great rememberers who have proven more lastingly compatible with my embarrassingly reticent temperament. W. G. Sebald trekking the Sussex coast and thinking about the traumas of history turned out to be more my speed, once he got round to doing such things and writing about them in his tragically truncated life.<br />
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Nevertheless, I’ve had a peculiar experience of reframing the Beat Generation, in the sense of George Lakoff’s notion of “framing” as putting ideas and events in a different surrounding context. All at once Ferlinghetti’s lifelong version of anarchist-tinged literacy seems like one valid version of Beatness, nicely complemented by Gary Snyder’s authentically Buddhist sojourns in an environmentally threatened wilderness. (The branch pursuing the barbaric-yawp side of Walt Whitman’s legacy has its own validity, but its devotees mostly proved ill-suited for surviving the long haul, as witness their variously early departures.)<br />
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I had been thinking about pursuing a series of essays on polymathic pilgrims searching for definitively final answers to life’s persistent questions (figures from Guillaume Postel to John Ruskin to Jean Toomer, fated to fail in their quests in ways ranging from tragic to pathetic, but always leaving behind lasting moments of insight attained en route)—but now I guess I have to detour through the folks who influenced my youth, without whom I probably wouldn’t have chosen to do graduate school in California to study with Mircea Eliade and thereby meet Kenneth Rexroth in the same academic year. (Joseph Campbell and Owen Barfield were lecturing regularly up the coast in Santa Cruz and San Francisco, so the theme of Dreams of a Final Theory was definitely my major topic then, as it is, whether delusionally or no, to this day.)<br />
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littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-63270714762369551032019-03-01T05:25:00.000-08:002019-03-01T05:26:13.976-08:00A prolegomenon to any future review of Benjamin Britton's "Desire, broadly," at Marcia Wood Gallery, Feb. 6 - March 2, 2019<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UOkwO51JARk/XHkyCcNc0vI/AAAAAAAACjA/wGKhuHsurh80GEIjYo1FzQqMNdR_jUNlACLcBGAs/s1600/Acknowledged_as_the%252Bconditional_past_tenseWEB-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UOkwO51JARk/XHkyCcNc0vI/AAAAAAAACjA/wGKhuHsurh80GEIjYo1FzQqMNdR_jUNlACLcBGAs/s320/Acknowledged_as_the%252Bconditional_past_tenseWEB-1.jpg" width="320" height="320" data-original-width="750" data-original-height="750" /></a></div><br />
Sometimes the three-week limit imposed by gallery schedules results in remarkable injustices. Benjamin Britton’s “Desire, broadly,” which closes at Marcia Wood Gallery on March 2, should get a substantial, detailed analysis combined with ample time for viewers to visit and contemplate for themselves what is at stake in these remarkable paintings. Instead, this is as good as it gets. <br />
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Britton is working with visual metaphors for the manifestations of memory and desire, especially with the ways in which desire manifests as desire for the impossible, for a time and place that perhaps never was and in any case is not to be had in the way that desire wants to have it. As Marcel Proust put it, referring to emotionally charged associations of memory in his monumental multi-volume novel <i>In Search of Lost Time</i> (a.k.a. <i>Remembrance of Things Past</i> in the classic English translation), “the only paradise is the paradise we have lost.”<br />
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Proust is to the point here because the phenomenon known as Proustian memory is one of the starting points of paintings that include trompe l’oeil representations of actual pages of Proust’s prose. The fragmentary texts, themselves evocations rather than representations of coherently formed moments, combine with futuristic, motion-filled abstraction in which the swooping lines terminate in almost photorealistic details of bits of landscape Britton terms “wormholes,” borrowing a term from contemporary physics for what Wikipedia piquantly calls “a transcendental bijection of the spacetime continuum” that “can be visualized as a tunnel with two ends, each at separate points in spacetime (i.e., different locations or different points of time).” <br />
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Wormholes, in other words, are the physical equivalents of what Proust visualized only as fantasy, and if they exist (which is in question) they could presumably actually link an observer’s fantasy-laden brain with the object of its desire. The only problem would be that the object of its desire wouldn’t correspond exactly with the shape of the desire formulated by the observer’s subconsciously modulated consciousness. What the Germans call <i>Sehnsucht</i> and the Welsh call <i>hiraeth</i> is a wish for a home country we have never inhabited, or a landscape more perfectly answering to unspoken wishes than any landscape on earth ever has or can have done.<br />
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Some of these paintings derive from a residency in Ireland, a territory particularly amenable to the generation of wishes impossible to fulfill or even to articulate. The discovery of actual representations of townscapes or trees and fields in the tiny representations of circular openings in what looks like a sci-fi illustrator’s version of cross-dimensional geometries evokes an indefinite sense of pleasure that is not only undefined but well-nigh indefinable. These works of art, in other words, brings forth the emotion it seeks to render and investigate in their combination of imagery. <br />
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In a better world than this one, such marvelously titled paintings as <i>Unsettled fascination on the edge of seasickness</i> and <i>The moment held so loosely that it precedes the thought but not the feeling</i> would receive an extended, work-by-work analysis. As it is, the notion of such a comprehensive examination will have to remain an object of unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire. Which, come to think of it, kind of fits. <br />
littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-7491937732008406272017-11-13T11:13:00.000-08:002017-11-17T21:16:35.444-08:00We Know in Part or Not at All: A Review Essay Based on "Knowing and Not Knowing" (Beth Lilly retrospective at Swan Coach House Gallery) and "Medium" (Zuckerman Museum of Art)<br />
Several writers have suggested that today’s America is trapped in an “epistemic crisis.” What the writers mean is that America is divided into groups that do not accept one another’s sources of information as communicating anything that could be called knowledge, or even evidence that could lead to coherent knowledge. There are no generally accepted authorities whose investigations cannot be called into question as “completely fake.” The paradoxical result is that completely fake stories can become widely accepted in a matter of hours; made up out of nothing by an online writer, illustrated with miscaptioned photographs stolen from unrelated articles, a fantastic tale will be repeated as truth so often that it becomes the top result in a websearch on the topic.<br />
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Of course, this dynamic played out in past eras, only more slowly. Before the invention of photography, woodcuts provided visual confirmation for the bizarre tales that circulated on broadsides, and before that, oral tradition elaborated ever more fantastically on fabricated narratives. Wise souls long ago learned to ask whenever possible for first-person confirmation, or “I’ll believe it when I see it,” which wiser theorists of knowledge almost as long ago corrected to “I’ll see it when I believe it.” What we see is partly determined by what we expect to see. Therein lies a larger issue, quite apart from the specific crises in knowledge today, that deserves the exploration that it has received in the autumn of 2017 in two Atlanta art exhibitions. (Actually, there have been at least two other exhibitions that raise the issue by implication; for my response to one of these, an Agnes Scott College exhibition on artists’ response to climate change, see—as of November 13, 2017—<a href="http://artsatl.com/data-flood-artists-respond-climate-change-prophetic-weatherwise/">here</a>.) <br />
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These two or three independently conceived but intimately related shows should have dominated artworld conversation, but life and larger epistemic crises tend to intervene. As it is, the exhibition that closed on November 8 stirred almost no conversation, and the one closing on December 3 deals with such vast hypotheses that its central thesis remains elusively but enticingly out of focus. <br />
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Beth Lilly’s “Knowing and Not Knowing,” a midcareer retrospective curated by Marianne Lambert at Swan Coach House Gallery, incorporated our central theme in its very title. And yet the title yields several different meanings, just as does “Medium” at the Zuckerman Museum of Art. But let the Zuckerman’s tales of mediums and media remain untold for the moment; we have an epistemological journey to make with Beth Lilly and the limits of story, history, and photography. <br />
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Lilly tests the limits right up front with <i>The Oracle@WiFi</i> and <i>Every Single One of These Stories Is True</i>, both of which series have been published as books as well as the individual prints from which the photographs on exhibit were extracted. Taken together, the two offer an impressive range of reflections on evidence, imagination, and rules of evaluation. <br />
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<i>The Oracle@WiFi</i> came about as an outright fiction about divination, but one enacted in real time. Lilly stated outright that she made no claims to oracle status, but would play the role by taking three photographs in response to a question not yet asked, when the questioner phoned to request a reading. After taking three photographs in quick succession in her immediate surroundings, Lilly would transmit them to the questioner while asking what question they had had in mind. Oracle and querent would then discuss the possible meaning of the photographic outcome. Often the images would bear an uncanny relationship to the details of the question, as when a question about “choice” resulted in three photographs of situations in which choices had to be made among multiple objects or options. Often the images were more ambiguously related to the original question.<br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OsEixHhdHGg/Wgn1cHmco9I/AAAAAAAACKk/joDGYRmlvLgpohyXll3N1mXvyDWmTPdlgCLcBGAs/s1600/Beth-Lilly__Right-Choices-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OsEixHhdHGg/Wgn1cHmco9I/AAAAAAAACKk/joDGYRmlvLgpohyXll3N1mXvyDWmTPdlgCLcBGAs/s1600/Beth-Lilly__Right-Choices-1.jpg" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="386" /></a><br />
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The process of interpretation involved extracting meaning from images created without prior knowledge of the situation for which they would be asked to provide data. What is of interest here is less the mind’s ability to project meaning into any unconsciously assembled pattern (for Lilly was not snapping pictures randomly, but rather seeing subtle patterns in the world around her, as any photographer does), but rather, the uncanny parallels between Lilly’s arbitrary pattern and the words in which a large or quite specific topic had been expressed. The correspondences were enough to make any of Lilly’s pronouncements seem prophetic, even as she made no claim to actual knowledge of the future. <br />
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The ambiguity expressed in this postmodernized version of prophecy is reinforced by the staged re-enactments of <i>Every Single One of These Stories Is True</i>. Lilly holds firmly to the veracity of every story told in the handwritten text framed alongside the staged version of the episode, even though—and/or because—all the stories have the air of tall tales. Lilly’s great grandmother knew all the details of a road mishap before the men to whom it happened had arrived home to tell them. A toy red elephant seen in a dream appeared in reality years later, in a bowl where neither Lilly nor her housemate had placed it. <a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gyVCEZoczrM/WgnwFpnHEGI/AAAAAAAACJE/lgtOFDR5as0CZaCKLswlVjm8IVqEVycYACLcBGAs/s1600/Beth-Lilly__Second-Sight.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gyVCEZoczrM/WgnwFpnHEGI/AAAAAAAACJE/lgtOFDR5as0CZaCKLswlVjm8IVqEVycYACLcBGAs/s400/Beth-Lilly__Second-Sight.jpg" width="400" height="245" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="612" /></a> <a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RVkGPXToYAw/WgnwKfRx3qI/AAAAAAAACJI/fkX9RQ9VEGooHP32hJedfi_8vYjh7i-6wCLcBGAs/s1600/Beth-Lilly__The-Dream-of-the-Red-Elephant-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RVkGPXToYAw/WgnwKfRx3qI/AAAAAAAACJI/fkX9RQ9VEGooHP32hJedfi_8vYjh7i-6wCLcBGAs/s400/Beth-Lilly__The-Dream-of-the-Red-Elephant-1.jpg" width="400" height="244" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="611" /></a><br />
These tales are placed under suspicion only by Lilly’s presumably forthright confession of possibly unreliable memory and outright mental illness in family members. One of Lilly’s aunts believed that any lost item had been stolen by the hippie she was convinced was hiding in her basement. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vvgZWtZGs5s/WgnwYimS1gI/AAAAAAAACJQ/aTZstw-yyiYFe1qxj5L4Z0AOZt2ZsZi7wCLcBGAs/s1600/Beth-Lilly__Schizophrenia.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vvgZWtZGs5s/WgnwYimS1gI/AAAAAAAACJQ/aTZstw-yyiYFe1qxj5L4Z0AOZt2ZsZi7wCLcBGAs/s400/Beth-Lilly__Schizophrenia.jpg" width="400" height="243" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="608" /></a><br />
Lilly herself recalls that her earliest childhood memory involved finding her cousin’s birthday gifts wrapped in black paper. “Later, I asked my Mom why she’d wrapped these in black paper. She said that had never happened. She said it must have been a dream. Maybe, but she has schizophrenia so I’m not sure I can trust her memories.”<br />
