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

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.

16 Beaver Group wishes more art were instrumentalized to serve radical politics … but it’s not.  And so, because we are all complicit, we should go and watch a dozen or so films screened this Sunday, recontextualized “to work for an idiosyncratic, political activism.”  Here is the information from their website:

http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/

What: Site a specific film performance
When: Sunday 1.24.10
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 8:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all
This sunday will be the third in a four-part series investigating the role of abstract and affective processes in a contemporary revolutionary politics, featuring performance and experimental film and video. The evening, as did our last two events, mixes lecture elements with screenings in order to recontextualize select works from the experimental film and video canon, and set them to work for an idiosyncratic, political activism.

Continuing our investigation of linkages between politics and abstraction, tonight will examine the critical category of narcissism.

Using Harari’s text on the late Lacan, and Krauss’ seminal essay from the first October on Video – The Aesthetics of Narcissism as touchstones, this sunday we will investigate the complex interaction between “narcissism” and the political. In previous evenings abstraction has been considered according to Bataille’s categories of the informe (formlessness) and the sacred, and Agamben’s analysis of The Open, with the political necessity of keeping open the spaces exemplified (and intensified) by the abstract Image as a primary theme. Here narcissism (the mirror) figures as a kind of short-circuit, which tonight’s performance-based videos evocatively display. Performance/improvisation – as a strategy of conceptual liberation, as a tool for creating radical intuitive (abstract) spaces, versus a kind of “mimetic narcissism” – as a product of radical devolution. The work of surrealist Jacques Vache (and the fourth dimension of (h)umour) and Duchampian irony will be utilized. Krauss’ essay will be considered but creatively reconfigured in order to take video performance out of its historicized context and set it to work for political activity.

Works to be included tonight (Jonas’s hypnotic meditation on self-reflexivity and alter-ego Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, Trecartin’s synaptic, digitally manipulated psychedelia What’s the Love Making Babies For?, Charles M. Jones’ classic short Duck Amuck, and Joe Gibbons’ acerbic take on emergence Sabotaging Spring, among others) will be employed to develop the theme.

In order to refigure video performance strategies to their purely abstract/structural dimension, performance works tonight will be interposed with the work of
Japanese filmmaker Takashi Ito.

___________________________________________________
2. Films to be screened

Joan Jonas Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy 15 min.
Takashi Ito Venus 8 min.
Chris Burden Big Wrench 16 min.
Takashi Ito Box 4 min.
Leslie Thornton She Had He So He Do He To Her 5 min.
Takashi Ito Ghost 6 min.
Ryan Trecartin What’s the Love Making Babies For? 20 min.
Charles M. Jones Duck Amuck 7 min.
Takashi Ito Drill 5 min.
Tony Oursler Selected Early Work [excerpt] 10 min.
Takashi Ito Spacy 10 min.
Joe Gibbons Sabotaging Spring 15 min.

Today, I made a pretty bad artwork.  It is as follows:

Not at all related to the recent haranguing about the New Museum’s practices, today, November 22, 2009, instead of attending Brody Condon’s Case at The New Museum, I comfortably sat at home and re-read sizable portions of William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic, Neuromancer.  If anyone is interested, the full e-text, graphic novel adaptation, and audio book (read by Gibson himself and featuring ambient music by U2!) are available here:

http://www.greylodge.org/gpc/?p=119

This post will serve as the documentation for After Case (2009).  This piece is unaffiliated with Performa.  The title After Case is in the tradition of after pieces which pivot on existing works.  Ironically, I will have finished reading the book before Condo’s piece is over, this evening at 6 PM.