[-empyre-] Onomasticities
Hi, Johanna et al! First off, I must say that I enjoyed David’s re-branding post immensely. In particular, the trope of re-branding is absolutely loaded—especially within the context of Business Art and the fraught relationship between art and advertising. I know that Johanna is quite interested in the history of the graphic arts, and, from my firsthand experience as a writer for various NYC ad agencies, can testify to the critical connection between (re)branding and Creative Departments, where graphic artists, writers and creative directors oversee the presentation and perfection of concepts to the public. Here, the wild, varied orthographies of Dada and Surrealism become so many Banners, newsletters and billboards, Breton and company achieving a complicity with a future throwaway culture in which Kiki of Montparnasse sells violins, and where Rrose Sélavy’s perfume bottles are the hit of Bloomingdales. Within this context, the word ‘concept’ looms large, calling to mind first and foremost the Hegelian identification of the idea as realized concept. For me, this notion recalls the realized concepts of Conceptual art, the one art form which has filtered through this dialogue as the place where theory and praxis meet, however dissonantly (although, here, the idea is not so much an ideal, in the Hegelian sense, but is more of what results when concept confronts world/reality through irruptive event). Everything from Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al to those fab Jenny Holzer diodes quietly assaulting slot machine junkies and high-hair mafia princesses at Las Vegas’ McCarran airport in the 80s as they retrieve pink suitcases from the baggage claim. And then, of course, there is the perennial and pervasive use of the word in ad agencies, which are largely concept-driven, even when we see them via Darren Stevens on Bewitched. Here, ‘concept’ is both noun and verb, something one develops and the very act of development or conception itself. “How are you concepting that?” is a question that still makes me laugh when I hear it, the same response I emit to the use of ‘party’ as an action verb by Eddie Murphy or others (“My girl wants to party all the time, party all the time, party all the time…”). But the concept is very much at stake for all of us on this forum, whether we are Sally Jane’s Over-identification Squad, or a Donald Judd box humming purple notes in the corner. Of all aesthetic movements, it is conceptual art which works the hardest to expose complicities—Chris Burden’s excavation of La La Land’s MOCA is a paradigmatic instance. And yet it is also the zone of the conceptual where important complicities flower in their own right, so many of them social, sexual —the marriage of Jeff Koons to La Cicciolina, or the relationship between Björk and Mathew Barney. The work these connections have created truly amazes me, all those racy photos of La Cicciolina with her glass dildoes, and the potential work that Matthew and Björk will perform with fauns, satyrs, and Cremasters if, unlike the Koons, they make it. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:36:05 -0800 From: david.chi...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13 I don't really think of what i am questioning as being part of a moral conscience per se--i think of it as a looking into the functions and functioning of language, which might include also a language which is in itself a form of silence. An area which i have been writing about in the last couple of years more and more is that of the Literature of the No. This involves several writers and several examples of methods and appearances of the No. These are unwritten works which in themselves refuse to be written, while creating a space which nonetheless exists as a an area in which the writings while unwritten have effects in their own of writing--this is just one aspect-- In a sense, i am concerned, interested in a way with the call to the spaces of art which claim with some degree actually, paradoxically, to a morality, of a moral nature--to not be concerned with being the moral conscience of a culture-- The political analogy is not necessarily silence at all, but on the contrary, a continuing functioning of writing which claims to a certain form of moral high ground as/for art in that it is in a sense above such questions-- What interests me are the questions which Pierre Vidal-Naquet raises re language and other issues within a culture's existence which are effected by the practice of torture (in his case)--when it is practised by a society as it is now by the American society. How has this affected the language itself?--What do the contradictions between what a culture purports to be for itself and what it actually does open up as spaces of
[-empyre-] Delightenment as Mass Perception
Hi, Johanna! Your remarks about aesthetic practice and it roots in brute sensation take me to Dewey’s anti-elitist somatism in Art as Experience and Alexander Baumgarten’s original sense of what aesthetics could mean back in the 18th century, when this discipline was first systematized in the West as discrete branch of philosophy, something different from metaphysics or ethics. I also am drawn very much to the poetics of the quantum, and look to physics and its unfolding symmetries as another place where material complicities are being re-imagined and re-described in ways that transcend mere re-naming of re-branding, and which throw into chaos that simple Cartesian separation between thinking, un-extended and extended, un-thinking matter(s). What do we make of the famous TOE, or Theory of Everything, something that string and membrane theories, with their inherent elegance, to use Brian Green’s highly aesthetic word, have attempted to grasp in recent years in their promulgation of a resonating, symphonic universe? And what of this spooky action at a distance, gravity, which involves us all in the complicities of matter and energy alike, which suffuses scientific fact and myth (that famous apple konking Newton on the head), and which appears to me as the ultimate metaphor for metaphor, this joining of the disparate over time and space within a structure capable of uniting them via only spookiness? I can deal with imbrications being stricken from the list of potential re-brands for the term ‘complicity,’ but still open the question