Notes for seminar class discussions

The Railway Journey Notes...

Railway system is a metaphor for industrial existence

The Railway Journey:

Forward by alan trachenberg

Speed the idea of speed or HYPER anything rose from industrialism

Deadlines, loony toons, fed ex, nascar. Walking into running in the 70’s

Nineteenth century modernity  machinery became the foreground of modernity

New ? placed on nerves

Chap 1: from a wood culture to a steel culture. The deforestation of Europe (denaturalization)

Coal what happens to knowledge when the space required to acquiring it is reduced to zero?

Does space define substance of knowledge>

Food taxes mark animal transportation.

Too expensive

Regularity and uniformity is what made the mechanical locomotion transcend the horse

Conformity

(no play)

pre industrial the mimetic of nature

trans-natural

mechanized travel rendered it calculable.

Experience : does it possess VALUE?

Form is personifyied by function

Uniformity became normative

SMOOTH, LEVEL, HARD and straight was an alienation from nature.

? national system of railways

Harmony was essential to railway conformity

The political landscape had to be altered for trains to succeed

Telegraph poleDolf sternbergers term panoramic view.

Telegraphs wires and poles looked strangley like a music score.

Space covered in a third of the time

(new airlines going from coast to coast in 12 minutes)

the epoch of the suburbs made possible by the train

trains “flew” but there was the fear of derailment

People felt impotent sexuality both liberating and subservient

Fear from station to station no one could hear you scream for help

Murder sickness

Europe: rail made industry efficient but destroyed tradition

America: rails allowed for industrialism to be possible  and personified America

Europe :high real estate prices low wages

America : low real estate values and scarce labor

America curved rails by using double axels

Jersey shore in Florence, patty duke

Democratic pioneer society (open cars)

English tradition based closed class based

Americans rails were initially modeled after steamship

European system was based on stage coach (privacy)

Roads were not developed in the states until the development of the automobile

Steam : a world in miniature mixed class and egalitarian

St. Moritz in nyc during the toy fair. SMALL!!

Pullman luxury cars

Michael Chevalier on the restless American “always in a terrible hurry”

Always fit for work except for  work which required a carefull slowness.

It is his idea of hell

Chap. 7 Pathology

The vibrations of rail travel (bio mechanics)

Railway train was bones without muscle. (industry)

Active production_ passive consumption

Railway travel production and consumption are simultaneous

Consumed during production

Travel like a parcel

Weirdness versus normality

The old was romanticized

Industry indirect, rails direct

Industrial fatigue

Frederick Winslow Taylor time motion studies

Physiological fatigue and technological fatigue

Fear by the insidious prospect of accident

Collective anxiety

Create illusion of movement

Through cyberspace

The more civilized the technology the more catastrophic  its accidents

Fell on its own sword

The technological apparatus fell on its own sword

The more perfected the more the gravity of the accident

Modern times the movie

Curbed energy and the means of curbing it

Psychological accidents are more severe anti depressants

Sell/purchase dynamic are one

Chap 9

Tramatic neurosis

Collective neurosis

Commotion

Industrialization as a psychological trama

p. 141bottom

terror has much to do with its production  Erichson Why did humans no consider the  philosophical ramifications of progress

newness as a shock unto itself

the injury without the accident

SHocK

Shock of the weird

Art of the familiar

Experience

p.152: individual combat versus a organized force which is abstract

the actual violence occurs before (Ali)

One on one combat

Versus the collective combatants

Shock and the evolution of the army as organization

Versus duelists

Derangement

Division of labor

Shock and awe, blitzkrieg, Guernica

Chapter 10  Stimulus shield

Craft versus – production type manufacturing (modern aircraft that goes from l.a. to NY in 12 minutes)

Fax machines used to take about that long to fax a message from one place to the next

Deepens the shock?

Creating a dissolution of reality – illusion

Technology improvements caused repressed fears does not eliminate

Zoloft, Paxil, Prozac

Anxiety and fright

p. 164 the duel versus mechanized war Duels faded by the time of WW1

What about suppression of stimuli? Replaced by illusionary stimuli (video games, horror, football, MMA etc.

Metaphysical atrophy

Piercing a shield

An inorganic protective layer due to hyper civilization

One inadvertently becomes enslaved to social rules at tech stimuli

Domination of industry

An increasing elimination of “play”  The lack of play between train wheels and the track are a perfect metaphor for the end of “play”

Technology’s forces are more immediate than social rules

Chap. 11 the railway’s alien nature . Set apart from the urban and rual. Alien: wrond side of the tracks

The terminal was built neoclassically to veil the industrial “aesthetic”

Chap 12

Hausmann created streets strictly for the FUNCTION of moving traffic not social intercourse

Air conditioning, TV…

The end of the poeticism of paris

Pragmatisim of traffic

Chap 13: circulation

Department stores developed to further promote the idea of convinience?

The price tag for the sake of efficient sales turnover rates. SPEED of transactions

Motion (book?)

Isolation versus connection binery

The grand tour destroyed by the destruction of time and space

The world became a department store.

Wanderlust Notes:

Tracing a headland

Walking: a universal act with particular meaning

The mind body and world in dialogue

The map is symbolic

We travel onto the map we live between the two spaces

Walking and nuclear testing in Nevada

Thoreau’s civil disobedience, history of pilgrimage

Walking as form of reading? Rebelling?

Sense of place gained on foot

Roads or trails cannot be received as whole until traversed; like a narrative.

Multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is eradicating FREE time

More production not more free

What can’t be quantified can’t be valued (industrial truism)

Walking-shortcuts

Travel is less important than arrival: this has a direct connection to our contemporary relationship with “process”. Is anything to be gained from process? Walking six flights of stairs to find a book and find the correct passage versus a Google search. When the process is stripped from a destination is its inherent meaning stripped as well?

Life is moving faster than the speed of thought: does this throw the idea of what qualifies as “thought” into question or is thought degenerating into “reaction”.

The incalculable is what gives life value: if life was immediately quantifiable it seems in ways that would be a form of death. Without the “in-betweens “ from one resolution to the next at least life would seem dead.

As an artist it seems one must always be open to surprises unintended consequences provide.

Finding what you don’t know you are looking for

Leisure is being crushed under the anxiety to produce. Which in turn means we have lost an understanding or ability to play.  When we do play (video games) it is in a way finite. There are specific walls within which one operates in the realm of play.

When you give yourself to places they give you yourself back

Exploring the world is the best way to explore the mind

Rousseau I can only meditate when I am walking

When I cease walking I cease to think

It is attachment that requires detachment

Nomadic (The Radicant) the moving narrative

The Christian’s fall ADAM

Redemption (civilization)

Thoughts move and even “saunter” much as the pace of a walk. A walk without destination constitutes the actions of aesthetic synthesis chiefly because aesthetic synthesis is a journey with no defined destination. If we set finite goals and destinations we only become practiced at setting goals. Once we “arrive” the next goal has been set and no moments in which to absorb.

James Joyce Virginia Woolf and the stream of consciousness much as one relates and develops thoughts during a walk

Rousseau and the ninth walk

The enlightenment idea of the personal and private

Tenth walk unfinished died at 75

Soren Kierkegaard 1837 old man in childhood

Lived off inheritance

Walking legitimized his alienation

Solitude in a crowd

Regina Olsen engaged to

Curious surrounded me everywhere

Getting lost in a crowd

A device to shape meaning

Edmund Husserl “our body in relationship to world. This is about the walk serving to recontextualizing ourselves through the act of walking.  Juxtaposing  a self to illicit new contexts and meaning.

The body moves but the world changes

The opinion that art is not political is in itself political- Orwell

Body as the site of sensation (receiving sensation versus acting upon. (Compare movies to video games)

Versus a site of action and production (industry)

Feminism (receive)

White-collar urban body consumes (sensation as distraction?)

Body as a parcel

Walking as going, like a narrative

The a proud unsteady tower

 A child struggling to walk seems to serve as an interesting metaphor. I liked the reference to the child struggling to walk as both primal and related to the idea that we walked before we thought. One required the other to be consummated.

Walking came first.

Walking lead to thinking

A pilgrimage: geography of spiritual power

A place is hard to grasp without a walk to that place. Walking the steps of a library. The walk delineates the makeup of a place. A walk to a place defines the spiritual “unperceivable” underpinnings of a place.

Map is symbol to traverse the space is to realize that space (and perhaps define what the meaning of a destination may be made of)

Art one must walk through like Richard Serra’s large sculptures

Gardens

     I saw Rebecca Solnits writing on the garden as an interesting manifestation of the western world’s impulse to control nature, remain outside of nature while more indigenous peoples live within nature as part of a whole.  The western world believes in the superiority of the human species and their art reflects that value. Indigenous people respected the characteristics of the natural world and were grateful for its reciprocation.

     It seems this is perhaps why westerners were on the forefront in the development of industrialism that seems to serve as an enormous symbol of our (innate?) arrogance.  Maybe industrialism was not part of the  “natural” continuum of the human species but a horrible glitch and bad joke on us only destined to eventually implode. Maybe we should make an effort to qualify the nature of our values. Why do we not have the ability to anticipate the unintended consequences?

     I’d like to venture a guess. We are so amazed by ourselves and in our arrogance we’ve become blind. Now we need to investigate what the unintended consequences of unguarded exponential growth in technology may bring. Yes, people are investigating these things but no one is really listening. Therefore maybe there needs to be bridges built to reveal these potential dark sides.  While some thinkers need to explore these ideas without restraint there needs to be a few (artists, writers etc.) who attempt to make these prognostications more accessible.

