The following link leads to a short, sweet and humble autobiographical summary of the life-to-date of Douglas Harper (the earnestness of its form, as an aside, made me want to face-palm at Gregory Ulmer’s “mystory” theory).  Harper is the founder of etymonline.org, writer of several books on Pennsylvania’s Civil War history, and a lover of literature.  He would, I gather from his proclaimed love of the romantic and especially Stendhal’s De l’Amour, forgive the sappiness… (“full of sap,” Late O.E. sæpig, from sæp (see sap (n.1)). Figurative sense of “foolishly sentimental” (1660s)) …when I express that his bio taught me more about how to live, love, fail, and read, than a large fraction of the philosophy I’ve labored through in recent memory.

On that note allow me to capriciously interject with one of Beckett’s finest ruminations:

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again.  Fail again. Fail better. (Westward Ho, 1983)

But back to the point.

Coincidentally or not, the other day’s New York Times Travel section featured a cover story on Madeira, the “Pearl of The Atlantic” and a cynosure of gorgeosity, off the coast of Portugal.  The article’s endnote said that the author, Henry Alford, had recently published “How to Live: A Search for Wisdom From Old People” (well thank you Douglas and Henry!)  Where my scholarly research has taken me, entertaining the idea of fate (posed technically as anthropocentric teleology) is considered a heresy or a naivety, but since I live candidly I will remark that a Portugese pearl of my own (the kind of gal who tells me I need to read Jose Saramago’s Gospel According to Jesus Christ if we’re to be together, and I goddamn will) recently taught me some lessons on life and love, and it’s precisely these coincidences that give us that frisson, the goosebumps, which make the temptation of believing in such naivetes unshakable from our being.

Here is the passage on love from Harper’s bio which inspired me to make that remark:

Kant knew that philosophy thrived when it was deemed trivial by priests and bankers and social reformers and prime ministers. If those people had thought philosophy important, they would have sought to control it or repress it or buy it or pervert it. The quest for truth can only occur in the autonomy known by the scorned and neglected. Yeats knew the same thing about poetry when he wrote “Adam’s Curse.” In a modern, commercial society, unless poets and philosophers are deemed dreamers and fools, no human thought will be free.

He is, I admit, a man’s poet, with all the folly and foolish nobility that implies. Lately I’ve been reading the later Yeats: “The Winding Stair and Other Poems.” I see these poems that I’ve known since I was 18 with fresh poignancy and power. I had read then, but never felt till now, his bitterness at leaving youth just when he’d finally mastered its arts. The powers I feel now: to please a young woman’s heart, to lead her to the well of her sensual self and clear the rushes and clarify the water so that she may drink deeply and long — all these attained powers arrive at the same time I begin to find gray hairs and my hip hurts.

http://www.etymonline.com/columns/bio.htm

Depending on sangria intake, I’ll respond to the following passage in more detail when The World Cup final is over (I’m at Lizzaran on Mercer Street), but it piqued my interest as an opportune causeway into a taboo topic that many art secularists (people whose devotion to art operates as sybaritic secular religion) are unwilling to confront.

via The Creativity Crisis – Newsweek – July 10, 2010 – by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.

The single slide Power Point presentation version of the article would point to the discrepancy between the Flynn Effect according to which IQ scores increase on average 10% each generation, and the concurrent decrease in CQ scores (not the Roman Coppola movie), since roughly 1990, scores which, in a word, “quantify creativity” (scoff, gasp!), but actually refer to the ability to creatively engage design questions like, “how can I make this already better?”

My concern relating to the article is the putative default mode of assuming art’s dominion over the positive idea of creativity; its linguistic status (divorced from crescere) and ontological connotations.  I feel that the Art Context as a common substance (Agamben) is an unconscious but highly active as glutton (creatophiliac, catastrophiliac, informavoric) that cannot be attributed to any particular arbiters or institutions, yet as a collective hallucination perpetuated by its antique reputation it is in almost every case righteously presumed to possess, by default, the most direct lineage to “creativity” over the galaxy of other disciplines and human behaviors.  And I think that presumption is a vain fallacy.