<br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Gp92QCQLOvk/Wgnwk3jRlJI/AAAAAAAACJU/SFo3R9eiPU8J1BjcNBQfNwLL9mr20y3PACLcBGAs/s1600/Beth-Lilly__Black-Presents%2Bcopy.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Gp92QCQLOvk/Wgnwk3jRlJI/AAAAAAAACJU/SFo3R9eiPU8J1BjcNBQfNwLL9mr20y3PACLcBGAs/s400/Beth-Lilly__Black-Presents%2Bcopy.jpg" width="245" height="400" data-original-width="360" data-original-height="588" /></a><br />
This witty double spin on the reliability of memory—each party casting doubt on the accuracy of the other’s recollection—foreshadows the games Lilly will later play with the theme of “knowing and not knowing”—not, be it noted, “knowing or not knowing.” All of us know and do not know at the same time, although what is known and not known shifts according to the situation. <br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-u1IvFvXPSi8/WgnwvtzQHBI/AAAAAAAACJY/rEPdsUPLlx05Mcjxwrsbq7baMtsN99n5ACLcBGAs/s1600/Beth-Lilly__Tornados.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-u1IvFvXPSi8/WgnwvtzQHBI/AAAAAAAACJY/rEPdsUPLlx05Mcjxwrsbq7baMtsN99n5ACLcBGAs/s400/Beth-Lilly__Tornados.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="667" /></a><br />
<br />
Sometimes this involves simple obliviousness, as in a hilarious set of staged and photocollaged images in which happy families are photographed against a green screen and scenes of impending or already present disaster are inserted behind them, creating a comic tableau of “What, me worry?” as their world collapses without their knowledge. Other obliviousness is captured documentary-style, in photographs of drivers in their cars on the Interstate who are clearly encapsulated in their own private worlds, unaware of the gaze of others. <br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W2D4CBQzbK4/Wgnw5Y4FNvI/AAAAAAAACJg/lQ5o7vyH3U0GEPot8R_x5aKSa9YLDvUQwCLcBGAs/s1600/Beth-Lilly__You-are-headed-int-he-right-direction.-Trust-your-instincts.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W2D4CBQzbK4/Wgnw5Y4FNvI/AAAAAAAACJg/lQ5o7vyH3U0GEPot8R_x5aKSa9YLDvUQwCLcBGAs/s400/Beth-Lilly__You-are-headed-int-he-right-direction.-Trust-your-instincts.jpg" width="400" height="286" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="714" /></a><br />
Lilly titles these latter images with texts from Chinese fortune cookies (e.g., "You are headed in the right direction. Trust your instincts."), linking them to her fascination with our need to define the future, or if possible, to foretell it with certainty.<br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w4F-QyP_qhY/WgnxSVnx_sI/AAAAAAAACJk/sbdDE9TWpOc5bMyYGehiAfd_TnWPZf9swCLcBGAs/s1600/Beth-Lilly__Monumental.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w4F-QyP_qhY/WgnxSVnx_sI/AAAAAAAACJk/sbdDE9TWpOc5bMyYGehiAfd_TnWPZf9swCLcBGAs/s400/Beth-Lilly__Monumental.jpg" width="400" height="302" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="756" /></a>Lilly also has photographed her own partial view of things seen from the road, or of landscapes at night where what is concealed by darkness creates a sense of uncertainty that translates more often into pleasing mystery rather than threat. Once again, what we see depends on what we believe. A suburban street can seem poetically placid or harmlessly spooky, but the same scene looks considerably different with the prior expectation of lurking intruders or predatory animals. <a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8_V4a7Hep0A/WgnxXAFu36I/AAAAAAAACJo/-D79ARqCGT4TZbV1Gn5gFpIUEw7Uf6iSgCLcBGAs/s1600/Beth-Lilly__Night-Street-2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8_V4a7Hep0A/WgnxXAFu36I/AAAAAAAACJo/-D79ARqCGT4TZbV1Gn5gFpIUEw7Uf6iSgCLcBGAs/s400/Beth-Lilly__Night-Street-2.jpeg" width="400" height="266" data-original-width="320" data-original-height="213" /></a><br />
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This sense of shifting perceptions or intrinsically blurry contexts for perfectly clear visual images carries over into “Medium,” the Zuckerman Museum of Art’s approach to our experience of the invisible world and the evidence by which we discern its existence or the aftermath of the ways in which we interact with it. “Invisible” is not always the same as “unheard”; the ambiguities of the auditory are so much a part of this exhibition that its catalogue incorporates a vinyl record alongside a poster documenting the essential facts about the artists and archives that appear in it. <br />
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Here it’s best to divide the subject matter into categories in a way that the exhibition itself doesn’t. The fact that the categories will still overlap, or that it will remain uncertain whether one work should be consigned to this category rather than that one, will serve as confirmation of the exhibition’s complex hypothesis about the indefinability of human beings’ transactions with the world of spirits, regardless of whether the spirits are real entities (or evidence interpreted as real entities), traces of past events turned into immaterial memories, or conscious fictions turning immaterial perceptions into material form. <br />
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The most documentary portion of the exhibition is, in fact, a collection of fictions intended to deceive, based on the search for hard evidence of spirit encounters in which the investigators for the Society for Psychical Research firmly believed but wished to authenticate. The manifestations of ectoplasm by purported mediums all proved to be hoaxes. Less easily documented phenomena, however, proved to be elusively but persuasively convincing.<br />
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This is why later recorded testimony of peculiar encounters and poltergeist phenomena (from the University of West Georgia research program that succeeded J. B. Rhine’s laboratory at Duke University) appears on the LP that serves both as the exhibition catalogue and as an independent piece of sound art, edited/created by Ben Coleman. The paranormal occupies a complex and unstable epistemological space; it skitters off when subjected to laboratory conditions, but manifests anew under circumstances that seem both unpremeditated and genuine. It is frequently difficult to disentangle from imaginative experience.<br />
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One of the artworks in “Medium,” by Carrie Mae Weems, responds directly to the nineteenth century’s magic-lantern phantasmagoria or projected images by which ghosts were made to appear, for deception or for pleasurable entertainment. Another work in the show, a complex sound-and-object installation by T. Lang and George Long, evokes the experience of their respective ancestors and the parallel but distinctively different experiences of blacks and whites in the South of yesterday and today, and raises the question of memory and imagination in a more “dematerialized” and/or symbolic form. (Persons wishing more extensive discussions of these artworks can find them in reviews <a href="http://artsatl.com/the-it-it-zuckerman-museum-arts-medium/">here</a> and <a href="http://burnaway.org/review/hokey-poignant-medium-goes-beyond-paranormal">here</a>.)<br />
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At this point, we may begin to discern the repeated themes of “Medium,” which are those of the dialectic between the deepest parts of historical experience, the role of imagination in mediating between sensory experience and memory, and the insufficiently theorized margins of sensory experience at which we may or may not begin to experience—something else. But what? <br />
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A deliciously comic metaphor for all these processes can be found in a historical phenomenon that otherwise seems out of place in the exhibition, the “bone records” of the Cold War era in which music aficionados in the Soviet Union imported contraband styles of Western music by etching the forbidden recordings onto used x-ray sheets in lieu of cutting them onto vinyl blanks. The readily available substitute material thus becomes an inadvertent multilayered metaphor: forbidden knowledge is smuggled past the censor by making use of a material that reveals the depths of the human body, thus permitting the dematerialized experience of music, in which the air around us is altered through the interaction of two objects which in themselves are not music (the record and the record player, the instrument and the body of the performer, the patterned software and the hardware altered by it). The imaginative leap that made the bone records possible and the experience of forbidden knowledge that came from playing them constitutes the contribution of what used to be called “the human spirit” or “the human imagination.”<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-n0lGku603M8/WgnyhHd619I/AAAAAAAACJ0/uk0hj9EzadAEFtLCPJaRSwtRI6zYXvRbACLcBGAs/s1600/Medium_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-n0lGku603M8/WgnyhHd619I/AAAAAAAACJ0/uk0hj9EzadAEFtLCPJaRSwtRI6zYXvRbACLcBGAs/s320/Medium_1.jpg" width="292" height="320" data-original-width="288" data-original-height="316" /></a><br />
What happens to that spirit upon bodily death, and whether that spirit co-inhabits the world with other spirits that are not human, is the subject of the history of religions, although that history overlaps significantly with the history of art, thus making “Medium” a feasible exhibition. The show begins <i>in medias res</i> historically, with the rise of spiritualism in the nineteenth century as a way of channeling what had previously been contained within religious strictures dissolved by newfound skepticism. The Society for Psychical Research and its counterparts in Europe arose as efforts to bring a scientific spirit of analysis to the exploration of the margins of the human experience. Today’s firm demarcation between experience restrained by religious dogma and denied by professional skeptics has relegated the paranormal to the realm of popular entertainment, as P. Seth Thompson’s overlap of movie stills from <i>Poltergeist</i> indicates (while giving us a glimpse of how the medium of the movies operates on our inward spirit). In this cultural climate, artists such as Stephanie Dowda are left to create their own visual metaphors with which to cope with the traces left in memory and history in the wake of a mother’s death. Dowda’s photographs of landscapes intersected by overlapping straight lines are curiously reminiscent of the photographs in which the late Gretchen Hupfel made visible the currents of energy carrying the invisible signals of our information media through the atmosphere. We live in a torrent of data of which we are unaware until it finds a channel. <br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/--eDvhVAaPdE/WgnyuCEzVTI/AAAAAAAACJ4/oxQXeLzVn6M4P2zM5vTIhYXaQTjjBpvOACLcBGAs/s1600/Medium_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/--eDvhVAaPdE/WgnyuCEzVTI/AAAAAAAACJ4/oxQXeLzVn6M4P2zM5vTIhYXaQTjjBpvOACLcBGAs/s320/Medium_2.jpg" width="320" height="279" data-original-width="288" data-original-height="251" /></a><br />
Whether we leave invisibly charged traces on the objects we have used, and whether perceptives can be the channel by which to translate those traces, is explored by Dan R. Talley in his juxtaposition of photographs of ordinary objects with the information that psychics extracted from them at his request. Or rather, they are juxtaposed with the story about extracting that information; as with the nineteenth-century pseudo-mediums whose faked ectoplasm is both ridiculed and transmuted into a different metaphor in Lacey Prpic Hedtke’s contemporary photographs of the female body, we have no way of knowing whether Talley is giving us a total fiction. (Fernando Orellana’s elaborate machines for detecting the presence of ghosts who might be drawn to the object from their past contained in the machine seem far more like a playful put-on with serious head-scratching at the edges; Talley’s dryly analytical account of his concept-laden process feels authentically earnest.)<br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jCgSJcbLGvE/Wgny6U4ddyI/AAAAAAAACJ8/MoBKUrYzvsYN8jn-ljy_rNPMJlzK5rtBgCLcBGAs/s1600/Medium_4.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jCgSJcbLGvE/Wgny6U4ddyI/AAAAAAAACJ8/MoBKUrYzvsYN8jn-ljy_rNPMJlzK5rtBgCLcBGAs/s320/Medium_4.jpg" width="203" height="320" data-original-width="144" data-original-height="227" /></a><br />
Any account of any experience, whether backed up by ambiguous physical evidence or not, is potentially fraudulent. (See: “epistemic crisis,” at the beginning of this essay, regarding what happens when this epistemological truth rots the shared sense of trust on which society depends.) Hence it is important that “Medium” includes artwork from two encounters with the spirit world for which we have trustworthy observer data regarding the felt authenticity of the artist’s experience. For the sake of moving towards a phenomenology of the encounter with the invisible world, it seems equally important that they come from opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, and of almost every other conceptual spectrum one cares to create. <br />
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J. B. Murray’s “spirit writing,” which he deciphered by reading the revelations through a jar of water drawn from a well on his property, eventually morphed into quasi-figural imagery that he interpreted as illustrating the punishments waiting in Hell for the unrepentant. Illiterate and rural, Murray believed himself “in the hand of the Holy Spirit” (to quote the title of Mary Padgelek’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hand-Holy-Spirit-Visionary-Murray/dp/0865546991">book about him</a>) after “the sun came down” and the sun plus the rainbow from his garden hose (cf. the 17th century German mystic Jakob Boehme’s “<a href="http://www.bodysoulandspirit.net/mystical_experiences/read/notables/boehme.shtml">light on the pewter dish</a>”) gave him the power “to see what other folks can’t see.” Although the spirit writings acquired their vivid palette only after artist Andy Nasisse made art materials available to Murray, there is no reason to believe they fail in any degree to reflect the visions of the inner world in which, as Murray put it, “Jesus is stronger than hoodoo.” At the same time, they are deeply creative expressions of Murray’s own spirit (or personal psychology); no other visionary in the rural South produced drawings/writings exactly like Murray’s. <br />