    The idea of the walk could not be more relevant in a time in which many concepts developed during the postmodern time are being called into question. I found Nicolas Bouriard explored this idea as it may relate to the walk in his 2004 book The Radicant. He is troubled by the propensities to appropriate multicultural motifs without bothering to translate those cultural products. How does this relate to a walk?  To walk any given expanse is in of itself a sort of narrative. The expanse is defined and unfolds through the act of walking. A map on the other hand may serve as a metaphor for postmodern expression in a relative comparison. The map serves as only a symbol of that space. It may serve, in a sense, as a colonial construction allowing humans to “control” the space it represents. A map symbolizes human’s mastery of space. A map represents the space as little more than a motif. It is also a tool with an emphasis on “arrival” (end) and a dismissal of the potential benefit of the means. For Bouriard, postmodernism was about the destination as a static place emptied of meaning. 

Mountains

The mountain serves as an exquisite symbol for western man’s impulse to control and dominate. It also served as an appropriate counter weight to the walk. Mountain can represent some of the ideas about authenticity and illusion in image.

I remember in about 2003 reading a book by historian John Lukacs called The End of an Age. In this book Lukacs uses the mountain as a metaphor for how written history can be deceptive. He writes that the horizon line of a single mountain changes according to where one is positioned in relation to the mountain. This points out the instability of “truths” as all truths are manifest in how they are expressed and from what angle.

This instability inherent in perceptions of the nature of mountains opens it to a variety of manipulations. It seems to be an appropriate symbol of western humans desire appropriate the symbols of greatness for no other reason than the claim of greatness. To scale a height that few if any have achieved becomes a symbol of greatness while providing no inherent benefit. I couldn’t help but be reminded of an advertisement made in the late 70’s or early 80’s featuring tennis star Andre Aggasse promoting a camera. At the end of the ad Agasse recites the slogan “Image is Everything”. I thought at the time it was an excellent slogan for a camera and it seemed to be especially appropriate for the time which seems to be the time the postmodern  idea was coming into its own. It also seems relative to Americans cult of trophys and awards.

     I remember growing up our family had a trophy case in our family room filled with golf, football, tennis and wrestling trophys. I also recall a golf tournament in which my brother participated. In his category the contestants were comprised of one opponent and himself. My brother lost to the opponent however there was a trophy allowed for first and second place yet it was proudly displayed in our home trophy case.






 Walter Benjamin  discussion notes 

   Photography reduced the human component necessary for artistic production to the eye allowing creative process to move at speed of perception.  What happens to aesthetic synthesis when one no longer needs to synthesize perception “brick by brick”, so to speak? Much as the layers of paint required to allow an image to emerge as it were. Is perception and creative synthesis compromised? The photograph allows for arrival without journey, at least from a formal perspective.

It seems now we work with layers of images to articulate meaning. I’m not quite sure how to, or if it is even necessary to qualify this development. Without a requirement for aesthetic synthesis, though, does the artist lose something?

The “original” becomes  accessible to wider audience but its aura is removed.

“quality of presence” is removed.

Plus historical testimony RESTS on Authenticity  which is jeopardized by reproduction

Is the authority of art actually compromised or is the instability of “truths” , reality brought to light.

This is a relevant question because one must now ask what the dynamic of these questions when applied to current technologies in terms of how we perceive “truths” and how we express our interpretations and manifestations of these perceived truths.

Multiples also compromise the idea of uniqueness.

Films cathartic destruction of traditional cultural heritage.

As humans have we innately and even unwittingly acted out an inner desire to express truths according to our “ideal” vision of a truth to thwart a genuine confrontation?

Is this revealed in sense since the idea of “reproduction” began (bronze casting and woodcuts).

Since the gladiatorial times we have always had the “desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spacially and humanly “. (is our only authentic truth the “concept “of our perceptions coming to an end in the form of death?)

Reproductions  , were they , in a sense (once the aura of uniqueness removed) only paving the way for purely theoretical “conceptual “ art?

Reproduction made art egalitarian

Also ushering in eventually ideas of intellectual property as a means of harnessing power. the companies who own patent rights on “seeds” for our food. Noting can be completely local or indigenous.

However this also put previous patriarchal power constructions in question.

(China and the internet)=egalitarianism

the cult/ ritual use of art – were aspects of the action painters “ritualistic”

The secular cult of beauty begging in the renaissance

In photography the last refuge for the cult of art lied in the portrait

Political significance of photography in providing historical evidence

Also gave the context of photography the ability to persuade and possibly harness power

Titles become obligatory

The transformation of  art through photography was not initially considered

Films relationship to the Egyptians (storyboard)

Surrealism and the unconscious versus the industrialized  subversion of nature in film. This may an interesting intersection of nature and technology.

Film seems to be the medium that Benjamin assigns the most significance to in terms of  its relevance ability to embody the components of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Of course photography was significant in the trajectory of its evolution it was at least capable of , as Walter Benjamin notes, “arresting a moment”.

It provides “shock” without the contemplative moral underpinnings as in Dadaism.

Duhamel detested film . A key and possibly pivotal quote from Duhamel, “a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries a spectacle which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other then the ridiculous one of someday becoming  a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.” Art demands concentration while the masses seek distraction.

One is absorbed by the work of art while the masses absorb the work of art.

Building and the idea of being absorbed and absorbing. Use and perception are the two means of appropriation.

But concentration is not enough. The human apparatus of perception is mastered through habit gradually over time.

Yes, as Marinetti wrote “War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it

If this is true of the aesthetics of modern warfare I ask two questions , what are the aesthetic components of hand to hand combat and what are the aesthetic components of contemporary methods of warfare?

Elemental Forces. Elemental forces transmuted through our time. AUTHENTICITY?

Wizard of  Oz.

Self Alienation allows self destruction to be the most sublime aesthetic.

Letters to a young poet disscussion notes

When a truly great and unique spirit speaks , the lesser ones must be silent.

(anti-egalitarian?) “go within”  (modernist?)

We are utterly alone especially in the things that are most important

p. 28 innocently unaware of his best virtues

Richard Dehmel his books    about lust sex fear

his art is not without blemish

little of it will continue and endure

full of adultery and confusion

suffering fleeting gloom

courage for eternity

love what seems to be insignificant

have patience with what remains unsolved

love the questions live the questions

physical lust

do not use as a distraction  (walter Benjamin)

receive the secrets more humbly

it is difficult

do not be misled by surface   (Warhol)

it is through aloneness that you will find all your paths

make a pact with aloneness

maintain the child’s incomprehension versus resistance and disdain

and when you realize  one day that there activities are superficial , that their careers are paralyzed and no longer linked with life

do not spend too much time clarifying

p.55 adapting to dull duty

fear of life in order to begin

embrace struggle  (as MFA’s)

love comes from aloneness and maturity  (no shortcuts)

society creates refuge

dull mutualality versus solitude

death –uncertainty

HIDING BEHIND FRIVOLITY

The convention of her ultra feminism

Love no longer between man and women

Two lonlinesses protecting one another (real?)

An acknowledgment of life’s tragic nature.

Sadness passes through (zen)

Accept existence to the greatest extent possible

p. 84 there are no traps or snares set for us

nothing that should frighten or torture us

there is no reason to untrust our world

p.87 do not scrutinize too closely (?)

values victory too much

it is not the great thing longing for greatness

maintain enough innocence to have faith life is right in ALL cases

let it happen to you

life AND death are wonderful

silence must be immense

by pretending proximity to art the deny and attack it.

Ben Shahn’s Shape of Content Notes. (1957)

Art blindness among Americans tends to become a diplomatic hazard.

Americans are like the soviets in that they are both technocracies.

Why we are not creative – art comes from chaos, which is antithetical to the American industrial project. It is about precise control of variables.

Art is met with hostility or indifference (but it is admired from a distance)

Artist colonies insulate artists to the point where their art becomes “ingrown”

(Social realists like Ben Shahn and George Grosz required accessible art to sustain democracies)

What if Goya got a grant and a “cozy” teaching gig? What would have become of his art? Would it have the fire in the belly?

Art comes from more than inspiration and stimulation. It comes from fire in the belly. (Modernist notion?)

Art – impudence

If university-fostering art is only altruistic (which it often seems so) it is meaningless.

Or it can be recognized as an essential part of education.

Conflict and struggle bring knowing. Hard realities.

The artist as teacher gradually turns into something else “former artist”.

Polite good taste (art that looks like art?)

P.16 mistrust of creative work (yes, upsetting the current power construction is a threat) because it requires questioning, confronting pre-conditions and values.

(Art is war)

Dilettantism - the dabblers

Fear of creativity

Discouragement of original work has become a policy.

An integration of what one knows with what one thinks. (Modern notion)

The dim view of the artist as an intellectual 9we often earn that view)

Power of snobbery of the critical end

Is artist mad genius or handyman?

The idea of genius needs to be deglamorized (maybe also not used so freely)

Genius discerns patterns within the confusion of details

Orthodoxy has destroyed a great deal of human good.

The university is not for the young person of genius (p. 23)

Inexact knowing that is implicit in art

Meaning transcends mechanics Clive Bell (p.26)

Bring no knowledge of life to a work of art

Shahn’s allegory

The emotion that surrounds disaster

Restraining factors can shape an image (Matthew Barney; drawing restraint)

Individual peculiarities interested Ben Shahn

The inner critic as artist poor but rich in spirit

Abstract art provided a cul de sac for the artist (insulation and masturbatory)

Limits of surrealism (p.45)

Painting is an intending act. HMMM (one may be an architect of an event but is it wise to be all intention?)