Nedko Lucas - Emotions Without Masks

Colleen Asper - Portrait of the Artist as President

LEGO Mindstrom mod by some kids

I’m a 23 year old art writer, though presently the process, even resulting text, of writing to me is perfunctory; I will not go so far as to say not necessary or incidental since what can we do but make marks.  But, in the way Zizek somewhat comically describes his method of extensive rambling note-taking followed by severe editing, eliminating writing in the process, I’m on board with that.  My oft heckled at main area of research has been relational aesthetics, and I’m committed to a prolonged investigation of it’s possibilities and implications (I think it deserves more than the short-shrift people give it).  But if I call it merely a jumping off point, it’s because I’m attempting to keep my eye on the future of art, the popular current blogospheric discourse about which seems to me completely blinkered by market concerns.  There’s still a hell of a lot of ideas out there that deserve sincere focus, and which have zilch to do with this market conversation.  And I’m especially interested in the history and future of exhibition making, both in art and non-art contexts, both in recognizable and yet-to-be-recognized forms. Yes, I’m reading Rethinking Curating, What Makes A Great Exhibition, Obrist’s book, Velthius’s book, etcetera.

BUT…

After my first research semester at the European Graduate School (a brilliant, semi-sadistic, experimental pedagogical interface in the Saastal mountains near Visp, Switzerland, where Avital Ronell is considered the most daring American philosopher, DeLanda the guy to clarify things, and Deleuze/Heidegger/Jean-Luc Nancy the entree at every communal meal, and Schopenhauerian suicide conversations happen daily – although it should be clear that Schopenhauer did not endorse suicide if only for the fact that one would be resigning to the hostility of the universe) I tend these days, perhaps predictably, (cliche?) towards more broadly and obliquely related areas that new art should/must confront.  By new art I choose to toggle off the browser tab containing chronology and historical trajectory, but rather refer to an amorphous body of art practices and involved in a fractured but immediately recognizable conversastion. And if I dare to be precociously/prematurely prescriptive I think more artists and ‘art people’ ought to engage to a greater and more coherent extent  this decade’s developments in continental and non-Western theory, salvageable fringe or radical impulses (a term now vague, sclerotic, bupkis), and especially ‘high science’.  I use CERN’s LHC as a synecdoche for that neat stuff which is problematic since it really takes effort to get past pop quantum physics as cargo cult, even for dedicated artist/theorists (and my own technopositivist faiths).   Although Bruce Sterling recently informed me in a seminar that CERN is basically a 50-year old hodgepodge of existent alongside abandoned projects with temporal shear and obsolete apparatuses held together by duct-tape at every turn, the perfect setting for a future fiction novel on media theory, maybe media punk.

Anyway just some thoughts, but here’s a link to an article I wrote on Triple Candie in NYC, which I was pleased and surprised to see they’ve kept in their press archives. http://www.triplecandie.org/About%20Press%20Calais%20antARTica%20112909.html

Some arguably relevant images I’m currently thinking about:

Christiania, Copenhagen - you are now leaving the EU

NSK

Oda Projesi in Galata - after George Perec's useless space?