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Shana Robbins produces a glitzy response to her own encounters with the spirit world that she has experienced in ayahuasca sessions in actual South American jungles and in self-invented sites for spiritual encounter from Iceland to downtown Atlanta. There is no reason to suppose her creative mythology is any less authentic than J. B. Murray’s. If we have difficulties with any aspects of Robbins’ practice, it is because we have difficulties with the aesthetics of the social milieu from which her practice arises. <br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cvGR7aT-hCo/Wgn0pH0yzYI/AAAAAAAACKY/89GTIo0N5ms-VjmxvmLO9nBcAfnBPQW0gCLcBGAs/s1600/Medium_6.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cvGR7aT-hCo/Wgn0pH0yzYI/AAAAAAAACKY/89GTIo0N5ms-VjmxvmLO9nBcAfnBPQW0gCLcBGAs/s400/Medium_6.jpg" width="400" height="266" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="333" /></a><br />
Is the practice itself, regardless of the aesthetic terms in which she chooses to cast it, sufficiently efficacious to have penetrated at least the margins of the phenomena, phenomena to which the history of religions gives abundant testimony? How can we do justice to the question of whether or not someone’s practice is efficaciously transformative, rather than dismissing it <i>ipso facto</i> as a simple piece of theatre? Might we be able to assert responsibly that the contours of such practices cannot be adequately mapped by cheap reductionisms? Can we make such an assertion even though we claim (as we must do as moderns) that the phenomena encountered in such practices, phenomena of which most of us have had no direct experience, are given to practitioners through cultural and biological filters—and that these filters make it difficult to discern, whether from the inside or the outside of the practice, whether there is anything authentically “other” occurring? <br />
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Can we compose a theory that acknowledges the role of imaginative discourse and composition in the creation of spiritual experience as well as of all forms of art, without reducing the former to a version of the latter? Can we, as Ben Coleman’s catalogue essay/liner notes imply, devise a method of investigation that fully incorporates aesthetic and spiritual experience in a theoretical format that does justice to the full dimensionality of both? <br />
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This epistemological issue is what I find most interesting, but it isn’t the only one that curators Justin Rabideau and Teresa Bramlette Reeves have pursued. As I have implied by word choices here and there, we are “haunted” by history, memory, and the gender and ethnic categories into which we are born. There is a reason that the metaphor of ghosts and haunting is used so often to describe personal obsessions and personal and collective trauma, and the show is as interested in that as in the ontological status of disembodied visitors. A catalogue of considerable dimensions could have been compiled that unpacks all of these implications and cross-connections. <br />
<br />
However, the vinyl record (with optional digital download of its contents) that constitutes the exhibition catalogue is not that sort of document. It incorporates the show’s auditory aspects (the things that have historically been left out of hard-copy exhibition catalogues, except in those few catalogues containing a supplementary CD or DVD) into a creative anthology of sound art in which documentation blends with experimental compositions. The spectrum of responses that runs between raw experience and refined artworks is thus honored, even as it is obliquely analyzed in the liner notes. The show’s visual aspects are illustrated in the folder of artist statements and biographies accompanying the album. This one-page format allows for the concurrent perusal of the entire range of aesthetic and evidentiary material in this remarkable exhibition, and thus permits the formation of hypotheses along the lines that I have here suggested. <br />
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I still would have liked to have a conventional catalogue full of scholarly essays with footnotes and bibliography. But had Reeves and Rabideau gone that route, this present essay would have been impossible. It is far better that they chose not to foreclose our options on a topic on which the options ought to be left as wide open as responsible analysis will permit. <br />
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—Jerry Cullum, November 12, 2017<br />
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littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-50847952560879255082017-07-08T10:10:00.001-07:002017-07-08T10:31:23.657-07:00a provisional, belated review of Kirstin Mitchell, "Midnight at the Oasis," Hathaway Contemporary, Atlanta GA Hegel famously wrote regarding philosophical reflection, “When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a form of life grown old. Philosophy cannot rejuvenate it, but only understand it. The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.”<br />
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The tropical sky colors that dominate one end of Kirstin Mitchell’s “Midnight at the Oasis” are those of dawn, not dusk, although the nearly monochromatic painting on the wall to the left could be taken to represent the blazing color of a tropical sunset. In any case, gray on gray has nothing to do with it.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-T8tbAzOB3dA/WWEM1bHvyFI/AAAAAAAACCc/6Bw8nBeIc6gBetygAZXa4YCKlgjNLpINQCLcBGAs/s1600/a%2Bdark%2Begg%2Bbetween%2Bdawns.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-T8tbAzOB3dA/WWEM1bHvyFI/AAAAAAAACCc/6Bw8nBeIc6gBetygAZXa4YCKlgjNLpINQCLcBGAs/s320/a%2Bdark%2Begg%2Bbetween%2Bdawns.jpg" width="320" height="213" data-original-width="960" data-original-height="639" /></a></div><br />
On the other hand, the diptych of rosy-fingered dawn flanks a pedestal containing a black egg-shaped sculpture, an archetypal image that leads in so many different contradictory directions (you could look it up) that we had better try not to overinterpret. At the very least, however, the dark interrupts the light for a reason. That it happens to be an egg, as dark as the midnight at the sort of oasis that is the source of life in the desert, would probably provide myth-oriented critics with a fairly rich vein of free association from which to extract more meanings than Mitchell ever intended to put there.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-r7dRBdk5PSk/WWEPq1L7qUI/AAAAAAAACCk/34tT8O20PU81KtH5K3n6qwQ4OfuLCIQxwCLcBGAs/s1600/gallery%2Bview%2B1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-r7dRBdk5PSk/WWEPq1L7qUI/AAAAAAAACCk/34tT8O20PU81KtH5K3n6qwQ4OfuLCIQxwCLcBGAs/s320/gallery%2Bview%2B1.jpg" width="320" height="155" data-original-width="960" data-original-height="464" /></a></div><br />
What is entirely intentional, however, is the faceoff between the paradisal brightness at one end of the gallery and the dark of <i>Limousine</i> at the other end. Here, too, however, the combination of elements is meant to defeat any easy retreat into symbolism; the dark-gray rubber sheet that forms a drape against the even darker panel is robbed of any purely funereal associations by the title, which evokes fashionable luxury as well as solemn occasions of state (although it also happens to be the proprietary name of the pigment found in the painting, which itself is a much more complex interplay of modes of darkness than it seems to be at first distant glance).<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Q0k6tdYiLwQ/WWEWtXNE0rI/AAAAAAAACCw/_UgT73VOBskv4dAh_5jDGzO6lCr9YRfJACLcBGAs/s1600/limousine%252C%2Bbetter%2Bphoto.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Q0k6tdYiLwQ/WWEWtXNE0rI/AAAAAAAACCw/_UgT73VOBskv4dAh_5jDGzO6lCr9YRfJACLcBGAs/s320/limousine%252C%2Bbetter%2Bphoto.jpg" width="320" height="219" data-original-width="960" data-original-height="656" /></a></div><br />
What is deliberate also is the use of rubber in lieu of woven cloth in the drapery that dominates the majority of the large wall pieces. The tensions between the sensual, industrial, and, not incidentally, tropical associations of rubber could easily lead critics off into yet another feast of free association, one that could fill volumes.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pCIPeF18oLc/WWEMUI_ojAI/AAAAAAAACCY/AX6r2BNXEuwEan6nwA3BT1UM0Z4O2MVQwCLcBGAs/s1600/three%2Brubber%2Bdrapes%2Band%2Ba%2Bblack%2Begg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pCIPeF18oLc/WWEMUI_ojAI/AAAAAAAACCY/AX6r2BNXEuwEan6nwA3BT1UM0Z4O2MVQwCLcBGAs/s320/three%2Brubber%2Bdrapes%2Band%2Ba%2Bblack%2Begg.jpg" width="320" height="213" data-original-width="960" data-original-height="639" /></a></div><br />
The tone of depth and sophistication established by the conscious arrangement of work on the gallery walls is undercut by the anomalous comedy of two vaguely fruit-shaped sculptures perched upon a chunk of Styrofoam flotsam in the center of the highly polished floor. The dark reflection of <i>Limousine</i> stretches towards the shore of this odd interruption, an oasis of humor in a conversation of color and form that encodes more serious matters than might first appear. (A blue cube also lurks in a corner between a purely white work on the left and the not-quite-black dark of “Limousine’ on the right, almost daring us to find symbolic meaning in a piece that may be there simply because it adds to the visual rhythm.)<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-F6Jo_Zt6gxA/WWEMKSW-lrI/AAAAAAAACCU/EhEAZQ3rpHYVzY7OKZ9QcHAqNTXqQNvLgCLcBGAs/s1600/white%2Band%2Ba%2Bblue%2Bcube.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-F6Jo_Zt6gxA/WWEMKSW-lrI/AAAAAAAACCU/EhEAZQ3rpHYVzY7OKZ9QcHAqNTXqQNvLgCLcBGAs/s320/white%2Band%2Ba%2Bblue%2Bcube.jpg" width="320" height="213" data-original-width="960" data-original-height="639" /></a></div><br />
Any doubt as to whether we are meant to engage in intellectual free play as well as sensual enjoyment and formal appreciation of spatial arrangement is dispelled by Mitchell’s artist statement, which consists of artfully selected etymological passages from dictionaries, dancing adroitly among historical associations of the words used in the titles of the works and of the exhibition. We very quickly notice the presence of body fluids, social relationships, practical activities with symbolic implications, facts from the sciences, and enough other suggestive linkages to keep attentive readers busy for longer than they might wish.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-87aZD607-14/WWEQoImAoZI/AAAAAAAACCo/7v-8A3FaT30eSvrq7dTbbABfk3DBhrOigCLcBGAs/s1600/a%2Btitle%2Buppn%2Bexiting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-87aZD607-14/WWEQoImAoZI/AAAAAAAACCo/7v-8A3FaT30eSvrq7dTbbABfk3DBhrOigCLcBGAs/s320/a%2Btitle%2Buppn%2Bexiting.jpg" width="320" height="221" data-original-width="960" data-original-height="663" /></a></div>At this point, you have very little time left to view the exhibition ("you" meaning those of you reading this on July 8, 2017, within feasible distance of Hathaway Contemporary, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.) in something resembling tranquility. If at all possible, you should attend the closing reception, which includes artist talks by Mitchell and by Karen Schwartz, on July 11. <br />
<br />
<i>All photos in this review are © Kirstin Mitchell.</i>littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-90778417566900268402015-12-05T03:13:00.001-08:002021-05-14T04:03:25.516-07:00The Age of Earthquakes: In Lieu of a Review<i>The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present</i> slipped into the global dialogue nearly a year ago now without much notice, in spite of being a three-person collaboration including a couple of intergenerational culture heroes of the artworld, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Shumon Basar was the name I had to look up, which turns out to be embarrassing since something by him was published in the same issue of <i>Art Papers</i> that marked my return to writing for that magazine in spite of my misgivings about feeling completely out of touch. Self-illustrative intuition.<br />
<br />
For persons of a certain age (okay, I really mean “for me”), the book is a vertiginous experience: it is so obviously an <i>hommage</i> to Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s 1967 experiment, <i>The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects</i>. <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bPLQfIp9Of0/VmWwP8RevxI/AAAAAAAABmg/HAn26qyoTuE/s1600/p02ldjh6.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bPLQfIp9Of0/VmWwP8RevxI/AAAAAAAABmg/HAn26qyoTuE/s320/p02ldjh6.jpg"></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RAk3iE8k3sw/VmWwQ4oHvsI/AAAAAAAABmo/-wxvs0l-Ufg/s1600/p02lbgwl.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RAk3iE8k3sw/VmWwQ4oHvsI/AAAAAAAABmo/-wxvs0l-Ufg/s320/p02lbgwl.jpg"></a><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OeK8Dq0anY8/VmK7G6heSbI/AAAAAAAABjo/SQyRH1JcT8E/s1600/medium-is-massage_i2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OeK8Dq0anY8/VmK7G6heSbI/AAAAAAAABjo/SQyRH1JcT8E/s320/medium-is-massage_i2.jpg"></a></div><i>The Medium is the Massage</i> was a book about the end of the age of the book, the rise of televisual media; and Fiore’s inspired design escorted the reader, or more accurately the looker, through McLuhan’s dizzying ideas and into the world in which he or she or ze or they already lived. It was above all a lovely physical object about a world that was increasingly immaterial, a labyrinth of moving pictures flickering on movie and television screens and sounds plus spoken or sung words conveyed through wired-up speakers and transistor radios. <br />
<br />