The values of a man are formed by his intentions

My OWN view what view does an artist have? Postmodern demolished that idea. Ben Shahn’s ideas seemed to be forming on a cusp.

I question his tendencies toward universals

What about questions, unmoored suspicions.

The average American approximates everyone but resembles no one. (Universal and individual)

Truth in art 

Strives for perfect freedom- laws and human limitations do not allow “perfect freedom”

Red beast is an idea painting

Painting may reflect the limitations of the artist.

Painting is able to contain all that one thinks and all that one is. (Bull; universalism again)

Form is formulation form is the very shape of content

Trinity

Content/ allegory

Ezra Pound a fluid moving over the minds of men

Modes of expression:

Naturalistic geometric, biomorphic expressionistic to name a few

Action painters were actors, performance artists.

Form could not exist without content (inextricably linked?)

Form is Motif?  A precursor to postmodern idea?

On nonconformity

Hemmed by peer groups, hedged by tradition struck dumb by archetypes

Modern evaluation

Picasso exploits into many aspects of past cultures

Friend’s ideas of purity are antithetical to art and art making.

Turner’s soapsuds.

Only a detached eye can see special qualities and properties

Whenever one captures life’s essential character one must be detached.

The artist must be involved in the pleasures and desperations of mankind.

Feelings are always specific never general ( I can’t help but comparing most of what he says to Warhol who was influenced by him and in many ways opposed to him).

It is the dichotomy of detachment and involvement that leads to the artist becoming a critic of society.

p. 82 ambrogio Lorenzetti 1300’s Picasso ( a  contemporary)

Goya expressed the horrors of religious and patriotic fanaticism

Formal execution as in the case of Goya can be a product of belief

Beauty is inseparable from power and content.

The deadening effect of conformity is in agreement (theoretically)

The actual KIND of non-conformity is never in agreement (also theoretical)

Even liberals need conservatives as a reminder of the past. (hmmm)

Larry Flynt and people for community values fed on each other as well as simon leis and the people of Robert mappelthorpe

Non-conformity is a pre-condition of good thinking (what about social realism today) Banksy, Fairy

Modern evaluation

In primitive painting  earnestness outreaches its competence

We turn to the critic etc. to set the standards upon which we evaluate. (hhmmm)

But should  education include a genuine ability to evaluate art without “experts”?

The scholars work MUSt possess some degree of absoluteness?!

Objective criticism is a bit of an oxymoron

Maybe if art became a more ubiquitous practice others would develop a more competant eye for evaluating

Too much freedom “frees” work of content. Restraint and even repression can be a source of content

Discipline and craft is indispensible to freedom

Keynote of the 20^th century is “ current; datedness”

Outdatedness compared to today’s longing for the past/authenticy

Then:new for its own sake

Wyndam lewis “the demons of progress in the  arts”

The end of progress and desire

Genius and inspiration are far more enticing than labor in art

Formula does not result in good art

Crisis plus WORK = art

Current public tastes have often rejected GREAT art

Time vindicates it

If a work is thoroughly incomprehensible it must automatically be good.

The public though is the reality of our culture

Do we need a few who can build bridges between the inaccessible brilliance and the feeble minded masses?

Are aesthetic values innate?

The popular eye is not untrained only wrongly trained

Truth and the search for the underlying character of man.

The education of the artist

Learn at least two languages outside your own

Be integrated –organically interacting

Hold opinions

Objective of young artist –to simply be different

How can an artist contribute to an industrial and scientific age?

What shall I paint? How shall I paint it?

How will I have security?

Style is the shape of ones meaning

Craft is the discipline that frees the spirit.

The university is communal in the biggest sense of the word

The public function of art has always been creating a community

The incidental items of reality remain without value until they are symbolized.

What about reality TV etc. What about actual experience being “reduced” to symbol?

Quotes:

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them. (Ben Shahn)

The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society. (Ben Shahn)

Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority, and its own enlightenment. (Ben Shahn)

It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout. (Ben Shahn)

Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material... so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things. (Ben Shahn)

Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals. (Ben Shahn)

Wiki:

He challenged the esoteric pretensions of art, which he believed disconnect artists’ and their work from the public.[8] As an alternative, he proposed an intimate and mutually beneficial relationship between artist and audience. (grosz said something to this effect)

Others Kathe Kolwitz , George Grosz, influenced Andy Warhol’s illustration style.

Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord:

The society of spectacle still must operate within the confines of a reality based axis. A spectacle is only defined by the reality basis within which it is framed. Yet it expands and extends itself through our metaphysical existence.

The rails upon which anything rides is to that extent held into place by a set of “real” boundaries

The spectacle inverts the real

The true is the moment of the false (here is the relative beginning of what seems to be an endless stream of paradoxes and contradictions.

Social life has turned into economic life and being has devolved into HAVING.

Escheresque topsy turvy

Desire to sleep

Spectacle the western philosophical project

19: precise technical rationality (possibly lies at the heart of illusionary project of spectacle)

degraded into the spectacular universe

if the dream becomes necessary necessity is socially dreamed

modern society detached itself

the specialization of power (professionalism) is the root of spectacle (Hollywood?)

spectacle is discourse about society fetishitic

the inadvertent ritual of industrialization

sacred contemplation mythical order classes the sacred justifies the economic order (Corresponds to the interests of the masters) golden calves

poverty of real social action

pseudo sacred

Jaques ranciere

26. A refinement of the division of labor  a parcelization of gestures (this being somewhat a payoff of the Railway system as a metaphor of the parcelization of humans (humans as parcels)

Specialization, professionalism, reliance on experts. (self help books as illusions of fixed security

A wholistic view of what is actually produced is lost thereby allowing for the lunacy of illusionary spectacle to take root.

Fundamental experience attached to the central task

Propogated isolation in production and product one serves the other

29. spectacle reunites the separate but reunites them AS separate

the abstraction of all specific labor (slot machine manufacturing)

the parcelization of labor has abstracted it, detached it and stripped it of meaning

the manufacturing of alienation: TV, car, home gym, i-pod, air conditioning

33. Facebook “his life is his product”  Branding of humans

Chapter 2

The commodity spectacle

The essence of commodity is when it is everything. When it has been boiled down to all time it becomes everything. Humans become nothing more than passive vessels.

Labor becomes more contemplative less active. (a Whole new mind and the conceptual age)

35. the commodity is full of metaphysical subtleties 

tangible world is replaced by images

images impose themselves as the tangible par excellence

objective praised behavior regulated?

40. productive forces (mass) quantitative function is still masked

commodity production when merged with large scale commerce is what opened the door to the illusionary components of the spectacle to  subsume tangible experience.

Quantitative development MORE MORe MORe … accumulation

Economic growth fress societies from natural pressure to survive

The liberator, though becomes the new slave master

Disney theme park : the untranslated appropriation of cultures

Geological layers of commodities buries, masks and traps any idea of truth or tangible authenticity

Alienated consumption AND alienated production (feed on each other and negate life)

Unrealism of real society

Exchange value as mercenary: everyone must submit or die.

The illusion is the heart

The heart of the consumption of modern commodities

The real consumer becomes the consumer of illusion (fashion, slot machine)

(Debord comments from 80’s)By its own development that no one bothered to investigate (unintended consequences)

Warhol and the society of spectacle

Death of meaning in the electric chair analogy by Warhol

Total separation of signifier from the signified

Warhol looked for images of peaks and resonance

Like historical painting which tried to find the highest points of tension (war/battle paintings)

Cultural and psychic obesity

Warhol as godfather of Koons and Hirst

48. a counterfeit life requires pseudo justification

49 money as an equivocator abstract saying the same thing in different ways

pseudo use of life

subjugate all reality to appearances

51.

victory must be defeat (paradoxes and contradictions)

52. society depends on the economy the economy depends on society

53. the consciousness of desire and the desire of consciousness

proletariat and bourgeiose conceptions DIVIDE

one divides into 2 – materialists

two fuse into one –anti materialists

54. unified /divided

demonstrated division  is unitary

demonstrated unity is divided

56.

uniqueness resides in a universal system

57. false models of revolution: MTV, rock and roll

59. banalization dissatisfaction itself became a commodity –rock and roll becoming commodified

capitalism subsumes all

60. celebrity inaccessible as a result of social labor

61. star is enemy of the individual because they become the masters way of redering their values sacred

63. behind the mask of total choice

64. bureaucratization capitalism holds … the totality of social labor and sells it back to society

no significant margin of choice (starburst fruit chews)

67. the purile itself becomes a commodity (dumb and dumber , jackass) THR BLOB

the gadget free key chain advertise real presence among the faithful . Inadvertantly endorsing the slave master (adbusters)

68. falsification commodification emptys meaning and allows anything to be subsumed

a full half hour of news (fox ad)

82 scientific history colonialism and economic history are all connected

Anthony bourdain saying laos is basically a blank slate(non-westernized so they might as well have never existed in an idea of western history)

Utopianism the science least dependant on history

The scientific justification of marx became an obstacle later

Defense of the proletariet was forced into a linear construction thereby adhering to the bourgeiose model of rational thought

Cause and consequence

National power of capital over labor (in the guise of freedom)a public force organized for social enslavement

Practical conditions of consciousness

Practical theory without practical theory the proletariet is rendered impotent . the bourgeiose allowed for a free-for-all and a reshuffling of the economic deck.