Renzo Martens - Enjoy Poverty

Albert Figurt - Notre CAM de Paris

Nathalie Bookchin - Mass Ornament - 2009

Michelle Teran's geolocative project

Alex Fuller and Noah Bernsohn - on a mountain top - 2010

After seeing the Jonas Akerlund-directed “trailer” for Francesco Vezzoli’s orchestration of the MOCA 30th anniversary gala, entitled Ballet Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again), featuring the Ballet Russes and Lady Gaga, she instantly became more appealing to me; jaundiced and inobservant had been my eye in not considering the obvious contextualization of her work in the performative tradition of acts like Marlena Dietrich, Klaus Nomi, the Kipper Kids, Sasha Fierce, even Ali G.  It’s also rather timely that I am reading essayist David Shields’ recent “manifesto”, Reality Hunger, which attempts to codify the migration of fiction into real life, and that tonight at the New Museum there is a lecture on the parafictional work Headless by artist duo Senneby + Goldin.  Yet my new contextual reading of Lady Gaga was almost immediately overshadowed by the most fascinating internet meme in recent memory, South African hip-hop group Die Antwoord, who not only developed a global fanbase within days of their website’s launch, but will likely drop the jaws of cultural critics interested in issues of otherness, globalization, and parafiction.  There is no doubt, this is some of the most interesting performance art, understood in the sense of advanced popular culture, possible.

We don’t often re-blog, but today via the Deep Europe mailing list SPECTRE, we received an interesting and unsettling (but overall unsurprising) story from the web existentialists at moddr_labs in Rotterdam:

Rotterdam, 18th of February 2010

Facebook excommunicates WORM because of the Web2.0 Suicide Machine

It is with great sorrow that we announce that Facebook Inc. has decided that WORM, the producer of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, will be excommunicated from Facebook.

The initiative to build the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine came from Moddr_, WORM’s media lab. By threatening WORM, Facebook is trying to take down the Suicide Machine.

The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine allows users of – among others – Facebook to commit ‘social network suicide’. Facebook threatens WORM with further legal action if WORM doesn’t stop targeting the FaceBook platform via the SuicideMachine. In addition, it has now also demanded that WORM immediately deletes its own Facebook profile (WORM_Rotterdam). According to Facebook and its lawyer, the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine has violated Facebook’s Terms of Service and with that WORM has forfeited it’s right to keep using the platform. WORM does not want to engage in a fight over this matter with Facebook. The idea behind the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine was to be able to ‘unfriend’ in an automated fashion and to make users of social networks aware that they should always be in control of their own data. Facebook won’t allow for this control and is also not willing to enter into this debate. We are pretty much done with that and are left with no other choice than to commit online suicide ourselves. The conditions and attitude of Facebook leave no other option as far as WORM is concerned.

WORM deeply regrets the current situation. The web 2.0 Suicide Machine was never intended to target Facebook as such, but meant as a tool for people who, for whatever reason, are tired of their online life. Facebook wants all access to their service, personal data of their users included, to run via their own ‘connect’ platform. In this way, Facebook can set, interpret and change its own rules as it sees fit…

The excommunication of WORM illustrates that data freedom and net neutrality of users is merely an illusion on many social network sites. Not only is it not allowed for people to unfriend (in an automated manner), but companies also have the power to expel users they do not like. Facebook shows that a user only has the rights that Facebook grants it.

Facebook claims all rights. WORM does not want to continue living in this 2.0 world. Which is why we say goodbye to all our friends. We wish you all the best.

No flowers, no speeches.

moddr_labs,
WORM, Rotterdam
worm.org
moddr.net
www.suicidemachine.org

In 1968, German artist Charlotte Posenske, having become increasingly indifferent about whether her work was identified as art, stopped working as an artist.  Distressed by her belief that art couldn’t have sufficient political impact on social inequalities, she gave up art making to become a sociologist.  She refused to exhibit her work, or visit exhibitions by other artists, until her death in 1985.¹²

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

The Austrian art group Gelitin are similarly indifferent about whether their work is identified as art, but the philosophy from which that indifference stems is opposite from Posenske’s: they relish the idea the art doesn’t have to do anything, and believe that expressly political art goes against the uselessness that should characterize it.  As with many artists and art lovers, art is understood doubly here as a free zone for experimentation, and an anarchic counter to capitalism’s expectations of efficiency and function.  Of course, this stance is inherently political in its own way, as art is still operating within capitalism, but you are asked to elide that fact and focus on the direct experience.