I was so unsettled by the visual quotations in Coupland, Obrist, and Basar’s book that I Googled a PDF of <i>The Medium Is the Massage</i> and after being annoyed by the anomalous cover packaging of this digitized version of a later edition (the quintessential Quentin Fiore white-lettering-on-black cover was a key part of the experience—a book about a world of saturated-color images at metaphoric warp speed, in which all the images coming at the reader in fast-paced page succession were in black and white), <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-07l_nRF3XRY/VmK-UqjOtEI/AAAAAAAABkU/BwFaWQQAHDE/s1600/mcluhan1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-07l_nRF3XRY/VmK-UqjOtEI/AAAAAAAABkU/BwFaWQQAHDE/s200/mcluhan1.jpg"></a></div>I settled into the irritating experience of seeing double-page spreads at what looked to be very slightly less than 100%. (I wasn’t irritated consciously enough to look at the top of the window and see if this was so.) I had scrolled through just enough to confirm my recollection of the startling quality of the original book when the remainder of the pages contained only the text “Whoops! Something went wrong and this page did not download.” <br />
<br />
It was one of those glorious bridge moments between <i>The Medium Is the Massage </i> and <i>The Age of Earthquakes </i> that falls into the category of “You can’t make this stuff up.” <br />
<br />
In any case, the latter book is also a vertiginous sensory experience, though perhaps twice as vertiginous for those for whom it brings back the experience of being a college senior and holding a book that tried to illustrate the weighty theory, only semi-intelligible, that <i>Understanding Media</i> had conveyed only a year or two before. <br />
<br />
For one thing, <i>The Age of Earthquakes </i> is a sexy object. The American edition, anyway; the rainbow-sheen reflection of the silvery-inked cover recalls the cover of the monumental exhibition catalogue for a turn-of-the-millennium show, which show I cannot quite remember, and I am not going to put down the laptop and go hunt for the catalogue. An image search of keywords didn’t reveal the name of it.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C2z6VthICQU/VmLByDcEHmI/AAAAAAAABlI/cq_eVoDjQEQ/s1600/age%2Bof%2Bearthquakes%2Bcover%2B1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C2z6VthICQU/VmLByDcEHmI/AAAAAAAABlI/cq_eVoDjQEQ/s200/age%2Bof%2Bearthquakes%2Bcover%2B1.jpg"></a></div>In any case, the heft of this little book is quite remarkable; the trio of authors obviously put considerable thought into the weight of the paper stock, because something that looks as if it should be feather-light is quite substantial, in a size that fits the hand. (Again, in the American edition, so I am basing my supposition on inadequate information; but the American hard-copy edition was published three weeks prior to the British hard-copy edition, which I have seen only onscreen—again, at less than 100% of the page size of the physical object. The onscreen preview of the American print edition is more than 100% on my laptop, and each page needs to be scrolled down to see all of it. Interesting…)<br />
<br />
Having belatedly discovered the book in late 2015 through the Douglas Coupland page on Amazon (I somehow missed <i>Art Papers’ </i> March 7 Facebook post congratulating Basar on its publication), I am particularly amused by the page spread updating Jenny Holzer’s truism: “Protect me from what Amazon suggests I want.” <br />
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So this is a book about the mental habits of a fast-changing age of digital media in the same way that the McLuhan/Fiore book was about the mental habits of a fast-changing age of analog media. And in the same way, it contains a good many trenchant observations alongside remarks that are not meant to be taken seriously, or at least cannot be taken seriously even if the authors intended them to be taken seriously.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-l7HmhNjiBgo/VmK-n54oqLI/AAAAAAAABko/PrsQ1b7kgO8/s1600/age%2Bof%2Bearthquakes%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-l7HmhNjiBgo/VmK-n54oqLI/AAAAAAAABko/PrsQ1b7kgO8/s400/age%2Bof%2Bearthquakes%2B2.jpg"></a></div>This is why I am far more forgiving of the book’s possible flaws than are the reviewers I’ve read thus far online. <i>ARTnews </i> senior editor M. H. Miller takes the authors to task for offering two contradictory opinions about the Internet a few pages apart, even though one of them is more or less documented and serious and the other is obviously written as the kind of preposterous opinion that people write in Facebook posts at three o’clock in the morning—drunk Facebooking being one of several updated social-media versions of drunk dialing. <br />
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Miller calls out our boys for the egregiously unfortunate bad timing of a page that reads, “Rodney King was the YouTube of 1993. If it happened today would it be able to compete with everything else?” Although (as Miller admits) the book was on its way into print before the succession of viral iPhone documentations of police brutality, Miller points out that not even the chronology in this remark is correct: Obrist/Coupland/Basar are remembering the year that the Rodney King video was incorporated into the Whitney Biennial, not the year it first burst into public consciousness, which was 1991. In fact, Spike Lee had already used it in the title sequence of <i>Malcolm X</i> in 1992. <br />
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I had failed to notice the erroneous date, but it seems to me to resemble the systematic misinformation with which I am bombarded every time I open Facebook. This species of self-confidently wrong and questionably grammatical meme shows up more times per day than I am capable of guessing an average number for. <br />
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I might find a book reviewer who gets the point if I kept scrolling through the Google results, but three reviews into the process, I am flabbergasted at how much the reviewers hate the book, and how much they seem incapable of understanding a book about being “smupid” that is so illustrative of its own premise that at least some of it has to be deliberate, even if some of it is just the usual phenomenon of being unable to see our own blindness. (The condition of “smupidity” in which the digital present leaves us is complemented by “stuartness”—the one being “smart+stupid” and the other “stupid+smart.” The book is both at once, or at least in quick succession, which is part of the point. One reviewer wrote, if I remember rightly, “If I wanted something that looked like the Internet, I’d go to, uh, the Internet,” and another wrote “I read books to get away from this kind of shit,” which is so unendurably thickheaded that I would have thrown the review across the room had it not been on my laptop screen, making it a bad impulse to which to succumb.)<br />
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The pacing of the book makes visible and forces into awareness all the onscreen phenomena with which we are too familiar to bother to reflect upon them. This is a longstanding practice in experimental literature and design, and I cannot believe that book reviewers not only for a major West Coast newspaper but for a venerable art magazine should be so incapable of comprehending this book’s place in that equally venerable history. <br />
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But then, we live in an age of growing illiteracy, don’t we? Visual illiteracy as well as textual. An age in which the information we have literally at our fingertips is only the information that we already know we can have at our fingertips.<br />
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<i>The Age of Earthquakes</i> is annoyingly smart-ass and conceptually smug, but that comes with the territory of being part of the artworld, and should be discounted appropriately. I like the moments in which it shakes up my perception more than the moments in which it reminds me of how insufferable a place the artworld really is. (One reason I usually just sit here with my books and my laptop until an art object comes along that makes me want to interact with it in spite of the insufferable social environment that surrounds it.)<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JMcdKZvz9vk/VmK_J-JXWoI/AAAAAAAABkw/et1UqUdqH8c/s1600/From-The-Age-of-Earthquak-009.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JMcdKZvz9vk/VmK_J-JXWoI/AAAAAAAABkw/et1UqUdqH8c/s400/From-The-Age-of-Earthquak-009.jpg"></a></div>Too bad nobody who has had it dumped on their desk as a review copy had their perception shaken as a result. Are even senior editors of art magazines what the McLuhan generation called P.O.B.’s? It is quite significant that the many, many definitions of that acronym in an online urban dictionary do not include Print-Oriented Bastard.<br />
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...Okay, update at 4:32 a.m. on December 5, as I go in quest of images to add to this post: Shumon Basar's interview at http://www.thedoublenegative.co.uk/2015/03/the-age-of-earthquakes-a-guide-to-the-extreme-present/ offers a linear, highly intelligent disquisition on the themes of the book, along with the name of the man who probably made those decisions about the paper stock and page size (although I wonder who decided on the radical disparity <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SMiqK0YsEFA/VmK4xYe1J3I/AAAAAAAABiU/kbZ1zfGXJ1g/s1600/age%2Bof%2Bearthquakes%2Bcover%2B1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SMiqK0YsEFA/VmK4xYe1J3I/AAAAAAAABiU/kbZ1zfGXJ1g/s200/age%2Bof%2Bearthquakes%2Bcover%2B1.jpg"></a> <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wed2BOhR3_c/VmK4zcXiGoI/AAAAAAAABic/42cdaddSWPg/s1600/age%2Bof%2Bearthquakes%2Bcover%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wed2BOhR3_c/VmK4zcXiGoI/AAAAAAAABic/42cdaddSWPg/s200/age%2Bof%2Bearthquakes%2Bcover%2B2.jpg"></a> between the covers of the U.S. and U.K. editions). <br />
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Although his name does not appear on the front cover, Wayne Daly is this book's Quentin Fiore. So now you know.<br />
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littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-88939411939747949672015-05-15T07:02:00.000-07:002015-05-15T07:05:21.033-07:00another note on global and local biennales<i>Some years ago, I staged a two-artist biennale that existed only in the form of catalogue documentation of an event that never took place, to make the point that this was the only way in which most of us would ever experience the sprawling immensities of the Venice Biennale or Documenta or a host of other global art events. Today I would have to establish a website, but there are so many bogus documentations of all sorts on the internet today that the thrill is gone. We trust (mostly) in the accuracy of the reportage on biennales that few of us will ever visit.<br />
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The idea of a biennale that one has no option </i>but<i> to visit, however, appeals to me. One with no curators, a self-organizing biennale within the parameters of a conceptually vague theme, is a commentary on the DIY aesthetic that may not have been intended when the definers (not the organizers) created the idea of the Mardin Biennial.<br />
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Of course, the project has a website, but I am not sure how one goes about documenting the event comprehensively. The notion of the carnivalesque, the site-specific that can only be experienced, but on a more intimately local level that demands total immersion and cannot be exported—unlike the video and sound pieces of the global biennials that can't be captured on a website but can be restaged in the world's museums. The Mardin Biennial sounds to an outsider like a hybrid between the critical deglobalized biennial Ali Artun calls for and Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence—a place where ignored or forgotten everyday objects become the stuff of fictional biographies or biographical fictions.<br />
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Here is the entire content of an email about it that I received from one of the only non-local artists in the biennial. Given the caveats I have just recited, I have no way of determining the authenticity of all this other than getting on a plane to the city in question:</i><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LtTorL5_2HY/VVX4C0lPo0I/AAAAAAAABQo/5FwdCN6F5R0/s1600/GZCXZQQXTecyYNrXlNVFGGvkyN2hH3xBbMVObIdRTMWpydIC0TtXh3H-Mhstl_PeZz-nNDJvsZkMRlTA-Ey0sdveZso97xxs3iI2p2g%3Ds0-d-e1-ft.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LtTorL5_2HY/VVX4C0lPo0I/AAAAAAAABQo/5FwdCN6F5R0/s320/GZCXZQQXTecyYNrXlNVFGGvkyN2hH3xBbMVObIdRTMWpydIC0TtXh3H-Mhstl_PeZz-nNDJvsZkMRlTA-Ey0sdveZso97xxs3iI2p2g%3Ds0-d-e1-ft.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Mythologies <br />
3rd Mardin Biennial<br />
15 May – 15 June, 2015<br />
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Opening 15th of May at 6 pm<br />
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<br />
3rd Mardin Biennial organized by Mardin Cinama Society. The conceptual frame of the biennial was set up with reference to Ali Artun.<br />
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Within the conceptual framework of ‘Mythologies’, the most essential aspect of the biennale is that it will have no appointed curator. Instead, the biennale will be realized with the contribution of local people in Mardin as well as other volunteered individuals including:<br />
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Döne Otyam, Ferhat Özgür, Fırat Arapoğlu, Mehmet Baran, Claudia Segura Campins, Sait Tunç, Mesut Alp, Fikret Atay, Hakan Irmak, Özge Ersoy, Ferhat Satıcı, Hülya Özdemir, Canan Budak, Can Bulgu.<br />
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Mardin is centrally located within a geography of antique civilizations, stretching from Egypt to India. It still retains noteworthy traces of the symbolic world, the universe of icons and myths, the art and literature it has created, amassed and, in turn, benefitted for centuries. These traces still survive in the daily lives of Mardin’s inhabitants, in their living environment as much as in the ethnographical and architectural heritage of the city. <br />
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The talismans, amulets, icons, jewels, garments, books, pictures, photographs, pots and pans, glasses and dishes, rugs and carpets accumulated in houses, shops, workshops form what can be called ‘cabinets of curiosities’: private ‘museums’ where objects form mysterious relations with one another and write unspoken myths. In these ‘museums’, antiquities and ordinary objects, as well as various times that are inscribed in them, constantly bestow new significations upon each other. You may come across such dream worlds on the workbench of a knife-sharpener, or the counter of a coppersmith’s; at a pigeon-trainer’s stall; in a church or a bar as well as in the nooks and crannies of houses. The objective of the 3rd: the poetry and magic to these cabinets of curiosities that have long ago abandoned them. It calls on artists to explore their memory, to write their mythology. <br />