No longer the time fore ideas but for facts and acts

1936 anarchism lead a social revolution

the revolution ideology was its self destruction…

Jean Tinguely (22 May 1925 in Fribourg, Switzerland – 30 August 1991 in Bern) was a Swiss painter and sculptor. He is best known for his sculptural machines or kinetic art, in the Dada tradition; known officially as metamechanics. Tinguely's art satirized the mindless overproduction of material goods in advanced industrial society.

Tinguely grew up in Basel, but moved to France as a young adult to pursue a career in art. He belonged to the Parisian avantgarde in the mid-twentieth century and was one of the artists who signed the New Realist's manifesto (Nouveau réalisme) in 1960.

His best-known work, a self-destroying sculpture titled Homage to New York (1960), only partially self-destructed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, although his later work, Study for an End of the World No. 2 (1962), detonated successfully in front of an audience gathered in the desert outside Las Vegas.

In Arthur Penn's Mickey One (1965) the mime-like Artist (Kamatari Fujiwara) with his self-destructive machine is an obvious Tinguely tribute.

Jump ahead…

Consumable disguise (mask, veil)

152. completely equipped blocks of time

the spectacular commodity can only exists because of the poverty of the corresponding realities

image consumption  is manifest in how time is packaged into consumable “blocks” of time.

Time saving (television and the consumption of time)

157. individual life as of yet has no history… Facebook

time is the necessary alienation (it passes?) Hegal

the necessary alienation of time.

The dream of time. We negotiate out existence through the prism of time

Chapter 7: The organization of territory

165 Unified space by means of banalization

 168. tourism: the leisure of going to see what has become banal

 172. the isolation of capitalism keeps populations under control

184. end of cultural history manifests itself on two sides. Its preservation as a dead object in spectacular contemplation( romantic glorification?) or the project of its supersession in total history

unifying direct activity with language

 188.

the greatest of art begins to appear only at the dusk of like. (Said “On Late Style”)

189. negation of an artistic sphere .  the internal taken to its solipsistic nadir.

A few thoughts : facebook it seems once technology takes over “left brained” activity the chief time value will be thought-time. Or thought as commodity. What is the architecture of thought. Space being effectively eliminated and controlled creating isolation. Now our thoughts must be arranged to serve a commodity based model. (mention the cartoon about two pigs discussing that they have free food and shelter of course, before the slaughter. This was a direct commentary of Facebook. This has been the perfect way to organize our thoughts. We are now living in a conceptual age. “Original” thought is the last human dog to be subsumed by capitalist blob. Facebook organizes and props our brains up much like in T-ball. 

We are given the illusions of independent thought through venues such as facebook, personalized license plates , Harleys , and tattoos

How is facebook organizing the “real estate” of our minds.

The spectacle of original thought and authenticity (tattoos) what about a tattoo of a pepsi logo . Is that the t-shirt or keychain.

A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink

When our reality becomes reduced in total to spectacle

No single rule of conduct or guiding principle leads to the negation of culture. Culture is the representation of humans values.

Culture as a sense of the world

Question he says the end of cultural history manifests itself on two opposite sides. Its supersession in total history and its preservationas a dead objectone linked to social critique and one to the defense of class power .

Which is linked to which? What forms may REAL social critique take? Wall street protest seem to have no teeth . WHY? They are reduced to spectacle.  Wall street elite  watching the spectacle as if they are watching a reality show ( I hate brian Bosworth t-shirts) Wall street capitalizes on rebellion. Mention the marketing agency sputnik

Common language is replaced by the commodity spectacle

This loss of meaning started with the baroque

The revolutionary bourgeoisie in roman clothes (neo-classicism David?)

Once art becomes a collection of Souvenirs their purpose is neutralized and the world of art ENDS (Danto?)  Post history, post art , postmodern???

Museums as tombs. Institutionalized

Surrealism and dada. Surreal ; realizewithout suppression, dada; suppress without realizing

Pseudo novelty

Clark kerr

Justify a society without justification (yet another contradiction)

The thought of non-thought

“the honest commodity” Boorstin inL’image

But the commodity was the creator of the “honest” commodity

The state defines the rules via absolute structuralism

204 he defends his contradictions”critical theory must be communicated in its own language. It is the language of contradiction”not the style of negation but the negation of style

concrete concepts are fluid and as a result negated.

All ideological systems : the impoverishment , servitude and negation of real life

Power of fraud

Concrete things in social life dominate .

But dreamed activity of idealism is equally fulfilled in the spectacle

We become unable to recognize our own reality … the hallucinatory social fact

The spectators consciousness imprisoned in a  flattened universe

DUCHAMP

Dealienating by having a common idea of history. An agreement in language which arms us in praxis.

Nicolas Bourriaud Relational Aesthetics

Interactive user friendly consumer of space and time in the implosive simulation based world

For anything that cannot be marketed will inevitably vanish. P.9 RA

The social bond has turned into a standardized artifact

How do we generate “relationships “ in society of the spectacle

Hands on utopias

Modern emancipation replaced by countless forms of melancholy

Today’s art is veering towards participation models

Today’s fight for modernity

Modern art was to announce a future world today it is modeling a universe

Condensed to… abandon an overall reconstruction of the space inhabited by humankind

Inhabit the world in a better way versus a resignation to evolutions

No more imaginary utopias but actual ways to occupy our space in the existing real

He is a tenant of culture

Development of time lived Bourriaud questions the owner based construction

A jungle hampering any lasting encounter ; Louis Althusser

A collective elimination of meaning

Art has always been relational

Catching the world on the move

Existential zen altruism

Maurizio Catalan “dolce utopia”

Interstice

Image provides links connections

Art tightens the space of the relationship

Art produces a specific socialility

Marx interstice eludes capitalist contexts

Rhythms in contrast with the world

Mechanisatioin of social functions reduces relational space

Should art reflect life or create new was to encounter the world

Mechanized relations versus agrarian time constructions

Social infra thinness

Gabriel orozco Jens Haam  Turkish square piece

IDEA get forms required for MFA Forms credentials collect autographs exhibition area of exchange

Human activity based on commerce

Unlike other activities , its sole function is to be exposed to this function

Materialism of encounter

Random materialization

The essence of humankind is trans-individual

Marx-the human essence is the set of social relations

Hubert Damisch”end of art”

End of game end of play

A new game is  (?) annomical as soon as the social setting changes

Relational aesthetics is not a statement of origin and destination but a theory of form

Form-independent entity

Form has to be a lasting encounter  (thereby needed some “value based”component

Film- dynamic unity

Instability and diversity of the concept of form

The contemporary artwork’s form is spreading out from its material form

Dynamic agglatination

Forms look back-relational art is a dot on a line

Forms only exist in encounters

Context? And dynamic relationships with other formations

Forms are developed one from another

When aesthetic discussion evolves the status of the form evolves with it

Form is further exposed relationally

Our form is merely relational( tree in forrest)

Forms are reified by the way others see it

Linking us with those who reify us by how they see us

Our self image is madeup of the perpetual transaction with the subjectivity of the other

Artists practice is through the invention of relations between consciouness

 Theirry deDove

Work is nothing than a sum of judgements

Serge Daney- form becomes face

Face becomes+ sign of ethical taboos

IDEA: piece of me directing someone portrait , police sketch every phot of me different

Emanuel Levinas intersubjective

Or interservile

Proscription

Serge Daney form is an image /representation of desire (opposite of Joe Thurston

IDEA (I want to kill… myself)

Tennis image is seen and returned

Its need for acknowledgement

An overdose becomes its opposite

Look at me ---look at that

Looped information (abramovic star down)

Rirkrit Tirananija

Camping gear sculpture , install, performance

Fluxus audience participation-the society of the extras

Truncated channels of communication

Delacroix picture a temporarily condensed emotion

Viewer activates image in the viewing of it

Denies place of art

IDEA:  performance get audience to help take show down

Duchamp it’s the beholder that makes the picture

Dialogue

A space of objective relations between positions

Power plays and struggles

Producer preserves or transforms

IDEA : produce list of what not to say or do in show (specifics “hi Brian” ilove it! Etc.)

Rano Nash Club(Devantour collection artists)

IDEA: I want to pass everything except the actual receipt of the actual degree

Art first situated in a transcendant world (primal)

1. art +interface between human society and invisible forces

governing its movements

2. then man and world

then cubism mental realism relation with only a limited number of parts at a time

collage

art is a history of the production of relations

inventing models of socialbility

this creates new formal fields

Does Bourriaud accept current power constructions?

*People games festivals etc.