to everyone, as it seems important for me that we find a way to name complicity in a way which invokes the non-agency agencies of systems theory and postmodernism, everything from le schizo to the CSO to the cyborg to that minimally committed Luhmannian para-subject traversing its grooved and groovy (geodesic?) networks. To be honest, I liked the word mostly because it sounded onomatopoetic to me: imbrications can’t be anything but imbricated, the tentacles of those three successive consonants flanked by identical vowels leaving me with the sense that I am being pulled beneath the waters of a lake by a mystery creature part human, part vegetable. In this vein, I look to Lynn Margulis’ recent work on bacterial symbiosis and its relevance for evolutionary biology and autopoiesis (for example, in hers and Dorion Sagan’s Dazzle Gradually, an odd fusion of poetry and biology, much of it verging on syphiology). For Margulis, evolution evolved because the simplest creatures learned to coexist in such a way that each benefited the other, a primal form of complicity for sure, one in which the most was at stake, so much more than tenureship or wealth or fame, whatever we gain by becoming accomplices in the human world. In her estimation, sexual reproduction, for example, began as an act of bacterial phagocytosis; when nucleic materials were proven indigestible, they divided along with bacterium, becoming transmitted to new cells (reproduction minus the sex, which, when it was introduced, could only spell death-by-meiosis). This picture is only a rudimentary sketch, but I like very much how she sees collusion at the heart of complexity and biodiversity, how the exchanges we undertake in our banks and classrooms and performance venues can be traced back to the primordial quid pro quo of predatorial unicellular beauties benefiting from cooperation and cooptation, albeit accidentally and contingently, and with no concept of altruism. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ From: druc...@gseis.ucla.edu To: emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:37:50 -0800 Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Les Liaisons Dangereuses Just picking up on all this rich exposition below -- what about Clint Eastwood as an interesting example with regard to what MAT has suggested here. Can I just say I really find all of what is written by Michael most useful -- but can I also say I don't care for the word imbrication -- it is one of the plague symptoms in my grad seminars I know when it appears a host of critical diseases will soon follow (paraphrasitis with risk of metacitation and logotoxicity). Picky picky, I know... Johanna On Jan 9, 2010, at 9:12 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote: Hi, Johanna! You’ve really piqued my curiosity with those comments about Parc de la Villette and that little chat you attended back at Columbia. There’s a lot to think about here: your own uneasiness, displeasure, even outrage as these intensities surface and are encouraged to be denied expression by a fellow colleague (gender?), the irony of a big-wig suggesting revolutionary design for potential parkgoers and neighborhood locals, who might otherwise be lulled to sleep by an ergonomic opiate rendering the ugly beautiful, even
[-empyre-] Secular Sacrilege
Hi, Davin! Thanks for the super-fantastic Richard Serra link--you are consummately the best when it comes to selecting just the right encapsulating instant. What an amazing controversy! What agitated publics, what disrupted privates, what interrupted and intercepted and bisected and misdirected flows, what a wonderful-horrible breakwater of sines and cosines and missed traffic signs. I almost hear Andre Breton caution: Ralentir Travaux... Dwight Ink's name just kills me: talk about inscription and the infelicities of the performative utterance! Richard's refusal of portability is also a goldmine of object possibilities and refusals: this ain't no Duchampian valise, no birdcage filled with sugarcubes and the bleached bones of cuttlefish! Hearing Holly Solomon speak is also a pleasure--especially her SOHO business ethos. Who wants good art to become bad business through the long process of a fatal relocation? That would just be poor form. The work remains in storage. It's the final word. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:59:08 -0500 From: davinheck...@gmail.com To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au CC: emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13 You are right, Gerry, in a sense. Artists, like anyone else, should not simply carry water for causes or movements that are defined by others with no room for reflection, inspiration, interpretation, criticism, etc. I think most people would agree, that say, a whole of of commercial art and propaganda art carry this in common. The artist is more or less a hired gun, paid to make ideas that cannot easily be adopted on their own merits appear sexy and fun. (Has anyone played America's Army?). Maybe there are artists who make ads for Shell who really do believe that Ken Saro-Wiwa got what he deserved... but my guess is that most people making ads for Shell don't know who he is, don't care to know, and if they do care, figure out some way to disconnect their job from Shell's actions in the Niger River Delta... because at the end of the day, they want to get paid, quite possibly need to get paid. (It's not really for me to say whether or not they are good or bad... but if they haven't thought it through, they probably ought to.) On the other hand, I don't see why it is necessarily destructive for an artist to say, I want to make something that reflects my values and my values circulate around concepts like 'justice' and 'truth' and might find their purest expression in representing the ways that injustice or dishonesty is expressed in our world... Or, maybe the internal dialogue isn't even like that maybe they think, Critics are assholes I am going to make something for them. (Which is also a political stance). I think what a lot of people refer to as politics is really another way of talking about how a preferred form of social connection with others is expressed in the public sphere. If it hurts an artist to think this way then the artist should do something else. BUT you cannot expect everyone else to stop caring about how what you do effects