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The 3rd Mardin Biennial is curated by a collective, constituted mostly of locals. Likewise, many of the artists are also locals, among them also artisans and craftsman. Hence, this version of the Mardin Biennial suggests an alternative approach by questioning the prevailing biennial procedure where a single curator, who is unfamiliar with the context and setting, single-handedly decides who to exhibit, what to exhibit, and how to exhibit it. This Biennial vehemently opposes the reduction of the local cultural milieu to an exhibition décor and the Mardin Biennial is to return identification of the locals with an exhibition forced on them, in other words, to the branding of Mardin by an autocratic curator who imposes a certain view upon the city, its memory and its history. Instead, the proposal is to conceive the Biennial as a Mardin carnival, therefore evoking such concepts as game, chance, spontaneity, serendipity, intimacy and collectivity as means for political resistance. Such a biennial will undoubtedly be more captivating for the locals who had previously been alienated from art events in their own city as well as for the visiting outsiders who will be exposed to exhibits that truly engage with their context. More importantly, it will give the artists that will participate in the Mardin Biennial a chance to experience this city and bond with its unique imaginative and poetic world.<br />
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Venues<br />
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Mor Efrem Manastırı, Alman Karargahı, Keldani Kilisesi, Mardin Müzesi, Videoist , Açık Hava Sineması (Sun Cinema), Mardin Bazaar.<br />
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Participating artists<br />
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Ahmet Elhan // Aikaterini Gegisian // Alban Muja // Ani Setyan // Antonio Cosentino // Aysel Alver // Babak Kazemi // Canan Budak // Claire Hooper // David Blandy // Deniz Aktaş // Dilan Bozyel // Dilara Akay // Eda Gecikmez // Elena Bajo // Erick Beltrán // Ethem Erkan // Evrim Kavcar // Fani Zguro // Fırat Engin // Gabi Yerli // Hakan Kırdar // Halil Altındere // Haris Epaminonda // Iratxe Jaio & Klaas Van Gorkum // Işıl Eğrikavuk-Jozef Erçevik Amado // İbrahim Ayhan // Iman Issa // Isabel Rocamora // Juan Del Gado // Khaled Hafez // Krassimir Terziev // Lena Von Lapschina // Mehtap Baydu // Melih Apa // Metin Ezilmez // Miquel Garcia // Mike Berg // Murat Akagündüz // Murat Germen // Mürüvvet Türkyılmaz // Nadi Güler // Necla Rüzgar // Nezir Akkul // Nooshin Farhid // Oriol Vilanova // Özlem Günyol-Mustafa Kunt // Pedro Torres // Romain Kronenberg // Sait Tunç // Stuart Brisley // Şefik Özcan // Thierry Payet // Ursula Mayer // Yavuz Tanyeli // Yaygara<br />
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Videoart program curated by Claudia Segura Campins and Özge Ersoy (with the collaboration of Loop Fair 2014)<br />
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Anne-Valerie Gasc// Antonio Paucar// Levi van Veluw// Oscar Muñoz// Zhou Tao<br />
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For more information: www.mardinbienali.org <br />
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littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-19641763375508266982015-05-06T18:10:00.000-07:002015-05-06T18:10:49.484-07:00"And all directions I come to you": not a review of a preview, please<b>Wild Beast Zero: Some Reflections (Perhaps in a Funhouse Mirror; That, I Know Not) on an Encounter in a Preview of glo’s “And all directions I come to you”</b><br />
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<br />
Jerry Cullum<br />
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<br />
I have been looking recently at a good many books from my youthful years…some, like Goethe’s <i>Faust</i> or Charles Francis Potter’s <i>The Lost Years of Jesus Revealed</i>, from really, really youthful, as in age fourteen. “Looking at,” not “reading,” because I am trying to sort through more than a lifetime’s worth of accumulated detritus. (I inherited things from my parents’ own early lives, like elegantly designed sets of playing cards and bridge tally sheets, things I can neither use nor discard. Kind of like personal memory in that regard.)<br />
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One of the books I have thus encountered is the first volume of Erich Neumann’s Jungian text <i>The Origins and History of Consciousness</i>, a book that set my future course rather firmly when I read it in my senior year of college. It wasn’t an assigned text at my experimental interdisciplinary school; in fact, I had to smuggle an in-depth study of depth psychology into my personal curriculum by way of a seminar in literary criticism in which I proposed to approach criticism through phenomenology and “a theology of consciousness.” <br />
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So imagine my delight back then at the synchronistic encounter, in the secondhand copy of Neumann’s book that I found at Haslam’s bookshop, with what now seems to me to be an unintended work of conceptual art; the happy accident certainly reflected the ironic visual and textual juxtapositions I had produced the year before in a wall-filling collage in my dorm room without knowing that the genre had a name. <br />
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“The fact this volume is being used as a textbook does not mean that the University endorses its contents from the standpoint of morals, philosophy, theology, or scientific hypotheses.” Think these thoughts, in other words, but do not believe them.<br />
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Study consciousness, read books that claim to give an analysis of how consciousness operates, but hold fast to your verbally expressed opinions even if everything in the book suggests that you should mistrust your verbally expressed opinions.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Tat0HZVllc4/VUq5dF_VBhI/AAAAAAAABPw/0A3Bt-XE9SA/s1600/IMG_0298%2Bcopy.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Tat0HZVllc4/VUq5dF_VBhI/AAAAAAAABPw/0A3Bt-XE9SA/s400/IMG_0298%2Bcopy.JPG" /></a><br />
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I laughed at the idea of a fundamentalist university having to offer a course undermining all its presuppositions, whereas my religiously liberal college offered a smattering of this opinion in our freshman year alongside Freud’s demolition of religion, and never mentioned it again. <br />
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I wanted to understand why human beings do all the incredibly strange things that they do, and here was a system that explained it all from the Paleolithic caves onward. All of it, visual art, warfare, erotic obsession, egomania, altruism, pyromaniac barn burning (I’m borrowing that one from the late James Hillman, whose books I also discovered in that year), and whatever else you can give a name to or fail to find a name for.<br />
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The only thing that bothered me was that C. G. Jung reported some very strange occurrences in his life in the autobiographical <i>Memories, Dreams, Reflections</i> that his system apparently failed to explain. He didn’t seem to notice the contradiction.<br />
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He did express the opinion that empirical research would eventually establish the relationship between the verbal and nonverbal behavior that he analyzed so convincingly and their neurological underpinnings.<br />
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All these years later, I remain baffled by why human beings do all the things they do; since all cultures seem equally alien to me and all of them seem to be doing no more than establishing provisional reasons for responding to their physical surroundings in the way that they do, it should come as no surprise that I now find all the psychological explanations to be grounded in the personality types of the people who espouse them. Lacanians have Lacanisn personalities, and I don’t like most of them very much. Jungians have Jungian personalities, and people who believe that consciousness is entirely computational have the kind of personalities you would expect people would have who believe that sort of thing.<br />
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It all seems extremely odd. The sciences of human behavior and human culture are constantly claiming to have a degree of certitude that confers predictive value, but they never quite manage to describe the entire empirical situation satisfactorily.<br />
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As Erich Heller wrote about Nietzsche’s philosophy, and I quote from fallible memory, “Some philosophies are like mountains; you climb them, or they are too tough for you. In either case, you can be certain of your relationship to them. Other philosophies are like longstanding cities; to ask ‘Do you know Nietzsche?’ is like asking ‘Do you know Rome?’ The answer is simple only if you have never been there.” <br />
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By and large, we exist in that latter relationship to our own minds and bodies, and to the surroundings in which we operate. We are strangers to ourselves.<br />
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Which, and I swear I was not trying to go there, turns out to be the word (“strangers”) that is operative in the creation of gloAtl’s new dance performance “And all directions I come to you.”<br />
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I have about as alien a relationship to dance as I do to human cultures or human psychology; dancers are, whatever else they are, at home in their bodies, which given the right kind of prodding will pretty much do what the dancers want them to do. (I seem to recall a passage from the Apostle Paul about all of this, but I am trying to repress that digression.)<br />
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This particular six-hour performance is going to be presented nomadically in parts of Central Park, courtesy of Nato Thompson and Creative Time. I once had an argument (actually, more of an indignant shouting match) with Nato Thompson when he dissed an artist in the audience who just wanted to sit in her studio and make artwork, rather in the way that I am sitting alone in my apartment writing and revising this reflection; I yelled that only an extrovert could possibly view with disdain persons who wanted to sit in seclusion until they had prepared a face to meet the faces that they meet (a “face,” a.k.a. an artwork, and I am quoting T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in that last phrase). All that would have taken too much time to say, so what I yelled was, “Spoken like a true extrovert!” and I don’t remember what I said after that.<br />
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For all of that, even introverts have to show up in public occasionally, however much they associate public interaction with past embarrassments. (Public interaction is not the same thing as appearing onstage, where they are not interacting with an audience, they are performing solo.)<br />
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Thus did I find myself an audience member at a private preview of the artwork that Lauri Stallings and dancers had been preparing in seclusion in the studio and were now activating for persons whom Lauri considered friends before trying it out on complete strangers. I knew Lauri but not the dancers, being as how I don’t interact with folks after their performances, not if there is a side door through which to avoid face-to-face encounter.<br />
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I knew in advance that the piece would require quite a bit of perambulation by the audience, having become rather proud at my capacity to follow the wrong trail and be seduced by the sideshow being performed by a single dancer while the spectacular stuff was taking place at the opposite end of the piazza or the skatepark or wherever. Since I have long noted my tendency to zig when a passerby from the opposite direction is sagging, thus creating mutual immobility and the occasional collision, it came as no surprise that I was constantly occupying the vacant space that an entire troupe of dancers was about to traverse at top speed. <br />
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Hence my attempt to get out of the way when the entire group came sweeping by me in what seemed like yet another unintended path-blocking on my part. I continued to retreat, trying to get out of the way, until I realized I was the way.<br />
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At that point there was nothing for it but to freeze in my tracks and assume a neutral position, facing the audience but looking neither at them nor at the dancers. It is a posture I have mastered over the years after great effort. <br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Y8ud1RBwRIs/VUq6gGpiFjI/AAAAAAAABP4/N7n1dsXIIwo/s1600/19421_445439422289644_1683656096989381768_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Y8ud1RBwRIs/VUq6gGpiFjI/AAAAAAAABP4/N7n1dsXIIwo/s400/19421_445439422289644_1683656096989381768_n.jpg" /></a><br />
[Photo © Catherine Wilmer and used by prior permission.]<br />
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And I stayed frozen and immobile until it became obvious that the dancers were also trying to establish eye contact, a strategy well known from previous gloATL appearances and one of the reasons I try to stay in the back row at anybody at all’s performances known to include audience interaction. <br />
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It is one of those introvert’s moments in which it becomes apparent that this is probably the greatest amount of intimacy they have experienced since some rather distressingly distant time, if ever, after which they embrace the artificiality of the situation and go with the flow. (I was too much in the moment to remember it then, but I know from the one scene in which I co-starred in Carol Lafayette’s video based on my poem <i>Skateboarding in Sarajevo</i>, the intense gaze of the performer is accompanied by counting off the seconds.)<br />