IDEA : leave my face behind every food item I pick up at grocery store

2. fake friend , people who are not my firnd

remain not a friend

maintain not being a friend

temporary –nomadic constrctuion

IDEA: my film playing on high pedestal on its back and unseeable against ceiling

Georgine sturr dining alone piece

Ben washed for random people

p. 32 Angus Fairhurst

douglas Gordon two galleries call at same time

collaboration and contrast a. moments of sociallbility

b. objects producing socialbilityextract production principles

Dominique forester-what you think you’re seeing

Mauritzio catalan

Gallery owner emanuel Peerotin

p. 34

Alix Lambert married and divorced four people quickly

Mark kostabi studio

Phillip Thomas – pieces he produces are signed by the collectors

IDEA: painting of my face as I fall in a film. Film looped below painting

2. inventory and analyise injuries

Henry Bond and Liam Gillick mimic profession of press but produce

IDEA: Sheppard gallery and mcnamara gallery (good goes in mcnamara)

How to occupy a gallery p. 37

Julia scheer

Realtime work

Ready made t-shirts

Blur art-exhibition  the female beggar

Villa Arson Nice

P. 39

Vanessa Beecroft

Block viewers joseph beuys

Coyote

IDEA: switch studies for a while and do parodies of each other (Ben?)

p. 41 Space time exchange factors

IDEA: large painting with piece torn out and glued to anothers feet

Same idea with aids ribbon negative space ripped out of canvas

IDEA: bronze of my head painted intentionally off register

p. 42 Mariylyn Warhol

social exchange of art context shrouds the process primary function

all goods have a common substance that permit their exchange

abstract labor

abstract moneyart is absolute merchandise because it is an image of the value itself

interhuman relations as a medium

the relational sphere

exhibition protocol without beliettling

IDEA: portrait of me framed by concave mirrors

(boxeding the portrait in a sense

Can Bourriaud’s proposition be gamed?

Immediacy in visual writing

Relational aesthetics taking up the legacy of the avant garde

While challenging its dogma

It is not about contrasts but about lasting bonds and co-existance

Meetings , casting auditions, buying lunch

Much like paint from a tube

IDEA: combine marji meeting with silent dancers

1.     how to translate aesthetically

2.     how used as referential to art history

3.     position within social relations (is this an acceptance of a western model?)

Use much like a vocabulary

IDEA: photos (large) lots of me lots of a friend and lots of a non friend

Scaled down models of  communicatrion situation  (but models all the same)

p. 66 Art and goods

the law of relocation after photography realistic representation more and more obsolete

speeding up exchange time –space reduction etc. railway journey

degas monet –photographic thinking

by shifting production methods and human relations we make them more visible

puts effects into perspective rather than putting up with it. (reflecting it)

Law of relocation it it requires its use with a shift

I don’t use a computer I use them in my mediations

Illustration or “symptoms” deciphering social relations brought on by production means

Alighieri Boetti-500

Weavers

p.68  address opprobrium

represent a human relationship by recreating IT in a microcosom

technology as an ideological model

IDEA: I came up with but was denied credit due to time

IE someone had thought before me

Contemplate time intellectual property

IDEA: capture crucial and uncrucial actions of hands while I’m doing it. IE me signing check me making a drawing

Make a collage using body doing various activities

Making a narrative

The computer: what it does   how it changes what we do

Photo is a worked recording of a physical impact

Digital image is not from movement of a body but from a calculation no longer represents the trace of anything

 Images function on their own

Joe Dantes

No longer a trace for active

Brecht fillou

Beuys

Franz Erhard Walter

Pierre Huyghe

p.71

the camera and the exhibition

computing --------video

Marcel Broodthaer Ozone

Mark Dion fabricio Hyhert

Disposable camera  to visitors to create

Their own catalogue

Works not as a spatial whole but as time span to be crossed

Replaces audience by camera—walter Benjamin

p. 84

Rehabilitation experimentation “altermodern”

Relational aesthetics- constructs  situation experimental realization of artistic energy in everyday setting

New types of relationships

In proposing a split in the word art… (me)

p. 95 the aesthetic paradigm

calls upon aesthetic to offset the hegemony of the scientific superego

laying concepts as unsurmountable certainties

no guaranteed theoretical foundations

only thing that matters is the work in progress the art of FORMING concepts

manufacturing concepts p. 97

ethical aesthetic paradigm

a form of scientific skepticism

conaminate every chord of discourse

art fixed energy (plural subjectivity)

ritournellized

clash between will

and material

it has the dangerof hardening into obsession

(source of previous modernist traps?)

the neurosis of capitalism model

rejects the supple partial objects

art is never removed from the symptom but never overlaps

 hardened art as a form of psychosis

art as a psychic life a interwoven

 in the same agency

image takes on role of “SHIFTER”

it deters immediate perception before hooking it up to other possibilities

p.100

the partial object

partial enunciation

Deleuze Guattari What is philosophy

Art-part of an experience

Of total thought

Art is a construction of concepts reforming lost political territory

p.101 refer to quote middle of page

Greenberg

the right of asylum to all deviant practice

beuys politics-form

Broodhear poetry-form

Corporateive subjectivity

p. 102 James Luna

George Batialle

IDEA: my head races

Human production of subjectivity

Form holds sway over things

Movements hold sway over categories

Gestures

Idea changes in productionlived as performance

p. 104 refer to last quote

No, its not time for another book about the end of art (or end of history etc.) or another post-this post-that. Its time to destroy art. Art the word, art the institution, art the commodity. I'm half and half between being provocative and speaking straight. Art, in the binary western ideal has been an albatross hung around all human's necks. Kaprow tries to expand (blur) its definition into "life". I am proposing the opposite. Destroy it. Propagate its recession . It's forth and ten and time to punt. Art defined by the western model has rendered art useless. Which makes it the perfect abstraction with which the rich can masturbate and exchange, much as common currency. When it does not serve as currency it is little more than the bastard child in need of a condescending pat on the head as it is shuffled off to the nearest asylum/tomb (i.e. museum, gallery, insulated vessel, trophies and resume items for artists). Meanwhile, the the masses who remain trapped in the cave have no access to its secret powers while the elite could care less about art's power unless they've got the corner office.

     What happens if we destroy "art"? What the hell am I going to do?  What the hell will I teach? What will happen to my CV??!! I guess once I stop being cute and cryptic I will discuss perhaps what the actual use the epistemology of art may yield. Once we destroy the term "art" its inherant epistemology may for once be free to roam among the masses. Unnoticed , incognito , anonymously for a while. Maybe it will have the opportunity to slip into the western idea of pedagogic practice and allow humans to mediate the world with the finesse maybe not made available in this winner take all mind set. We've reduced "play" to gaming. I suggest rendering "art" to nothing.

Louis Althusser materialism of encounter or random materialization

The human essence is a set of social relations(relational aesthetics mediates this )

Not an end to art

Hubert Damisch

“end of game” “end of play”

Duchamp-art is a game between all people of all periods

Guy Debord denies simulations in art

Relational aesthetics is not a theory of art but a theory of form

Forms come into existence by deviations of patterns (atomic level)

But it must be sustained

Historical context is the bonding agent of form (art)

Emile Durchheim social fact is a “thing”

An artowrok is a linking element a dot on a line

Present day art forms only exist in the encounter

With other forms( artistic or other)

Forms do not exist without the “gaze” (if a tree falls down in the forrest did it really fall?)

Forms develop (they seem dependant)

A struggle with the “other”

Exposes his “being”

Perception of self is is a sum of others subjective perpetual transactions

Inside The White Cube: notes

Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space by Brian O’Doherty The Lapis Press Santa Monica San Francisco

Copyright 1976, 1986

Intro by Thomas McEvilley

addresses egyption tombs as insulation from the outside world , so to speak . A ritualized burial to allow entombment to ironically allow the art object eternal life.

The art object’s existence hinges on its context. The Gallery space is explored in large part as the axis off which art can be defined, qualified and utilized.

1 Notes on Gallery space

The gallery as context

Devours the art object or better yet it becomes art object and possibly further blurrs line between art and life. Although Doherty calls the gallery the limbo between the artist’s studio and the collector’s living room.

Samuel F.B. Morse, Exhibition Gallery at the lourve (salon style grouping of paintings)

Larger paintings positioned at top and angled for viewing, best pictures in the middle

Authority of the frame: a westernized idea as a way of neatly parcel zing and or “owning”  the essence of something. A western concept of owning and controlling images or things (colonized)

Neatly wrapped parcel. He refers to the framed picture as a neatly wrapped parcel. This echoes an idea expressed in the book “The Railway Journey” regaring the passenger being reduced or transformed into a parcel>

Mural painted wall (rivera) (egalitarian), easel painting is separate and framed as object of capitalism. The Mural becomes more part of the public space or collective arena to exchange ideas. (wanderlust)

Painting is a portable wall portable window

Gated communities, borders fences “The Club” (for cars) Deeds, Diplomas. Refers back to Mondrian.

Early photos the subject matter composed itself (artist composes borders in a painting)

The edge is an umpire between what is in and what is out. (A formal idea of elitism)

The myth of flatness

painting is a container of illusionary fact

Now becomes the fact (abstraction) it becomes autonomous object referring to nothing but itself (probably no longer possibler because the idea of abstraction is a referral to a motif)

The technology of flatness

Gertrude stein on Picasso “the emptying out is complete”

Without the exploration of the picture plane as object art would be rendered obsolete

Degrees of progress mimic the laws of fashion (style?)

Transformation of literary myths into literal myths (transfer to modernism)

Picture plane represents without representing

A new convention without consensus

Seurat; edges became equivocal

Matisse easy to hang made no arrogant claim to outer space

Hanging art , values, taste , fashion: ( what is hung , where it is hung, what is not hung)

History of painting and history of how they were hung (how painting was contextualized)

A frames announces monetary status

William C. Seitz took off the frames for the great Monet show ((ushering in a more bleeding out into a dialogue with the wall space. (more egalitarian dialogue)

(Howard Hodgkins) uses frame as a motif or postmodern self reflexiveness)

How does this discourse work with works on paper?

Mounting easel paintings flush with wall highlights the differences between a painting on the wall and an easel painting

During the sixties it wasn’t painting but easel painting that was in trouble

Easel painting was the ultimate in capitalist art (parcels commodities , marx)

He describes John’s flags as desperate wit

Lucio Fontana cutting into picture “plane” addressing idea of “plane” (using the space as context and brushing along the idea of the art as an object in dialogue outside itself.)