them. I wouldn't say that people should censor artists... but I do think that people have a right to criticize works of art, especially if that art is made in ignorance of how it might impact their lives. A good example of this public obligation is in the Tilted Arc case: http://www.cfa.arizona.edu/are476/files/tilted_arc.htm In particular, I direct you to the words of Danny Katz: I didn't expect to hear the arrogant position that art justifies interference with the simple joys of human activity in a plaza. It's not a great plaza by international standards, but it is a small refuge and place of revival for people who ride to work in steel containers, work in sealed rooms, and breathe re-circulated air all day. Is the purpose of art in public places to seal off a route of escape, to stress the absence of joy and hope? I can't believe that this was the artistic intention, yet to my sadness this for me has been the dominant effect of the work, and it's all the fault of its position and location. I can accept anything in art, but I can't accept physical assault and complete destruction of pathetic human activity. And, here, I think is where the question of art, theory, and politics collide. In the case of Serra's work, Art and Theory exclude politics. But, to what end? To make a point, which is itself political. I'm not going to say whether or not the Tilted Arc should have been destroyed I only want to highlight what happens when you remove the burden of politics from the mix. It just becomes another species of politics. Davin On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 11:25 AM, Gerry Coulter gcoul...@ubishops.ca wrote: When we attempt to task art -- as
Re: [-empyre-] self and others
gh comments below: On Jan 13, 2010, at 2:15 PM, Christiane Robbins wrote: it seems that we always keep landing on this flea ridden canard – “what is art ?” What is Art? Flea ridden indeed! Analyze the question and you get the premise for an avant-garde. No-one asks that question anymore everyone even philistines know what art is and knows what they like. I'd pose the question differently and ask what is the difference between art and craft or maybe what is the difference between art and a theory of art. Anyway, given the question I'd say that art making is part of the human psyche or mental structure. It 's related to and may even be the first shift to abstract thinking before the emergence of human language around 30,000 years ago. There are of course painting elephants but they've been taught by humans. They do really nice Abstract Expressionist paintings but they don't paint portraits of other elephants. My favorite quote or definition of art is from Magda Sawon who says that an artist takes something and transforms it and then transforms it again. The second time it turns into art. I've said in other posts that the support system for art is what defines art. There have always been artists in human society. Looking at for example a tribal society you might get shamanistic masks or maybe carved stone tablets of tribal laws and an arch to carry them around in. It seems there's always cross over or cross reference or commingling of art and religion. Here's some more pertinent questions for the 21st century artist. Who do you make your art for? What market are you trying to capture? Is your art an extension of your life style? For example do you believe in Art=Life? Do you need a college degree to be taken seriously as an artist? Is there a path to professional advancement as an artist? Do you think of your art making as a career? I could go on but you get the point. My observation is that the current art system and type of art being made around the world except maybe in traditional or tribal societies is supported by a series of small cults or interlocking rhizomatic marketing systems. It reflects global capitalism. Each artist/ gallery/museum gathers supporters who are essentially their clients or customers. The art that they exhibit is a variation on a number of personal obsessions or life style choices. People who agree with that lifestyle choice use the money exchange system to buy art that reinforces their choice. It's like fetish masks but in this instance art functions in a small tribal clique of consumers with disposable income. This is the patron of the artist that I had alluded to in an earlier post when I quoted Rimbaud. The other part to this system is the theoretical or linguistic system that verifies art and its value. It also certifies that an artist is indeed an artists and that what they produce is art. This is of course the University or Academic system that gives out diplomas and produces many theorists and critics to write about art. This is the poet Rimbaud refers to whom Rimbaud refers. So if you want to answer the question what is art there are two answers. Art is anything that is exhibited and sold in an art gallery and art is anything that a critic or art theorist defines as art. As an artist I try to operate outside this system or make proposals that break apart the structures of art. I like to challenge the precepts and principals of the existing structure. This doesn’t garner me much support because I think of art as a liberation and transformation of the psyche. It’s essentially an anti-marketing position. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Delightenment as Mass Perception
the arts of complicity, with regard to predatorial unicellular beauties benefiting from cooperation and cooptation, albeit accidentally and contingently, and with no concept of altruism... harold ford implodes... http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-14/harold-ford-implodes/?cid=hp:exc Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D NRIII for Congress 2010 http://intertheory.org/nriiiforcongress2010.html Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org From: Michael Angelo Tata, PhD mt...