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We now know, thanks to the notorious <i>New York Times</i> article of a few months ago about how to fall in love with one another when you can’t seem to make it happen, that mutual gazing makes oxytocin levels rise regardless of your opinions in the matter. I loved the whole experience. And the later delectable, deliberate anomaly of the way in which the whole audience was eventually brought into personal communion was fascinating because it worked when I have been in so many similar situations in which it did not, including ones in which I very much longed for it to happen.<br />
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I have no idea how all this is going to play out in the company of total strangers* together in Central Park. It would be charming to see some of it happen. <br />
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I have omitted, because I was not asked to write about it (this is my response to some other audience members’ request—not glo’s), the actual subtext of the whole performance, the burden of Southern history and the endless task of creating union where there has never, ever been unity. (“The burden of Southern history” is the title of a once-famous book, as I find it necessary to state explicitly before I get credited with coining a phrase.) See the Facebook page for ‘And all directions I come to you.” <br />
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The title of this essay comes from the name of the swarming maneuver that forms the central focus of this narrative; “And all directions I come to you” is composed of something like 138 “systems”—not sure of the number—that are invoked in sequence, thus breaking up a very long event into manageable units of movement that can be changed in response to circumstances. <br />
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*This phrase is a semi-quotation from Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” to which I listened obsessively during my loneliest periods of isolation at age twenty-two in Santa Barbara.<br />
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littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-42622834865954866962015-04-09T10:36:00.000-07:002015-04-09T10:40:12.421-07:00My manifesto regarding art reviewing landed with a predictable dull thud, garnering a tenth of the response from the Facebook link than the reaction to my Facebook posting of an icon of the Entry into Jerusalem with a comment on Byzantine objects in context, a post that was universally misinterpreted but I haven't had time to explain what I was actually talking about since the responses that it did elicit were right on target, just on target about a parallel topic. <br />
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So given the lack of excitement about the topic of why there are no art reviewers, I shouldn't spend too much time bewailing again the fact that art reviewing is mostly limited to people who don't have a life, or who have sufficient predictable income so as not to need to hold down two day jobs and one night one. The problem is that there are not enough people who can write, are motivated to write, and don't have a life or are able to allot their limited free time to make space for art reviewing in it.<br />
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This has to be the reason some of the shows not yet reviewed have gone unreviewed. Case in point would be "Gathered" at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia: some stunning works by artists we previously didn't know about (and whoever took up the challenge, I now realize, should have limited themselves to discussing artists they had never heard of previously). Seventy-seven artists makes for an unreviewable show, the more so in that the work ranges from pleasurable surprises from artists we thought we knew well already to pleasurable discoveries to the inevitable seeming missteps that were probably made for perfectly defensible reasons. One person's misstep is another person's stroke of genius. These will be the works that other people would regard as the best things in the show. Maybe Andy Warhol was right when he commented something to the effect of, "I like the type of critic that just puts people's names down."<br />
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Other shows require so much question-asking and thought about how to present them that by the time I know how to talk about the show, the show's over. Item: Katherine Behar at Eyedrum, where we'll have to wait for Meredith Kooi's review for <i>Art Papers</i> to get the scoop on how well Behar handles the well-worn trope of machines that keep replicating themselves and performing functions designed by humans long after the species that designed them thus has gone extinct. Behar's functioning machines, based on underlying parts from already existing kinetic tchochkes, are as impossibly cute as the robotic critters of several well-known sci-fi movie fantasies; they include an actual 3-D printer turning out plastic jackets for the adjacent population of machines that do something or other; whether these are the ones that emit the Morse-code cries of "Mommy! Daddy!" I'm not clear on.<br />
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Ryan Coleman's reworkings of a familiar visual genre at Sandler Hudson, but incorporating his past expertise with turning out animation cels, is another case of something not getting written about unless someone has stepped forward since the last time I checked. I could go on, but I have already had arguments with people in the community (not with the legendary gatekeepers, who keep the gate much less stringently than people imagine) about which of the many other unreviewed shows deserve to be first past the post. <br />
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Since Nicholas Adams prodded me to go look at the Georgia State MFA shows, I should say you have one and one half more days (I think) to see some remarkably accomplished work by Adams, Lauren Gunderson, and Kelly Stevenson, but I have to rush off to an appointment at the Papermaking Museum where there is a historically and aesthetically important exhibition of a seventeenth-century (I think) atlas with revealingly colonialist border illuminations. Post links to your pics in the comment thread, people. Unless comments have been disabled and I don't know about it.<br />
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More later, I would hope. <br />
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littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-63200251019966745352015-03-29T09:02:00.000-07:002015-03-29T09:02:05.026-07:00Art Reviewing, Art Criticism, and the Dissemination of Art InformationArt Reviewing, Art Criticism, and Crowdsourcing<br />
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I have recently had a conversation about “good bad art” and “bad good art,” by which I mean several different things in both categories.<br />
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“Good bad art” can be art that has everything wrong with it except faultless technique, or art that is unselfconsciously wrong in terms of genre or subject matter but that approaches that genre or subject matter in a way that redeems the artwork from the status of kitsch, or shades off into what I call defensible guilty pleasures—art that has such egregious problems on certain levels that its virtues do not really redeem it, but we love it anyway because it touches the parts of our personality that were formed prior to the age of four. <br />
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“Bad good art” is to be found in many galleries—art that meticulously rehearses well-worn strategies without contributing a scintilla of personal passion or imagination to the process, or art that imitates current passions and fashions in ways that work well enough, but really do no more than play with ideas and visual themes for which other artists metaphorically and occasionally literally are sweating blood. And there are many other kinds of bad good art, not based on passionless reproduction but nevertheless falling short in some way or another, difficult to define except on a case by case basis—one case in point being pompously meaningless or unnecessarily opaque conceptualism proclaiming its superiority. (What one person perceives as pomposity is another person’s deep seriousness, as any working critic learns very early when she or he praises something as being deeply serious.) Middlebrow art being inflated to conceptual greatness by insertion into a framework of ideas that can barely support it would be another commonplace type of bad good art—but anyone who claims that this is a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes had better be prepared to back up their claim with acutely reasoned assessments.<br />
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The problem is, as I have implied above, is that people have perfectly valid reasons for liking every one of these things, even the ones they think they ought not to like. We are all shaped by our personal experience before the age of four, and we are all shaped by the social context in which we live and move and have our being. When we are overwhelmed with excitement by something that may on reflection turn out to be not all that great, what drives our excitement is usually a combination of personal factors.<br />
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Plenty of people dislike “good good art”—in fact, there are subgenres of it that do nothing for me, and I have to labor very hard to muster the enthusiasm to discuss just why this art is as good as it is on every level. Even more people (or at least it seems that way to the cognoscenti) like “bad bad art.” <br />
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Lowbrow is distinguished by the wish to find the good bad art out there in genres awash in bad bad-artmaking, and to show rather than say why it is good. Just as with every other genre traditional or transgressive, there is good lowbrow and bad lowbrow, and the genre itself has fallen out of fashion, I think, because its point has been made, just as nobody wanted to use the term postmodern any more once it was recognized that what Zygmunt Bauman calls liquid modernity was a different social and aesthetic environment from the sets of assumptions and economic conditions under which modernism flourished and in which what we called modernity took on its distinguishing shape. <br />
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But I digress. <br />
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The point I actually wanted to get to is that art criticism ought to be devoted to contextualizing and whatever degree of objective evaluating can be done—and I am not sure how we assign relative proportions of success to people whose art fails because they meant to do that, people whose art succeeds because (not “even though”) they have no idea why their artmaking is successful, and so on. There are semi-objective standards of comparison that seem to obtain across many cultures and subcultures, but they are modified in each cultural context, and comparison is a difficult business. There is even good kitsch and bad kitsch, although there the points of comparison are so challenging that it takes something like Tyler Stallings’ fabled exhibition tracing the birth of black velvet painting to make us contemplate why there ought to be, and is, an art history book about black velvet painting.<br />
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Art reviewing or art journalism is something else again. It sits somewhere between critical analysis and consumer guide, usually with the extreme discomfort that comes from being positioned between opposing categories. <br />
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Most artists and galleries would like to have their two-thousand-word analysis, preferably with the good stuff parked up front like in an old-style newspaper story, not like academic articles where the argument is made step by step and what journalists would call the lede is buried at the very end, where we discover at last the fundamental insight that all this analysis has been preparing us to realize. (This is why academic journals frequently insist on the inclusion of a hundred-word précis, introducing the conclusions to which the article eventually comes.) <br />
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The real artworld desire, though, is for a vehicle for marketing, whether it is called that or not. How many shows do we wish we had seen (whether we are art buyers or only art viewers), had we only known that they were there, and how to get to them in a time that suits our crowded schedules? But that we wish we had known existed, first and foremost.<br />
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Art reviewing sites are wedded to the older model of recommending the best of the best, and more realistically, whichever parts of the best of the best can be gotten to and be written about by a limited pool of art writers. Increasing the number of art writers decreases the number of brilliant shows that go unreviewed, but does nothing to solve the problem of the greater number of shows that go unmentioned. <br />
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Art reviewing sites also are confronted with the problem of discerning what on earth “the best of the best” really means, when “best” is defined so differently in different communities. We might well be left with the problem of wishing to write about the best good bad art, for example, in some month when it is more interesting than any of the bad good art that is out there. At best, we write occasionally about why good bad art deserves attention, and why bad good art is sometimes so unremittingly bad. <br />
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But then other communities, some of them quite well informed indeed, will insist that we are writing nonsense, although they are much more likely to say that we have our heads inserted into an anatomically impossible orifice. <br />