In abstract expressionism the edge entered into a dialogue with the wall

The “placeness” of the gallery (what about art as place ; the pattern on the wall in the fourteen 30 gallery using a Warhol-like screen printed pattern to define the gallery space. Also refers in a sense to the space inside of the art as a place with which to hold or contain objects important to the artist: Joe Thurston) this refers to the nonnegotiable space within that the viewer cannot see.

Small works surrounded by walls

(idea: drawings covering gallery floor)

color field described as rolls Royce

cubist jalopy

William anatasia ( painted a representation of the wall on which the representational painting hung) A conceptual dialogue

2 the eye and the spectator

Painting became subject, object, and process-illusion squeezed out

Curtain of paint

Picasso’s 1911 collage painting

p.38 the impure space (relates to kaprow’s work on pure and impure)(abstraction and reality not realism)

snobbishness is a form of purity

reality does not conform to the rules of etiquette (Doherty discusses style in art as equitable to etiquette in society)

reality does not does conform to exclusive values

arts cultural references is the definition of space and time

space is articulated through art-a basic but least understood force in modernism

space has no hierarchies

mythologies are drained

postmodernism gallery join the pictures as a unit of discourse (installation art)

(p.38)

Spectator-picture-wall

More male than female ?!!  (spectator)

Perpetual adam

Viewer   observer notices

Spectator –moves

The spectator and its snobbish cousin the eye

The eye can be trained in a way that the spectator cannot

The eye- a noble organ p. 42all things impure favor the spectator

Kirt schwitters merzbau 1923-destroyed 1943

The cuts is a cartered of collage and gallery space

Utopian hybrid (desk stool) sculpture architecture

Shell/cave /room

Bacon’s studio , kate Steinitz urine and light create liquid gold

The sacramental nature of transformation (space , gallery space as an agent of transformation) contrast this with my ideas about the studio visit and about how the gallery space can take part in aesthetic discourse.

Romantic idealism

The transformation of objects is contextual. By treating the gallery as a foundation upon which an aesthetic idea may rest it can then be allowed to activate the art or as often as not deactivate the object. My concern is with Doherty and his ideas about an artist participating in the gallery as an institution as a compromise. Is the gallery space a westernized way of placing artistic discourse into neatly packaged parcels with which to sublimate into the capitalist eating machine?

The gallery becomes a transforming force (does it weaken or strengthen aesthetic discourse. I suppose the answer is that depends). By the same token can an artist activate the gallery space and call the institutional component of the space into question?)

Gallery as chamber of transformation ( or could a gallery subsume and transform art into artifact much as James Luna’s artifact piece)

A world can be colonized by the converted eye (the westernized impulse to control by deconstruction using the discriminating eye)

The collage is noisy words are disruptive words cut across media and forces itself on stage. Words in a sense are immovable signs whereas images can move through space and be meliorated in a variety of ways through contexts. Words are capable of being shifted through context as well but the edges are harder.

The bank teller passes you a hold-up note after cashing your check

Happenings mediate a careful stand-off between avant garde theatre and collage

Spectator as collage (hmmm collage maker)

Idea (sketch artist sense disorganized and redistributed by firmly transgressed logic

Tableaux

Kienholz, segal, samaras, Duchamp, oldenberg

Hansen and andreas segals plasters is a convention of removal , subtraction

Taken indoors and “artificial”

Living sculpture-declare its own history (ok harris by carlin Jeffries)

Broad definition of collage

The eye looks down on the spectator (is the spectator an egalitarian almost modernist idea when it come to art and context?) maybe refers in a way to the bicycle exhibit at the museum of craft.  The bicycle exhibit at the Museum of contemporary craft may have been addressing how gallery and museum space can assist in building a bridge between the elite insulated status of high art those seemingly disenfranchised  “philistine” populace.

 The spectator thinks the eye is out of touch with reality. The spectator maybe has been weeded out of the cultural clique . A show incorporating the applied arts on the high pedestal of the museum may resurrect the museum from its tomb-like status.  It may be a way to liberate it without compromising its “higher” aspirations. It may be a way to provide accessibility without the need for spectacle.

Pollock – real space spectator- color field , eye

In minimalism the two come together briefly

Sensation- conceptualized concept –actualized

Why do eye and spectator separate?

 Why is it necessary?

Mediation of experience brings it home

(snapshots confirms you can have a good time when your friends confirm it or believe it) facebook provides the perfect platform for the invention of experience. Friends confirm or validate ones life through these inventions.

a photo is not only proof but invents experience. The photo provides evidence but not objective “truth”

direct experience might kill us(my fight). This was something I explored in my Brazen Bull exhibit. My aim was to meliorate the idea of the experience of a body in crisis as a way to underscore the idea of direct experience. I attempted to do this by removing the fight from the “parcel” with which it is normally associated. Once removed from its normalized context and put into what Doherty referred to as the “limbo” of gallery space it was capable of approximating actual direct experience. This is an example of how the gallery space can be used as more than a graft onto art objects. The neutral space was crucial in providing exactly the “limbo” required to explore the aesthetic forms addressed with bodies in crisis. I avoided exhibiting an actual street fight so as to avoid “spectacle” because a street fight can be “contextualized” virtually anywhere whereas a traditional boxing match has a normalized context. Once alienated from this context the action is allowed to be viewed more objectively as an action.

once we examine sex its proxy climbs in.

labile senses

spectators and eyes conventions stabilize our missing sense of self.

Identity itself is a fiction

Systems 19^th century

Perception-20^th century

Eye and spectators as surrogates (of experience?)

Conceptualization eliminates the eye in favor of the mind (Duchamp)

Spectator-artist-art

Chris Burden Sacramental trinity

Experience is made possible but only at the price of alienation (again this addresses my goals in trying to isolate an experience which I have always found to own a particular aesthetic. The fight, the idea of human conflict had to be one step removed or alienated to allow objective examination. Doherty refers to Chris Burden ) Perhaps this is why the gallery space is necessary for the precise examination of societal phenomena . Postmodernism exposed this idea to new dangers by supposing to contextualize everything including the gallery itself.

Infinitely pathetic about the single figure in the gallery testing the limits ritualizing assaults on the body.

Art became the life of the mind or body

lll context as content

The Gallery is the limbo between the artist’s studio and the living room (p.76).

As an artist (and I would question whether this should apply only to an artist) I found that the studio visit was a far more significant way to address an artists practice, intentions and effect (unless of course the artist is an installation artist) this is often where a work is conceived , developed and made. During the studio visit one is immersed in the space of creation. It seems this may be the space where one delineates the space between art and life with the highest precision. Upon entering Joe Thurston’s space I was immediately on the lookout for the art. What I found interesting was that it was not immediately apparent (could this be a key in revealing the artists inadvertent intentions?) About 30 seconds into the visit it became clear where the art and studio space could be delineated. Thurston uses art shipping crates with which he transforms into art as a tomb of sorts 9 a metaphysical tomb perhaps) Inside these art shipping crates he entombs photos , letters , family heirlooms , objects from his past. They are sealed within the works themselves out of site and mind of spectators and or collectors.  These works seemed to function on several levels. This in regard to what art is and what it can do visually and psychologically.  Do these objects interfere with our memory of actual experience. The work seems to address the ideas and effects of the oral traditions and images used to record or provide markers of memory for experience. Do these objects serve as barriers which suspend actual experience? These objects are tombs very much the way the gallery space and possibly museum space serve as tombs of societal phenomena. In contemporary experience humans have come much closer to wanting to have photographs not only prove but invent experience and subject it to confirmation by their particular pier group. This confirmation reinforces the quality of experience to ourselves and allow the photo to serve as a surrogate or proxy for actual experience.(p.52)Thurston permanently buries this within the tombs which are his art (the art crates). In a sense they become a personal proof of an excorcism. He excorcises illusion to allow his metaphysical space to BE.

  before large moral and cultural issues the individual is helpless but not mute

A mind with no fixed abode

Contradiction is our daily vernacular (possibly connect this to the fourteen forty gallery).

We are hard on the art that precedes us.

In postmodernism both artists and audience are further blurred

Both are highly vulnerable to contexts when virtually everything has been contextualized.

The gallery space is exclusive codified for the elite .

The gallery is the limbo between the artist’s studio and the living room (a good limbo?) Maybe that limbo should exist. Art might need room to allow contemplation

But the gallery is also in danger of becoming esthetics turning into social elitism  when one enters the gallery space one feels negative vibrations in terms of elitism

It accommodates prejudices and enhances the elites idea of self image of the upper middle class. How can gallery spaces bridge this gap? I am interested in ways in which gallerys or perhaps other art institutions can serve to build a bridge versus furthering the gap. (this is a prime area to address insofar as my “drawn together thesis)

Duchamp and the 1200 bags of coal : not obtrusive physically but obtrusive and ()perhaps violent) psychologically allowing the esthetic to bleed out into the space. To engage a dialogue with context as content. Once psychology is accepted  as “space” all bets are off and art subsumes all. Everything becomes art and or spectacle. The implosion begins.

Gestures are a form of invention

Assumption can be forgotten

Dispatching the bull of history  but it needs that bull for it shifts perspective . The shift cannot be manifest without the historical axis off which to invent. suddenly  on a body of assumptions and ideas.

A gesture is not art but “artlike” The gesture of making use of the ceiling is artlike in its invention.