@ipublishingllc.com To: Soft Skinned Space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wed, January 13, 2010 7:09:29 PM Subject: [-empyre-] Delightenment as Mass Perception Hi, Johanna! Your remarks about aesthetic practice and it roots in brute sensation take me to Dewey’s anti-elitist somatism in Art as Experience and Alexander Baumgarten’s original sense of what aesthetics could mean back in the 18th century, when this discipline was first systematized in the West as discrete branch of philosophy, something different from metaphysics or ethics. I also am drawn very much to the poetics of the quantum, and look to physics and its unfolding symmetries as another place where material complicities are being re-imagined and re-described in ways that transcend mere re-naming of re-branding, and which throw into chaos that simple Cartesian separation between thinking, un-extended and extended, un-thinking matter(s). What do we make of the famous TOE, or Theory of Everything, something that string and membrane theories, with their inherent elegance, to use Brian Green’s highly aesthetic word, have attempted to grasp in recent years in their promulgation of a resonating, symphonic universe? And what of this spooky action at a distance, gravity, which involves us all in the complicities of matter and energy alike, which suffuses scientific fact and myth (that famous apple konking Newton on the head), and which appears to me as the ultimate metaphor for metaphor, this joining of the disparate over time and space within a structure capable of uniting them via only spookiness? I can deal with imbrications being stricken from the list of potential re-brands for the term ‘complicity,’ but still open the question to everyone, as it seems important for me that we find a way to name complicity in a way which invokes the non-agency agencies of systems theory and postmodernism, everything from le schizo to the CSO to the cyborg to that minimally committed Luhmannian para-subject traversing its grooved and groovy (geodesic?) networks. To be honest, I liked the word mostly because it sounded onomatopoetic to me: imbrications can’t be anything but imbricated, the tentacles of those three successive consonants flanked by identical vowels leaving me with the sense that I am being pulled beneath the waters of a lake by a mystery creature part human, part vegetable. In this vein, I look to Lynn Margulis’ recent work on bacterial symbiosis and its relevance for evolutionary biology and autopoiesis (for example, in hers and Dorion Sagan’s Dazzle Gradually, an odd fusion of poetry and biology, much of it verging on syphiology). For Margulis, evolution evolved because the simplest creatures learned to coexist in such a way that each benefited the other, a primal form of complicity for sure, one in which the most was at stake, so much more than tenureship or wealth or fame, whatever we gain by becoming accomplices in the human world. In her estimation, sexual reproduction, for example, began as an act of bacterial phagocytosis; when nucleic materials were proven indigestible, they divided along with bacterium, becoming transmitted to new cells (reproduction minus the sex, which, when it was introduced, could only spell death-by-meiosis). This picture is only a rudimentary sketch, but I like very much how she sees collusion at the heart of complexity and biodiversity, how the exchanges we undertake in our banks and classrooms and performance venues can be traced back to the primordial quid pro quo of predatorial unicellular beauties benefiting from cooperation and cooptation, albeit accidentally and contingently, and with no concept of altruism. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ From: druc...@gseis.ucla.edu To: emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:37:50 -0800 Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Les Liaisons Dangereuses Just picking up on all this rich exposition below -- what about Clint Eastwood as an interesting example with regard to what MAT has suggested here. Can I just say I really find all of what is written by Michael most useful -- but can I also say I don't care for the word imbrication -- it is one of the plague symptoms in my grad seminars I know when it
Re: [-empyre-] self and others
it seems there has always been an unnameable economy, Bataille referred to as the 'general' economy...we, quite powerfully, modulate such an economy; socially, technically - for better and worse. An interesting biological aspect of this economy,Tata referenced via Margulis' work on symbiosis. The ontological complicity of us all - I think of it as - for living things, that this unnameable economy substantiates our first metaphysical principle...that of capital. Bataille connected it to the Sun - and in a sense, he was right, because of the Sun's primary connection to life. The further theoretical connection is our human consciousness of capital, and its particular currencies we identify and trade - artistic, political, and otherwise. The negotiation and reconciliation you invoke between pleasure and work, Christiane, seems beholden to a first principle complicity - that of the unnameable economy, which gives rise to a metaphysics of capital, to which we all subscribe, by virtue of our membership in life. Another, perhaps second principle complicity, revolves around what Dienstag identified as the 'first' thought - that things could be otherwise. I would say that the extent to which we are willing to activate the first thought - that things could otherwise - directly denies or affirms our ontological relation to our first principle complicity. As you can see then, one can approach the escape velocity of complicity as a limit, but never completely achieve it, in life. Perhaps that is the perfection of martyrdom, death and God. One's perfect fidelity to an idea or complicity can never again be challenged by the facts of one's material existence. Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D NRIII for Congress 2010 http://intertheory.org/nriiiforcongress2010.html Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: Christiane Robbins c...