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Subcultures create critical discussions of their own, of which the dominant culture (if it deserves to be called a culture at all these days, rather than a consensus) is usually unaware. This permits feelings of superiority that are not just an unjustified hipper-than-thou, but it means that there are all sorts of shows and events that go unpublicized outside of social media. There are an equal number of traditional shows and events that are well publicized, but never reviewed, because they will generate a traditionally minded audience without the necessity of being written about. <br />
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SCAD had (it’s been years since I looked for them, so I don’t know if the experiment was abandoned) interview-based videos surveying art shows. The problem with interview-based videos in general (which have continued) is that they are also time-based, and few people have the time to sit and listen just to find out whether this is something in which they would be interested.<br />
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Facebook friends (I have no idea what is evolving on the other social media sites) seem to be posting individual images from current exhibitions, and short videos devoid of commentary. This makes it possible to tell at a glance whether this is something in which we personally would be interested, without producing the impression that we have now found out enough about it to know that we are happy that it exists but do not feel the need to see it in person. (This latter perception is usually wrong—non-digital work usually needs to be seen directly, not via a digital reproduction—but understandable. That is, however, another subject entirely.)<br />
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I now reach my long-deferred conclusion. Just in case you are skimming this, as well you should.<br />
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Oughtn’t we to have a single go-to site that incorporates this sort of information? Yes, yes, yes, I know it would be cluttered with personal puffery in no time if it were not hedged about with crowd-enforced rules—but unspoken rules of behavior have already evolved in the friends network to which I allude. People seldom post every single work in their exhibition; they pick and choose, and discreetly provide a URL for more information. Friends and other strangers (I quote Bob Dylan with that phrase) who are enthusiastic about a show are even more credible sources, but there are many occasions when we would not know about very good work if the artist were not engaging in a species of self-publicizing that is more than braggadocio. <br />
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Some friends (not on Facebook) plan their weekends by investigating the gallery websites and looking at works by the artists having openings (not necessarily the works to be exhibited in the upcoming show). These folks already self-edit because they know what they like, and they do not expect to find anything that interests them at certain galleries—but these ipso facto uninteresting exhibition venues are different galleries for different folks (sorry to echo the wording of the late Fritz Perls’ annoying maxim). <br />
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When I suggest that these folks might be missing something and ought to be given a more comprehensive way of rapidly perusing the available options, I am told that there are link-based arts calendars for that. But bare lists of names with clickable ways to get more information require more patience than most folks have. We have nothing in between listings and, if I may allude to a literary reference I have been trying in vain to track down, more than we wanted to know about penguins.<br />
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Right now, one-sentence verbal summations combined with something like Terry Kearns’ short exhibition videos seem like an excellent way of accessing basic information that can then be followed up on. (I assume the gallery URL could be embedded in the video caption.) Terry Kearns has said that although he is fulfilling a perceived need, he doesn’t want to take it up as a profession.<br />
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We have new ways of accessing information; we ought to figure out how to use them in ways that benefit communities with a wide variety of interests, technological savvy, and attention spans. <br />
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littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-18961820630636524382015-03-26T14:21:00.000-07:002015-03-26T14:21:39.499-07:00Nick Madden's "I'll Die High" at EyedrumOne of the greater artworld injustices is the lack of attention paid to Nick Madden's "I'll Die High" at Atlanta's Eyedrum. A major reason for this may be the show's bizarre violation of categories: cartoonish kinetic sculpture is not supposed to be an appropriate vehicle for thoughtful consideration of death, especially the death of one parent by cancer and the inner death of the other parent via dementia.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QdKUqUp9CCo/VRR3C5cmTwI/AAAAAAAABNc/xlHv0Xg-3Hw/s1600/photo-13.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QdKUqUp9CCo/VRR3C5cmTwI/AAAAAAAABNc/xlHv0Xg-3Hw/s320/photo-13.JPG" /></a><br />
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<i>Waiting</i> features a crank allowing viewers to make the figure's teeth chatter, a strange, excellent metaphor for the isolated nervousness of kin in hospital waiting rooms everywhere. The show continues in this vein, ending with a marquee-like sign reminding us that one day we will die. <br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VyxKRSlkBAg/VRR3n1SS6II/AAAAAAAABNk/75qWtC5EzYg/s1600/photo-12.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VyxKRSlkBAg/VRR3n1SS6II/AAAAAAAABNk/75qWtC5EzYg/s320/photo-12.JPG" /></a><br />
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The meaning of this exhibition isn't entirely clear without the information provided by Eyedrum staff, and that may be its chief problem. Viewers have had no trouble making up stories about things like this figure about which we are invited to pull gently on the cord until we see the light (which does eventually appear, for the patient viewer). <br />
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There is only one day remaining in the exhibition as I write this, but a closing reception is scheduled for Friday evening, March 27.littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-27086441071189942052015-03-19T19:34:00.001-07:002015-03-19T19:38:38.189-07:00A Note Regarding the Artist's Talks for Two Atlanta Exhibitions, March 21, 2015; a non-review even more non- than usual<br />
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<b><i>Space, Time, and Gender: or, why you should go to Pete Schulte’s talk at Whitespace at 2 p.m. this coming Saturday, March 21, and then get over to Meredith Kooi and Nicole Akstein’s similarly structured talks at Kibbee Gallery at 3 p.m.</b></i><br />
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“Imbued with history and memory, the objects inhabiting our world breathe and vibrate. These objects and their surroundings are constantly on the precipice of becoming strange to us.” So writes Meredith Kooi in “Enstranged Spaces,” her half of “Close,” the two-person show at Atlanta’s Kibbee Gallery curated by Chanel Kim.<br />
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The work of defamiliarization (cf. Brecht’s <i>Verfremdungseffekt</i> as both distinct from and related to Shklovsky’s defamiliarization or <i>ostranenie</i>) is different in each generation, and right now it seems as unexpectedly phenomenological as anything else, although Kooi claims to be incorporating history in a way that only existential phenomenology ever managed heretofore—Merleau-Ponty being a case in point, perhaps. <br />
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But biology has lately also come into play, thanks to the momentarily famous debate over “What color is this dress?” wherein the distortions imposed by poor lighting in a cellphone photo and online viewers’ wildly variant screen quality combined with randomly reproduced jpegs led to an argument that then led to the realization that we see differently not just because we have different histories but because we have different retinas. Take that, Louis Althusser.<br />
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I am engaging in wisecracking banter instead of getting down to cases because in this case, I am not quite sure what the case is. Still less am I sure in the case of Pete Schulte’s Whitespace and Whitespec exhibition “Light a Fire,” an incredibly site-specific evocation using things/artworks that are the opposite of site-specific; or rather, they transform the site in a specific way and would do so on whatever site they could be placed in this particular order. <br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZUc9kulkD_Y/VQuF_FwLHyI/AAAAAAAABMw/gKnArRNT7HQ/s1600/schulte%2C%2Bsounds%2Blike%2Bsomeone%2Belse's%2Bsong.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZUc9kulkD_Y/VQuF_FwLHyI/AAAAAAAABMw/gKnArRNT7HQ/s320/schulte%2C%2Bsounds%2Blike%2Bsomeone%2Belse's%2Bsong.jpg" /></a><br />
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Schulte’s objects and Kooi’s deploy geometry to opposite effects. The fact that I cannot say quite what those effects are is the reason I am writing this, the most non- of all the non-reviews I have thus far posted, for I cannot review work that I in no way claim to understand, only experience. The “wow” effect is positive in both cases, more so in Schulte’s because of the cumulative impact of the repetition of geometric forms in a minimal palette combined with a recording of evocative tonalities presented in the illusion of an antique playback medium (the vinyl record on a turntable has nothing to do with producing the soundtrack emanating from the machine’s embedded speakers). Something is going on that is reminiscent of what is going on in the best of Russian Constructivism, a body of work in which the archetypal qualities of the form and color subvert all of its would-be debunking rationalism. Schulte isn’t claiming to debunk anything, but what he actually is claiming to do is beyond me. The same goes for the specifics of Kooi’s installation, where the interplay of, for example, the transparent screen and video image on Kibbee Gallery’s famous stairs that lead nowhere produces a spectacle that is genuinely spectacular but elusive as to artist’s intent. <br />
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I think I am equally puzzled by the specifics of Nicole Akstein’s “Mother, Mae,” the other half of “Close.” Theoretically, I get that these photographs conceal or mystify as much as they reveal about Akstein’s actual mother. Her previous documentary work that documents events that are more staged performance than slice of life would lead me to conclude that. But I don’t know what the performances here are supposed to add up to, or even if they are supposed to add up.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-okRbSOuza6s/VQuGLJ55OAI/AAAAAAAABM4/e_mSjS3AXm4/s1600/nicole%2Bakstein%2C%2Bshadow.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-okRbSOuza6s/VQuGLJ55OAI/AAAAAAAABM4/e_mSjS3AXm4/s320/nicole%2Bakstein%2C%2Bshadow.jpg" /></a><br />
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Thus I can hope that it is physically possible to get from Schulte’s artist’s talk on Saturday March 21 at 2 p.m. to Kooi and Akstein’s talks at 3 p.m. the same day. Whitespace and Kibbee are not that far apart, but. <br />
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P.S. —I am confident that the artists have left sufficient clues for sufficiently committed viewers to puzzle out far more than I have been able to. I count myself as a casual viewer, always, except when a work of art so stops me in my tracks that I could commit the rest of my life to understanding it. Which works of art those are will differ for each human being on earth, and not only because of their biology and social history; the accidents of individual biography count for much, as well. <br />
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littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-89057818506816551412015-03-10T02:44:00.001-07:002015-03-10T14:43:45.447-07:00A Few Hybrid Notes....A Few Hybrid Notes on What Used to be Called Hybridity (What Do Folks Call It These Days? I Am So Out of the Academic Loop)<br />
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Jerry Cullum, asserting whatever Creative Commons rights seem relevant, as usual <br />
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I have just ordered a copy of the catalogue of the new exhibition from New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, <i>From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics</i>, which I learned about from Hyperallergic’s essay by Allison Meier, “Afterlives of Mesopotamian Artifacts, from Flapper Fashion to de Kooning.”<br />
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As usual, the books are piling up faster than I can find time to look at them, since I still haven’t done more than page through the highlights of my copy of Jennifer Y. Chi’s earlier ISAW volume <i>Edge of Empires: Pagans, Jews and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos</i>. Dura-Europos has been an interest of mine ever since graduate school, when E. R. Goodenough’s <i>Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period</i> made much (if not too much) of the wall murals in the Dura synagogue. This garrison town was a unique site of contestation between Roman, Parthian, and Persian empires, a crossroads where cultures blended and co-existed even as the political boundaries shifted; today its excavated streets are endangered by the shifting boundaries of the contemporary wars in Syria. <br />
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This is one strand of the stuff that interests me in this department—that which Homi Bhabha used to call hybridity. (Whatever happened to Homi Bhabha, anyway? Twenty years ago you couldn’t open an art magazine without reading references to his books, usually citations of the same one or two paragraphs, as is the wont of the art world.) <br />
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Given half a chance, cultures seem to borrow extravagantly from one another, even as they are endlessly being reined in by ideologues of a cultural purity that is frequently largely mythic; whether the culture doing the borrowing is economically and politically dominant or subordinated (God help us, not the military-colonial metaphor “subaltern”!) doesn’t seem to matter as far as the simple dynamics of hybridization are concerned. It matters a great deal as far as the self-perception of the hybridizer is concerned, but that’s another story. <br />