Doing Duchamp again  would put old assumptions to the test (art becomes artifact)but we read about art to further distance ourselves from the pack.

Duchamp and the aesthetic of indifference

Hostility to the audience is a key coordinate and one of the key components of modernism. The audience can’t get mad or they become accused of being philistine

The avant garde gave it the opportunity to transcend  insult (second nature to business people). The museum’s of crafts exhibit of bikes assists in bridging that gap.

The dynamic between principle and money

Style in art is the equivalent  of etiquette in society

Advanced art without contemporary relevance ignore that it has been a subtle critic of social order (fashion and its use as social critic) thereby context becomes crucial to this dialogue.

Address studio visits versus gallery visits

Mike lazarus words from sign placed out of context

Joe Thurston boxes which store valued memories from his own life

He’s a humorist and a cynic.

Nikki McClure hand cut book and calendars

Space flow

Navigating space

Space considerations (narrative of artist or art actually subsumed in a sense by the space)

Bikes building a bridge between art and industry

Change context to restructure the gap

Kate Copeland salt print security envelopes insects displacing dust shot using analogue techniques

(Diedonne)

I’ve posted recently on my class blog that art should be destroyed and I feel it necessary to make it clear that I never would intend this to be interpreted literally. However, since reading the book “Blurring the line between art and life”, and the book which shall serve as the central topic of this paper  “Inside The White Cube” by Brian O’Doherty I sense that the term “art” is due for a major overhaul contextually and as an autonomous term. Inside the White Cube explores the idea of the gallery space serving as a contexual frame,  a  portion of, or even central component of the actual content of art . Once Duchamp allowed art to service the mind over the retina art  was liberated to violently invade.

Is the artist who accepts the gallery space conforming with the social order? I believe that is not a lot different than the artist the writer who refuses to use paper to takes notes or write a finished manuscript.

I believe being uncomfortable with the gallery space as an INSTITUTION all the while using the space with this in mind is not necessarily conforming to social order.

Most people who are looking at art are not looking at art but looking at the idea of art. But is art not the arbiter of that idea of art or maybe it is the space and context in which art is placed?

“we ended up with the wrong audience”

Mondrian is against individualism.   Because it disrupts a harmonious material environment. While, he also believes there are a select few capable of discovering the universal social order (Mondrian seems to , in this sense fit the gallery as elite institution model). Therefore he urges all artists to detached (hover above) themselves from the majority of people. (Mondrian was very orderly in his painting of social disjunctions) thereby highlighting those disjunctions

Put into balanced opposition to a spirit

A perfect unity between two opposites (referring to the Mondrian, Salon de Madame B. a Dresden) based on a drawing made by modrian in 1926 made in 1970.

Sublimated nature

In this room the grossness of the human body seems inappropriate

In this room I suppose he advocated a completely integrated painting sculptural and architectural unity

Duchamp accepted the gallery as a place for artistic discourse

Madame Blavatsky made the gallery space indispensible

Jean Baudrillard simulations: notes

Louis Althusser materialism of encounter or random materialization

The human essence is a set of social relations(relational aesthetics mediates this )

Not an end to art

Hubert Damisch

“end of game” “end of play”

Duchamp-art is a game between all people of all periods

Guy Debord denies simulations in art

Relational aesthetics is not a theory of art but a theory of form

Forms come into existence by deviations of patterns (atomic level)

But it must be sustained

Historical context is the bonding agent of form (art)

Emile Durchheim social fact is a “thing”

An artowrok is a linking element a dot on a line

Present day art forms only exist in the encounter

With other forms( artistic or other)

Forms do not exist without the “gaze” (if a tree falls down in the forrest did it really fall?)

Forms develop (they seem dependant)

A struggle with the “other”

Exposes his “being”

Perception of self is is a sum of others subjective perpetual transactions

Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal

(is this a somewhat colonialist construction)

“For like all modes of communication, television, radio, and newspapers observe certain rules and conventions to get things across intelligibly, and it is these, often more than the reality being conveyed, that shape the material delivered by the media. ”

― Edward W. Said

For it is with the same Imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real

Psychosomatics: belief of real produces symptoms that cannot be treated

Religion "I forbad any simulacrum in the temples because the divinity that breathes life into nature cannot be represented."

Calvinists rejection of symbols and Plato’s rejection of art??

knowledge of the forms was, to Plato, the most important kind of knowledge, he rejected imitation of them through art as dangerous. Plato was anti-mimetic. I’m curious to know what Plato may have thought about objective abstract expressionism

 But images can be used as a way to harness power (colonialists, politicians, sophists) Behind the baroque of images hides the grey eminence of politics

What if god could be manifest in a sign? Not as unreal but as a sign (all becomes weightless?)

 - it is the reflection of a basic reality

 - it masks and perverts a basic reality

 - it masks the absence of a basic reality

-       it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

-       Plato there is never a full understanding of reality beyond our senses

-       (allegory of cave)

For ethnology to live, its object must die. James Luna Tasaday tribe colonialism

Our entire linear and accumulative culture would collapse if we could not stockpile the past in plain view.

colonialism

Thus, at the beginning of colonisation, there was a moment of stupor and amazement before the very possibility of escaping the universal law of the Gospel. There were two possible responses: either to admit that this law was not universal, or to exterminate the Indians so as to remove the evidence. In general, it was enough to convert them, or even simply to discover them, to ensure their slow extermination.

Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation - a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions.

WATERGATE reiterating moral codes…capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure

Capital doesn't give a damn about the idea of the contract which is imputed to it - it is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more

The right needs the left and the left needs the right for Capital to survive there must be opposite oppositions. Two party system feeds each other

Watergate…

 - proving theatre by anti-theatre

 - proving art by anti-art

 - proving pedagogy by anti-pedagogy

-       proving psychiatry by anti-psychiatry, etc., etc.

-       Go and organise a fake hold-up. Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger (otherwise you risk committing an offence). Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the greatest commotion possible - in brief, stay close to the "truth", so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won't succeed: the web of artificial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phoney ransom over to you) - in brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality - that's exactly how the established order is, well before institutions and justice come into play.

http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Baudrillard,Jean/simulations.html#c1

-        

(skip to notes #7)

all holdups are simulations

transmuted inscribed in advance

rituals of media (parcels?)

occupy wall street

effecting power

a referential order that can only dominate referentials

power eventually becomes a simulation of power

finally capital which was the first to feed throughout its history on the destruction of every referential, of every human good

shuttered distinctions between true and false

good and evil

to establish a law equivalence

and exchange (the blob)- (meat grinder)

hyperealization of simulation by the reals’ striking resemblance to itself

from the death of the social that socialism will emerge,

through the death of god religion emerged

none of our societies know how to manage their mourning for the real

power is no longer present except to conceal that there is none

power’s spark has disappeared

work is a social demand

not an ideology of power but a scenario of power

the end of panopticon

the real in its fundamental banality

its radical authenticity

American tV veritte the loud family 1971

300 hours of nonstop broadcastingp.49

the louds broke up during that shoot

as if we weren’t there is the equivelant of you were there”thrill of the real”

aesthetic of the hyperreal

the joy in the excess of (meaning?)more true than nature

joy in the microscopic simulationtransforms real into hyper real

porn-metaphysical  War porn

ornamental house wife

the louds agreed to a sacrificial process.

The liturgical drama of a mass society

The truth of a family or the truth of TV (what about current reality TV?) p.51

The end of the panoptic system

The distinction between active and passive are abolished. Watching people watch TV

The real is confused with the model

No more subject or focal point

Center or periphery (implosion)

No longer in the society of the spectacle

The violence of the media and the models

The meaning gap (cause effect-object-subject)

Indeterminacy-less a product of molecular randomness than a product of abolition of the relation

The initial to the terminal implode

Implosion of meaning

That’s where simulation begins

Truth/fiction  indecipherable

p. 58 orbital and nuclear

zero sum signs regulate “game strategy”

deterrence is the neutral, implosive violence annihilation of stakes

space race played the same role as the nuclear race

the vertigo of a flawless world

not the lunar landing

we were enamored by the perfection of planning

we are no longer in a state of growth we are in a state of excess

fascinated by the maximization of norms

mastery of probability

every deployment of the real is impossible

Homogenization of everybody else on earth (Vietnam war)

The end of history

Normalization of peking-washington

We pulled out but won!?

Vietnam proved that they were no longer unpredictable --- we could leave

They are ever more effective than capitalists at  liquidation of primative precapitalists

Precapitalist and antiquated structures communist and capitalist is the same in effect

Adversity of adversaries no longer exists “war is Peace” orwellp. 73

Kitsch, retro porno all the same  artauds theatre of cruelty

The last flickering of an ideal of the body

The atomic club

Self deterrence

The means to do serves as the deterrence from doing so

Energies freeze by their own powers

The order of simulacra

The Orders of Simulacra



Three orders of appearance, parallel to the mutations of the law of value, have followed one another since the Renaissance:

 - Counterfeit is the dominant scheme of the "classical" period, from the Renaissance to the industrial revolution;

 - Production is the dominant scheme of the industrial era;

 - Simulation is the reigning scheme of the current phase that is controlled by the code.

The first order of simulacrum is based on the natural law of value, that of the second order on the commercial law of value, that of the third order on the structural law of value.

Three orders of appearance 1. Counterfeit

2. production

3. simulation

the stucco angel

fashion can’t exist in a class based society

End of non-notebook notes

in a feudal based order signs refer to status

no counterfeit is possible

signs according to demand(fashion?)

modern sign simulate necessity

signs seek obligation but find only reason

the modern sign produces only neutral values : because signs have been emptied of meaning?