@mindspring.com To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wed, January 13, 2010 2:15:57 PM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] self and others Indeed, its been an energetic few weeks on empire. As such, it hasn’t been easy to keep track of all of the issues on the table. However, it seems that we always keep landing on this flea ridden canard – “what is art ?” Most specifically to this list - how do we think of it and what forms does it – can it take”? The domain of art practice seems to be broadly accepted as a given. There are references upon references to “great works of art” and that we should be concerned with these significant works ( primarily masterworks of the 19th/20thc). A pivotal question is left begging- what guarantees these works of art their centrality – as an ontological constant - within this discussion? Without question, it is simultaneously dynamic, provocative, insightful and, at times, frustrating when what art is … and isn’t … are bandied about, professed and sanctioned by experts from disciplines from sociology, law, computer science, literature, etc. Within these posts there often seems to be an offer of a bifurcated, inherently contradictory notion of contemporary art practice(s). Art has been positioned ( and beautifully articulated ) as an endeavor which seems ensconced in this utopian, self-referential, romantic, nostalgic, mournful exercise of self-expression. I think it was Lyotard who said sometime ago that there was an element of “sorrow in the Zeitgeist.” In the positioning of such a sense of loss, I see a jettison of the framework and substantiation of the late-20thc capitalist directive of the “professionalism of the field” – of an art practice that streams itself as a “career path” within capitalistic economies and systems – such as the academy. I, too, find making art pure pleasure - incredibly so at times! Much to my chagrin, I also realize that pleasure can sustain one only so much . So please forgive, and humor, my own naiveté to ask you all this question, how then does one negotiate and then reconcile these seemingly disparate tracks - pleasure and professionalism ? This may ring particularly relevant in revisiting notions of complicity – as its been parried about during the past few weeks. On Jan 13, 2010, at 6:36 AM, Johanna Drucker wrote: Nice turn to these exchanges. I also really appreciated Gabriela's point and the follow-up by others. If we think of art as the act of form giving, we recognize that forms partake of symbolic systems. As social creatures we 'interpellate' (hideous theory word) shared symbolic systems (signs, stories, genres, dance moves, rules of the game etc.). But of course collectively and individually, we shift those symbol systems (for better and worse--think of personal choice and fashion trends). I've fallen from my pure structuralist beliefs. I no longer think we are only 'subjects.' Individualism may be a founding mythology of western
Re: [-empyre-] self and others
The support system for art can operate as either a positive or negative influence. In the West today it includes an art market that doesnt care much about art as anything other than an investment. best g From: empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of gh hovagimyan [...@thing.net] Sent: January 14, 2010 8:35 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] self and others gh comments below: On Jan 13, 2010, at 2:15 PM, Christiane Robbins wrote: it seems that we always keep landing on this flea ridden canard – “what is art ?” What is Art? Flea ridden indeed! Analyze the question and you get the premise for an avant-garde. No-one asks that question anymore everyone even philistines know what art is and knows what they like. I'd pose the question differently and ask what is the difference between art and craft or maybe what is the difference between art and a theory of art. Anyway, given the question I'd say that art making is part of the human psyche or mental structure. It 's related to and may even be the first shift to abstract thinking before the emergence of human language around 30,000 years ago. There are of course painting elephants but they've been taught by humans. They do really nice Abstract Expressionist paintings but they don't paint portraits of other elephants. My favorite quote or definition of art is from Magda Sawon who says that an artist takes something and transforms it and then transforms it again. The second time it turns into art. I've said in other posts that the support system for art is what defines art. There have always been artists in human society. Looking at for example a tribal society you might get shamanistic masks or maybe carved stone tablets of tribal laws and an arch to carry them around in. It seems there's always cross over or cross reference or commingling of art and religion. Here's some more pertinent questions for the 21st century artist. Who do you make your art for? What market are you trying to capture? Is your art an extension of your life style? For example do you believe in Art=Life? Do you need a college degree to be taken seriously as an artist? Is there a path to professional advancement as an artist? Do you think of your art making as a career? I could go on but you get the point. My observation is that the current art system and type of art being made around the world except maybe in traditional or tribal societies is supported by a series of small cults or interlocking rhizomatic marketing systems. It reflects global capitalism. Each artist/ gallery/museum gathers supporters who are essentially their clients or customers. The art that they exhibit is a variation on a number of personal obsessions or life style choices. People who agree with that lifestyle choice use the money exchange system to buy art that reinforces their choice. It's like fetish masks but in this instance art functions in a small tribal clique of consumers with disposable income. This is the patron of the artist that I had alluded to in an earlier post when I quoted Rimbaud. The other part to this system is the theoretical or linguistic system that verifies art and its value. It also certifies that an artist is indeed an artists and that what they produce is art. This is of course the University or Academic system that gives out diplomas and produces many theorists and critics to write about art. This is the poet Rimbaud refers to whom Rimbaud refers. So if you want to answer the question what is art there are two answers. Art is anything that is exhibited and sold in an art gallery and art is anything that a critic or art theorist defines as art. As an artist I try to operate outside this system or make proposals that break apart the structures of art. I like to challenge the precepts and principals of the existing structure. This doesn’t garner me much support because I think of art as a liberation and transformation of the psyche. It’s essentially an anti-marketing position. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13