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The story told in <i>From Ancient to Modern</i> is a specific case study of hybridity, the typically whacked-out response of European and American popular culture to objects excavated in Mesopotamia. The exhibition also traces the influence of the Mesopotamian discoveries on modernist and contemporary art, a line of influence that is usually subsumed under other art historical rubrics—so we have something new to discuss in that regard. However, that line of influence needs to be set in context.<br />
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The enthusiasm for newly discovered Sumerian artifacts followed upon the King-Tut-inspired manifestation of Egyptomania, a much older cultural phenomenon in America and Europe that is interestingly traced in various books with that word in their titles, including Scott Trafton’s <i>Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania</i>. Trafton’s book follows only one thread of global Egyptomania, the uses of Egypt in the ethnic dynamics of nineteenth-century American society; some of the other Egyptomania books track the phenomenon’s influences on the birth of eighteenth-century Freemasonry in Europe (and what happened to it later in the United States), the many styles of fashion and design that borrowed from Egyptian antiquity, and too many other traces of the ancient in the modern to summarize comfortably. <br />
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Egyptomania long predates Napoleon’s expedition that gave Europe the Rosetta Stone and a generation of Egypt-themed mantelpieces and dinnerware; the Renaissance, for example, made much of it thanks to the prestige of the Hermetic documents and the supposed wisdom encoded in hieroglyphics. But archaeology changed the terms of discussion, and it did it again and again. One could argue that the re-erection in the Vatican of the Egyptian obelisk that once adorned Nero’s Circus is a <i>terminus a quo</i> for mythic dreams based on material culture, but to confirm that would require better knowledge than I have of the history of the obelisk that Theodosius erected in Constantinople. The extraction of mostly imaginary mysteries from exotic objects long predates the different discovery of the phenomenon in the Gothicism of eighteenth-century England, although the cultural penumbra associated with it were more often a matter of sensing the presence of deep symbolism rather than experiencing the pleasurable shudder associated with it in the wake of the Age of Reason. <br />
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I digress. Not really, however: the point is that objects brought by trade or by imperial conquest had consequences in the cultures into which the objects were imported, whether the objects were African sculptures in the flea markets of Paris, Japanese prints used as wrapping paper for the ceramics shipped to a Europe as mad for <i>japonerie</i> as an earlier Europe had been for <i>chinoiserie</i>, or furniture of the Pharaohs, golden artifacts of Troy and Mycenae, and statuary from ancient Sumer brought back by successive generations of archaeologists. All of this found its way into design, painting, and sculpture, but differently depending on the influence and whether the artist was Vincent Van Gogh, Gustav Klimt, or Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Henry Moore.<br />
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And that spins us back to hybridity, about which John Boardman’s two-decade-old <i>The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity</i> is still an excellently provocative starting point for reflection. Tracing the migration of motifs from locations as close to the Greco-Roman source as Ptolemaic Egypt to places as distant as the farthest Central Asian outposts of the Silk Road, Boardman’s survey demonstrates the wondrous destinies of objects when they are detached from their originating culture, or are sent on the road accompanying their culture, whether the road is traversed by merchants or by missionaries or by armies. <br />
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That in turn brings me back to Dura-Europos and to Mesopotamian artifacts, but also to the present-day destinies of cross-cultural hybridization. Is antiquity in its archaeological incarnations ceasing to be culturally influential? The flotsam and jetsam of Asian and African cultures that show up in tattoo art and graphic novels, and the frenetic exoticism found in various video games, either replicate fragments of still-living cultures or reproduce the flavor and texture of entire bygone societies; as far as I can see, they don’t borrow motifs from museums. In the cultures for which the artifacts in museums are part of their own direct heritage, there seems to be relatively little creative influence of such objects on contemporary culture; when they are noticed at all, they are used as emblems of national pride or rejected as symbols of an outworn or unacceptably decadent past. <br />
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It would require more online research than I have time or inclination to pursue to confirm this impression, but I am wondering what the impact of the digital revolution has been in this regard. I think there are cases in contemporary art around the entire planet in which the legacy of antiquity is incorporated alongside the lessons of biology and the influence of everything from...well, one might as well say everything, for I am thinking of artists from Alexander McQueen to Björk to Matthew Barney to Pipilotti Rist, and many, many others. The lines of influence are multiple and distorted, of course; the costume and set design departments of the <i>Star Wars</i> sequels and prequels are a case in point, since the artists in charge plundered the resources of half a dozen ancient cultures to come up with the styles of a galaxy long ago and far, far away—a tendency that has long been regnant in the movies, and in science fiction at least since <i>Forbidden Planet</i> purloined midcentury modernism and electronic music to evoke a world of the distant future. <br />
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It would be wonderful if I had time and mental energy and publication venue to produce a genuine piece of scholarship on this whole topic, but I don’t, so I’m just putting this out there in hopes that somebody will fill in the missing pieces. Anyone curious about the books I have cited off the top of my head—and way too many others, for typing in just one search term yielded six or eight seriously interesting titles of which I hadn’t been aware—can easily pull up the bibliographic information and ways to acquire the books in question.<br />
littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5917543335925664834.post-56342901937911964252015-02-08T06:58:00.001-08:002015-02-10T17:18:30.189-08:00Stuck (Sort of) in the Middle with You and Almost Everyone Else: Thoughts About "Middle" at Gallery 72, AtlantaThe ordinary-seeming concept called “middle” is a major puzzle.<br />
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For one thing, no matter what the dictionary suggests, “middle” is often almost the opposite of “center.” The center is ordinarily a place of honor or at least of organization. Even in ordinary usage, one wouldn’t normally say that the sun is the middle of the solar system. In the history of religions, “Center” is a word to conjure with, even in Meister Eckhart’s (and/or others’) definition of God as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. “God is a Middle”? Not so much. Postmodern philosophy sought to decenter Eurocentrism; less disturbed by terms and operating assumptions that happened de facto to be in the middle of things. <br />
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The middle term of a syllogism gets a certain amount of respect...you can’t get from Point A to Point B without it. But in general, middle-ness is in-between-ness, a point midway on the way to somewhere else or from somewhere else. The middle is also, as is increasingly recognized, the midpoint in a gulf separating two established terms. There is a continuum, or a spectrum, but we don’t know that, not yet anyway: out there in the void that ought to be a bridge, comes the interstitial middle term. <br />
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So it makes sense, in an era celebrating neither-nor more than both-and, and the provisional more than the firmly established, that a show called “Middle” should have been mounted at Atlanta’s Gallery 72 courtesy of curator Candice Greathouse.<br />
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Unfortunately, as I just now implied, we are in a bit of a muddle over “middle.” I am not entirely sure that Greathouse’s show, which runs through February 15, has cleared up the issues of “inbetweenness and potentiality through material and process” that she says the show addresses. <br />
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That definition manages to narrow “middle” down a little. We are looking, we might think, at formalism, at the roots of provisional painting, perhaps. But we would be wrong in thinking that, or at least I think so.<br />
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For one thing, there is the almost grotesque marriage of Freud and Marx in the video gallery. Meta Gary’s <i>Enterchange</i> depicts the endless loop of earthmoving equipment in late capitalism’s ceaseless logic of demolition and development, as framed in the vaginal opening of a leftover piece of concrete, or more likely one that hasn’t been put in its place yet. Brittainy Lauback’s <i>Hole</i> keeps inserting digits or foamy materials into openings of one sort of another, never quite attaining a perfect match nor truly filling the unappeasable voidness. Patricia Villafane’s multiple-image video of Target and its target-shaped store logo (talk about a center versus a middle!) presents a different sort of unappeasable desire and irremediable deficiency, a process of exchange in which none of the parties can ever be completely satisfied even if the transaction is regarded as open and above reproach. <br />
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That leads us, logically I suppose, to Christina Price Washington’s <i>Thoughts on the (excluded) Middle</i>, in which a vague pictorial or non-pictorial image set well below eye level on a movable wall (we learn from her statement that this is a picture of a helium filled balloon) carries a great deal of conceptual and openly philosophical weight along with it. “The privileged position of the isolated photograph” is indeed “destabilized,” and we can’t help (or I can’t, anyway) but think of Max Nordau’s <i>Luftmenschen</i>, people left floating in air by the circumstances of modernity, people whom Rilke characterized in the <i>Duineser Elegien</i> as the “disinherited children to whom no longer what’s been, and not yet what’s coming, belongs”—humans perennially in between times and places. This isn’t, however, Price Washington’s major point, as she finds herself “exploring the photograph as the subject and the information in the making.” <br />
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This exploration places Price Washington’s work firmly in the middle between the Law of the Excluded Middle and the Fallacy of the Excluded Middle, the former being the assertion that a proposition is either true or not true, no other choices available, while the fallacy considers “only limited alternatives...while in fact there is at least one additional option.” (These definitions open to discussion, because Wikipedia.) One could argue productively, if hyperbolically, that in a world of spectra and continua the law of the excluded middle is always already the fallacy of the excluded middle.<br />
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That leaves us with Margaret Hiden’s and Trevor Reese’s mysteries, as well as a couple of other in-betweens courtesy of Lauback, who offers a photo of a set of parallel fluorescent tubes that once held a lighted sign but holds one no longer, and that presumably will hold one once again—another product of late capitalism which belongs no longer to what’s been, and not yet to what’s coming. Hiden’s digital recapitulations of damaged slide photographs exist in a space between past and present, if not future, but only if you know what you are looking at—although I suppose one could also make up stories about the obliteration of recorded memory and the role that lack and fragmentation plays in the interpretation of history. In that sense, they are interstitial, neither unambiguous visual documents nor outright fictions. <br />
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Trevor Reese’s sculptures, I suppose, exist on the trembling interface between settled history and the shorthand with which we capture or configure it, although his de-wheeled hand truck set in concrete in in storage seems to have made a fairly firm transition from practical instrument for moving things to symbolic monument to the moving of materials. His lava rocks interspersed among existing rocks in the outdoor decor feels more like an unnoticed supplement to an architectural element that could be supplemented indefinitely. (One could, for example, put one or more pieces of old-fashioned public ‘plop art’ on top of the rocks.) Reese’s statement to the effect that “My interest in vernacular architecture and folk psychology is influencing my current thought on literal relationships, the different types created by people and things. I find myself navigating an increasing index of interpersonal and ‘mechanical’ connections” is headed in an extremely productive and correct direction, even if I personally can’t quite get what he’s driving at in his concrete (as it were) metaphors. <br />
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That’s about as far as I can push this provisional midpoint. There is just under a week for those who happen to read this non-review right away to go confirm, disconfirm or, preferably, correct and expand upon my intuitions. <br />
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littlejokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01036588703338799387noreply@blogger.com0