Gelitin’s 2007 piece The Dig Cunt was a “durational work as a celebration of the millennium of the female and the anti-phallus”. Beginning every morning for seven days they ritualistically dug a hole on the beach at Coney Island; each evening the hole was filled in. ³

Gelitin has a durational blindfolded sculpture piece going on at Greene Nafatli.  Here’s the press release: http://www.greenenaftaligallery.com/exhibition.php?id=3585&jumpTo=pressRelease

1. http://www.betweenbridges.net/Posenenske.html [↩]
2. http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/charlotte_posenenske/ [↩]
3. http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/performance/gelitin.html [↩]

This is a screenshot from the website of The Secret of the Ninth Planet, a show curated last Spring in San Francisco by students at the CCA San Francisco curatorial MA program.

Here is a small list of vocab words we came across and looked up — either for the first time or for refreshment — this past month in our art readings.¹

revanchist: (Date – 1926) one who advocates a policy of revanche, a usually political policy designed to recover lost territory or status

tannoy: Tannoy Ltd is an English manufacturer of loudspeakers and public-address (PA) systems. The company was founded as Tulsemere Manufacturing Company in London in 1926. The name Tannoy is a syllabic abbreviation of tantalum alloy, which was the material used in a type of electrolytic rectifier developed by the company. The brand had been trademarked by 10 March 1932, on which date the Tulsemere Manufacturing Company was formally registered as Guy R. Fountain Limited.

portacabin:

Now and again you come across the word ‘Portakabin’ in a variety of different, but wrong, spellings. And regularly we are asked questions about this. As the only experts on this topic we would like to clarify the origin of the name and how it should be used correctly.  Portakabin is not an ordinary word but, in fact, a trade mark. Donald Shepherd, the founder of the company Portakabin, had the idea of a stand-alone, relocatable building way back in the Forties. He thought of a fitting name for his business – Portakabin, which he registered as a trade mark. Since that day, only buildings produced by Portakabin can be called a Portakabin building.

As a pioneer in the development of relocatable and modular accommodation and as an international market leader in the industry, sometimes people use our company name wrongly. We always work hard to prevent this.

In short – Portakabin is a protected, exclusive trade mark that can only be used to describe the products of the company Portakabin.

Other mispellings we came across:

portacabin, portacabins, portakabins, porta cabins, porta cabin, portocabin, portocabins, portkabin, porta kabin, porto cabins,potakabin, potacabins, port a cabin, port a cabins, potacabin, porta kabins, portokabin, porto cabin²

secateurs: Chiefly Brit a small pair of shears for pruning, having a pair of pivoted handles, sprung so that they are normally open, and usually a single cutting blade that closes against a flat surface

antiphrasis: The use of a word or phrase in a sense contrary to its normal meaning for ironic or humorous effect, as in a mere babe of 40 years.

cater-corner: (Date – 1838) in a diagonal or oblique position

1. Sources include: Artforum, Frieze, e-flux, Afterall, Artlies, October, OEI, Artvehicle, cms.mit.edu, edge.org, The Next Layer, Mute Mag, aaaarg.org, NeMe, IDC [↩]
2. http://www.portakabin.co.uk/news/newstwo/ [↩]

There is no critical preface necessary here.  This is for fun.  We (think we) are going for accuracy, not mockery.  This post will be open to comments indefinitely, and will be updated frequently and edited capriciously, but all revisions will be noted.  Eventually, the list will be indexed and used devilishly in an upcoming collaboration with Club Samantha, an media collective from Bucharest.

We will start with ten a day.  This list will get obscure fast, don’t worry.

Simon de Pury – Ralph Fiennes

Larry Gagosian – Jeff Bridges

Julian Schnabel – Mickey Rourke

Andy Warhol – David Bowie

Dennis Hopper – Dennis Hopper

Marina Abramovic – Meryl Streep

Catherine Opie – Kathy Bates

Liam Gillick – Stephen Dorf

Nicolas Bourriaud – Vincent Cassel

Matthew Barney – Christian Bale

Additions #1:

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Peter Sarsgaard

Maurizio Cattelan – Adrian Brody

Adrian Piper – Halle Berry