Gerry, I hate to continue pushing on a point... because I don't want to be a pest. At the same time, I'd like to get a better understanding of your comments. I do believe that art could very well be the product of some primordial impulse, that it might be useful to assign it something resembling a transcendental value. Certainly, this is the way I experience my most gratifying ideas when I write stories, cobble together poems, draw, or just kind of sit around and think about the kinds of jokes that only I laugh at. I think we could also assign a similar sort of singular existence to individuals and events. My real question, however, is about the transition from something singular to a representation. Sure, at the point of origin, I am totally willing to accept the idea that art is an enigma. But once it enters into materiality once it is cast into the realm of representation... I don't know how it can avoid being entangled and burdened by the stuff it is made of (its words, its substance, its space of presentation, its framing discourse, the interpretive traditions around art). Maybe it enters into the social, not with an obligation (in the sense of, You artists really should stick up for so-and-so), but it does start accruing value in the sense that it engages viewers to respond. It becomes ladened with responsibility in the sense that it no longer exists purely as an enigma, but immediately evokes interpretation. The more enigmatic works, here, become more compelling because they generate meaningful interpretations but compelling works also (imo) tend to be enigmatic enough to engender multiple interpretations. They resist being fixed, but our minds struggle to fix them. For me, the real punch in art is that it carves out space for indeterminacy not BEFORE its execution but that its indeterminacy expands the interval BETWEEN its creation and consumption. In other words, its fecundity is in the space between artist and audience. It connects the singular aesthetic experience of creation to the singular aesthetic experience of consumption marking the meeting of two entities who are radically other vis-a-vis the object. In other words, it offers something like presence via representation. Respectfully, Davin On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 5:14 PM, Gerry Coulter gcoul...@ubishops.ca wrote: Art is not responsible to anyone or anything. Neither should academics feel the need to speak for others. It is nice when are makes the world more enigmatic -- artists who disentangle themselkves from theory do the world a favour. Art is amoral, irresponsible, it ceases to be art when we make it otherwise. Political art and political theory share the same overwrought character. Art is stronger than politics and morality -- it comes from a time before politics, from elsewhere. best g From: empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of davin heckman [davinheck...@gmail.com] Sent: January 12, 2010 12:19 PM To: soft_skinned_space Cc: jha...@haberarts.com; soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13 This is shaping up to be an interesting week on Empyre. Thank you, everyone. Sometimes, I think it is good to think about art, politics, criticism, theory, morality, etc. from a naive perspective, a sort of psychic backtracking, so that we follow the paths that we have avoided in the past, and imagine what would be if we were not where we are today. The knot of art, theory, politics, and commerce that we live in right now is singular, and so it is treacherous to extrapolate this into a general theory of how artists or critics or anyone should operate (in fact, all speculation is fraught with peril, because other people do and want other things). If art is not meant to communicate, what is it for? Is it for the artist to express him or herself? If so, then for what end? I don't want to burden art with too much of a redemptive mission... but at the very least, I think art ought to be communicable in some way. That the event can be reproduced (as a concept, as a record, a trace, an object, a text, whatever)... that it is has to go from one person to another person in some way that intervenes against the flow of time and space. Art has to refer to an idea that at least one other person (even a hypothetical one) could agree upon. To offer the most meager definition of art, at the very least, it could be like the words in your head that give shape to your ideas. Undoubtedly, our brains do things. Animals' brains do things. But when we put these neural actions into representation, whether we share this representation or not, we enter into that socially constructed space outside of the whatever-would-have-happened-had-we-not-intervened (nature? the animal? physics?). Now, this is a naive explanation of art. It
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13
Re; But once it enters into materiality once it is cast into the realm of representation... I don't know how it can avoid being entangled and burdened by the stuff it is made of (its words, its substance, its space of presentation, its framing discourse, the interpretive traditions around art). Indeed, what you are into now is Meaning and art's encounter with language. Language here stands in for Meaning which is eternally absent. best g From: empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of davin heckman [davinheck...@gmail.com] Sent: January 14, 2010 3:21 PM To: soft_skinned_space Cc: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13 Gerry, I hate to continue pushing on a point... because I don't want to be a pest. At the same time, I'd like to get a better understanding of your comments. I do believe that art could very well be the product of some primordial impulse, that it might be useful to assign it something resembling a transcendental value. Certainly, this is the way I experience my most gratifying ideas when I write stories, cobble together poems, draw, or just kind of sit around and think about the kinds of jokes that only I laugh at. I think we could also assign a similar sort of singular existence to individuals and events. My real question, however, is about the transition from something singular to a representation. Sure, at the point of origin, I am totally willing to accept the idea that art is an enigma. But once it enters into materiality once it is cast into the realm of representation... I don't know how it can avoid being entangled and burdened by the stuff it is made of (its words, its substance, its space of presentation, its framing discourse, the interpretive traditions around art). Maybe it enters into the social, not with an obligation (in the sense of, You artists really should stick up for so-and-so), but it does start accruing value in the sense that it engages viewers to respond. It becomes ladened with responsibility in the sense that it no longer exists purely as an enigma, but immediately evokes interpretation. The more enigmatic works, here, become more compelling because they generate meaningful interpretations but compelling works also (imo) tend to be enigmatic enough to engender multiple interpretations. They resist being fixed, but our minds struggle to fix them. For me, the real punch in art is that it carves out space for indeterminacy not BEFORE its execution but that its indeterminacy expands the interval BETWEEN its creation and consumption. In other words, its fecundity is in the space between artist and audience. It connects the singular aesthetic experience of creation to the singular aesthetic experience of consumption marking the meeting of two entities who are radically other vis-a-vis the object. In other words, it offers something like presence via representation. Respectfully, Davin On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 5:14 PM, Gerry Coulter gcoul...@ubishops.ca wrote: Art is not responsible to anyone or anything. Neither should academics feel the need to speak for others. It is nice when are makes the world more enigmatic -- artists who disentangle themselkves from theory do the world a favour. Art is amoral, irresponsible, it ceases to be art when we make it otherwise. Political art and political theory share the same overwrought character. Art is stronger than politics and morality -- it comes from a time before politics, from elsewhere. best g From: empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of davin heckman [davinheck...@gmail.com] Sent: January 12, 2010 12:19 PM To: soft_skinned_space Cc: jha...@haberarts.com; soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13 This is shaping up to be an interesting week on Empyre. Thank you, everyone. Sometimes, I think it is good to think about art, politics, criticism, theory, morality, etc. from a naive perspective, a sort of psychic backtracking, so that we follow the paths that we have avoided in the past, and imagine what would be if we were not where we are today. The knot of art, theory, politics, and commerce that we live in right now is singular, and so it is treacherous to extrapolate this into a general theory of how artists or critics or anyone should operate (in fact, all speculation is fraught with peril, because other people do and want other things). If art is not meant to communicate, what is it for? Is it for the artist to express him or herself? If so, then for what end? I don't want to burden art with too much of a redemptive mission... but at the very least, I think art ought to be communicable in some way. That the event can be reproduced (as a concept, as a record, a
Re: [-empyre-] Delightenment as Mass Perception
Michael, Wonderful wonderful! I couldn't agree more! I love Brian Green's work, by the way. I wrote a book called QUantum awhile back (artist's book), and have invoked quantum theory in the projects around speculative computing (SpecLab). Absolutely agree that we need to engage with those non-agency agencies of systems theory -- also part of my SpecLab stuff, just fyi -- Heinz von Forester and Ernst von Glasersfeld among my favorites, a little more imaginative than Luhmann, oddly. Also, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's work very important for me. I think Maturana is filled with insight. Another reference in this realm, though some might see it darkly, is Childhood's End. Anyway, thanks for all this, very useful and intersting. Only, let's not call sensation brute -- it is the source of knowledge! Johanna On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:09 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote: Hi, Johanna! Your remarks about aesthetic practice and it roots in brute sensation take me to Dewey’s anti-elitist somatism in Art as Experience and Alexander Baumgarten’s original sense of what aesthetics could mean back in the 18th century, when this discipline was first systematized in the West as discrete branch of philosophy, something different from metaphysics or ethics. I also am drawn very much to the poetics of the quantum, and look to physics and its unfolding symmetries as another place where material complicities are being re-imagined and re-described in ways that transcend mere re-naming of re-branding, and which throw into chaos that simple Cartesian separation between thinking, un-extended and extended, un-thinking matter(s). What do we make of the famous TOE, or Theory of Everything, something that string and membrane theories, with their inherent elegance, to use Brian Green’s highly aesthetic word, have attempted to grasp in recent years in their promulgation of a resonating, symphonic universe? And what of this spooky action at a distance, gravity, which involves us all in the complicities of matter and energy alike, which suffuses scientific fact and myth (that famous apple konking Newton on the head), and which appears to me as the ultimate metaphor for metaphor, this joining of the disparate over time and space within a structure capable of uniting them via only spookiness? I can deal with imbrications being stricken from the list of potential re-brands for the term ‘complicity,’ but still open the question to everyone, as it seems important for me that we find a way to name complicity in a way which invokes the non-agency agencies of systems theory and postmodernism, everything from le schizo to the CSO to the cyborg to that minimally committed Luhmannian para-subject traversing its grooved and groovy (geodesic?) networks. To be honest, I liked the word mostly because it sounded onomatopoetic to me: imbrications can’t be anything but imbricated, the tentacles of those three successive consonants flanked by identical vowels leaving me with the sense that I am being pulled beneath the waters of a lake by a mystery creature part human, part vegetable. In this vein, I look to Lynn Margulis’ recent work on bacterial symbiosis and its relevance for evolutionary biology and autopoiesis (for example, in hers and Dorion Sagan’sDazzle Gradually, an odd fusion of poetry and biology, much of it verging on syphiology). For Margulis, evolution evolved because the simplest creatures learned to coexist in such a way that each benefited the other, a primal form of complicity for sure, one in which the most was at stake, so much more than tenureship or wealth or fame, whatever we gain by becoming accomplices in the human world. In her estimation, sexual reproduction, for example, began as an act of bacterial phagocytosis; when nucleic materials were proven indigestible, they divided along with bacterium, becoming transmitted to new cells (reproduction minus the sex, which, when it was introduced, could only spell death-by-meiosis). This picture is only a rudimentary sketch, but I like very much how she sees collusion at the heart of complexity and biodiversity, how the exchanges we undertake in our banks and classrooms and performance venues can be traced back to the primordial quid pro quo of predatorial unicellular beauties benefiting from cooperation and cooptation, albeit accidentally and contingently, and with no concept of altruism. *** Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/ From: druc...@gseis.ucla.edu To: emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:37:50 -0800 Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Les Liaisons Dangereuses Just picking up on all this rich exposition below -- what about Clint Eastwood as an interesting example with regard to what MAT has suggested here. Can I just say I
Re: [-empyre-] Delightenment as Mass Perception
Johanna have you got a url or download site for your Quantum ? I love this idea of your book. But i need some enightenment (from MichelA. too) - can you shed lumieres on Luhmann? I have been riffing for a while on this sense (sixth sense) that autopoesis a la Maturana etc is a linguistic generative thing... I mean that you can actually make images and sounds do this as a kind of meta-systems implosion- i am rambling (appropriately enough, as in a rumble, or a walk through the woods). christina naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net On Jan 14, 2010, at 6:10 PM, Johanna Drucker wrote: Michael, Wonderful wonderful! I couldn't agree more! I love Brian Green's work, by the way. I wrote a book called QUantum awhile back (artist's book), and have invoked quantum theory in the projects around speculative computing (SpecLab). Absolutely agree that we need to engage with those non-agency agencies of systems theory -- also part of my SpecLab stuff, just fyi -- Heinz von Forester and Ernst von Glasersfeld among my favorites, a little more imaginative than Luhmann, oddly. Also, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's work very important for me. I think Maturana is filled with insight. Another reference in this realm, though some might see it darkly, is Childhood's End. Anyway, thanks for all this, very useful and intersting. Only, let's not call sensation brute -- it is the source of knowledge! Johanna On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:09 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote: Hi, Johanna! Your remarks about aesthetic practice and it roots in brute sensation take me to Dewey’s anti-elitist somatism in Art as Experience and Alexander Baumgarten’s original sense of what aesthetics could mean back in the 18th century, when this discipline was first systematized in the West as discrete branch of philosophy, something different from metaphysics or ethics. I also am drawn very much to the poetics of the quantum, and look to physics and its unfolding symmetries as another place where material complicities are being re-imagined and re-described in ways that transcend mere re-naming of re-branding, and which throw into chaos that simple Cartesian separation between thinking, un- extended and extended, un-thinking matter(s). What do we make of the famous TOE, or Theory of Everything, something that string and membrane theories, with their inherent elegance, to use Brian Green’s highly aesthetic word, have attempted to grasp in recent years in their promulgation of a resonating, symphonic universe? And what of this spooky action at a distance, gravity, which involves us all in the complicities of matter and energy alike, which suffuses scientific fact and myth (that famous apple konking Newton on the head), and which appears to me as the ultimate metaphor for metaphor, this joining of the disparate over time and space within a structure capable of uniting them via only spookiness? I can deal with imbrications being stricken from the list of potential re-brands for the term ‘complicity,’ but still open the question to everyone, as it seems important for me that we find a way to name complicity in a way which invokes the non-agency agencies of systems theory and postmodernism, everything from le schizo to the CSO to the cyborg to that minimally committed Luhmannian para-subject traversing its grooved and groovy (geodesic?) networks. To be honest, I liked the word mostly because it sounded onomatopoetic to me: imbrications can’t be anything but imbricated, the tentacles of those three successive consonants flanked by identical vowels leaving me with the sense that I am being pulled beneath the waters of a lake by a mystery creature part human, part vegetable. In this vein, I look to Lynn Margulis’ recent work on bacterial symbiosis and its relevance for evolutionary biology and autopoiesis (for example, in hers and Dorion Sagan’sDazzle Gradually, an odd fusion of poetry and biology, much of it verging on syphiology). For Margulis, evolution evolved because the simplest creatures learned to coexist in such a way that each benefited the other, a primal form of complicity for sure, one in which the most was at stake, so much more than tenureship or wealth or fame, whatever we gain by becoming accomplices in the human world. In her estimation, sexual reproduction, for example, began as an act of bacterial phagocytosis; when nucleic materials were proven indigestible, they divided along with bacterium, becoming transmitted to new cells (reproduction minus the sex, which, when it was introduced, could only spell death-by-meiosis). This picture is only a rudimentary sketch, but I like very much how