Signs in the age of production no longer refer to nature but to exchange commercial law of value

Stucco “fork as prostheses

Metaphysics of the counterfeit (sitcoms as proxies for a personality)

Exorcise natural substance to substitute as synthesis

A universal substance

Stucco and baroque

A substance out of the cycle

Stucco a condensed form of ambition of a universal semiotic

p.92 the automation of the robot

with the machine comes equivalence

unity of operational process (problems are not confronted, they are “processed”)

it supposes a detectable alteration between semblance and reality

it is a radically opposed to the principle of theatrical illusion

p.96

the industrial simulacrum

original- counterfeit is not the relationship-equivelance

process is the original not object (process as origin) object becomes secondary?

Absorption of all original beings into a series of identitcals

Counterfeit-copy of original  (mask theatre)

Walter bejamin art reproduction

Marx- reproduction “nonessential sectors of capital

The true ultimatum was in reproduction itself

Benjamin and McLuhan

A reversal of origin

Not just mechanically reproduced

But conceived from a point of reproducibility

Signifier of reference

No longer serial reproduction but modulation

Conceived from the point of their very reproducibility

Model “signifier of reference”

Structural law of value

The code of the model lies in its very reproducibility

Classical configuation

Prestige status and social destination zero and one

The very image of creation

Binary oppositions

Feedback question---answer

The loss of resemblance and designation

The digital program sign –tactical

The third order of simulacrum our own

DNA molecule

A codes interpretation of form or substance

A convergence of genetics and linguistics

Vehicles of physical information

Language our living system can be discredited by a unified cybernetic point of view

(Duchampian?)

Jacques Monod (nobel prize)

finality exists beforehand inscribed in the code

the order is the end

a nature of actuality distorted by fantasy

fantasy of  the code= reality of the  power

Leidnolz p.p.b.s. planned programming budgeting system

Capitalist productive society

To neo-capitalist cyberetic order

Which aims at total control ( a liquid version of reality) all is sublimated into data-digital

Scarygod man progress history dies to profit the code

Transcendence dies to profit immanence

 No more real or referential to be confronted with

The golden age of the revolution was that of capital

Capital as a social genetic code

No room for reversal-the blob

P.113 is DNA a myth

(the problem of the science of discourse… Again, Duchampian?)

constructions destined to justify a preconceived ethical political theory

objectification of the world-western colonial?

Objective simulacrum which hides the political strategies… words

Science as a model of discourse

Convention or objective reality   (unstable and based on static conventions not dynamic)

Science is organized as the basis of conventional logic

Science accounts for things previously enscribed ---imposed ignorance

Down with all hypothesis that have allowed the belief in a true world

p.115 the tactile and digital digital-question and answer (binary)

anticipates it in a predictable form

there is no longer any referential from syntactical complex language

to binary sign system of question/answer

perpetual test

this designation is advance

every message is a verdict

Benjamin mechanical reproduction test

Actor plays to the camera

Audience responds to camera (means of transmition which has mediated the actor in advance)

Film – contemplation is not possible only yes, or no  reaction

Reality broken down

Sample elements thus they have reassembled its scenarios of regulated oppositions

Total manipulation to a pre-set group of conventions (implosion-non-dynamic)

We select and the medium selects

Medium and consumer revolve into hyper real – vicious cycle with no stable truth

Binary renders inarticulate all discourse-postmodern

p.122 the end of unanswerable question

hyper real montage

Michel Tort intelligence quotient – book the artifact is a rude interference with reality

James Luna

What can be objectively known and what is the result of the intervention of a medium

(bumper sticker mentalities)

controls the process of meaning

election-social exchange reduced to an answer

suffrage

political economy

TV-instrument of perpetual polling

Polls totally absorb public voice

Short circuit all process of expression

Statistical contemplation

Blood for media

All answers become manifest in simulations (brazen Bull)

Indigeonous is anything but the simulated

Question and answers become mirrors (implosion)

The answer pre exists in the model on which the question formed

The fact is that of power simulation of opposition between two powers

Oligopoly

Double monopoly DEMS –repubs

A binary is required

Power is absolute only if it can break into its equivalent

Simultaneous opposition

Twin towers binary construction  signifying the end of competition

Destruction of meaning

Twin signifying the end of verticality

p.138

The Hyperealization of simulation

Artaud Theatre of Crualty

Spatio-dynamic simulation abject caricature

Saturation threshold

Reality -----hyper reality

Ecstacy of degeneration

Hallucinating  resemblances of the real with itself

Objectivity liberated from the object

 A vertigo of reality

1.     deconstruction of real into details

2.     endlessly reflected vision

3.     Warhol

Death mode of reproduction anterior to the sexual sex-death (beginning –end binary)

Minimal separation

Very smallest common paradigm that the fiction of sense could possibly support

All painting takes refuge in the border

The real that of which it is possible to give  an equivalent  reproduction

 The real corresponds  with science

Hyperreal

That which is always already reproduced

Hyperrealisim is the limit of art

And the limit f the real

 Implosive madness

It is reality today that is hyperreal

Aesthetic hallucination

Simulation of guilt despair violence

 And death

Euphoria of simuklation abolition of cause and effect. (nothing off which cause can be effected)

Tupolev crashed a Bourget they could see themselves die on their own cameras

Reality is immediately contaminated by its simulacrum (my fight)

Overexposed reality

A kind of non-intentional parody hovers over everything

 Production experience  the pure forms of production

 Value of finality without purpose

Art and industry become interchangeable Hirst-Koons

Warhol

The Machine itself is only a sign

Artifice is at the very heart of reality and so is dead

 Schitzophrenic vertigo

Dream notes:

p.2 faith in fantasy

p.3 follow path of Christopher hitchens

Bush created reality

Take your desires for reality

Empiricism, they can be measured

Separate desires from measurable truth

p. 4 Galileo objective reality (math) versus senses , when the creature with those sensations die the “ideas” die (really?)

p.4 science holds subjectivity in check

reality freed from imagination is no longer clouded by imagination

Enlightenment politics modeled on the real

Real nature of man

Thomas Hobbes man is brutish and cruel

Rouseau , man is noble and good

Most men use reason

Secular –reason

Rational acts guided the invisible hand of the market-Smith?

Cornerstone of democracy and capitalism

p. broke church group and undermined hierarchy of feudalism

but now we live in a society of spectacle (magic)

Terri Schiavo

p.7 duncombe says we are highly literate (but do we think?)

we find comfort in compelling narratives

no dramatic welcome

saddaam’s end was anti-climatic

but saving private lynch was a compelling narrative

p.8 Humans pull toward dramatic narratives

jesus used parables

p.8 the spectacle is a way of making sense of the world

p.8 Walter Lippman TR-LBJ

Democratic theory and democratic practice are two different things (yes)

Manufactured consent must be continuously revealed and deconstructed

(he says it was the wrong lesson to learn)

we should have learned how to manufacture dissent (why?)

p.9 key page… he cynically suggests that in essence progressive need to adopt (and thereby cynically endorse) the illusory sentimental ideology that in a sense created the capitalistic construction in the first place

Capitalist industrialists and the psychotic epitome  it created get as close to the core of the source of the problem.

If progressives do not attack this core they are doomed to become their opposites and will be seduced strictly by power (Clinton)

Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable

p. 10 (sounds like he belongs on Madison ave.)

Aristotle warned of the orgiastic and emotional (wind instruments rock and roll guitars)

Golden mean (Hobbes Rouseau Locke)

Burke Hamilton Marx

p.12 all believed reason should rule

Religious symbols were used to harness power and escape the “here and now”

(I use the twin towers as the binary construction)

What about Socratic inquiry and gahndi saying if one does the right thing and it has no effect he still must do it

This is what hardens cynicism into pure power binaries

(this renders artists as purely pragmatic and removes their inherrant powers)

he says these myths , narratives and symbols need to be explored and EXPLOITED?!

Revealing reality  and actions to make it anew

Toyota encouraged customers to customize the scion thereby putting its creation into the hands of the buyer

p. 16  transforming tools of spectacular capitalism into tool for social change. ( I question this , the capitalist model will subsume it into its opposite, look at all symbols of rebellion subsumed into the market, long hair, the dry look, tattoos no longer about rebellion, Harleys are toys for lawyers and accountants, desecrating the flag turned into a redneck capitalist fashion statement, rock n roll became a HUGE corporate mind fuck symbolizing nothing )

(this may be great fodder for why modernism failed and Bourriaud

crafted fantasies speak to something deep

the emotional needs of war: romance valor honor sacrifice militaristic sentiment

impure desires  (I wonder if this will not make change but strictly shift power horizontally)

appeal to our worst traits

he say to create ethical spectacles

Bourriaud … 1.participatory : dreams the public can mold and shape themselves , but Bourriaud suggests using this not to shape people into something progessives want but that this moving narrative cannot be shaped only translated

2. active: public helpers create

3. open ended : leaving silences

4. Transparent: have power to attract

5. Amplify: embrace reality

illusion not delusion not postmodern provocation of real not existing  (Clinton and the meaning of is)

there is an empirical real We make “sense” of real

by itself real does not matter

Real by evidence -------made tangible by a compelling narrative

Seems like an elmer gantry blueprint for how to sell snake oil

Political systems are human creations

Selling ideas: it’s a slippery slope , that what begot clinton that’s what begot bush

Williams :truth happens to an idea

Fox in the hen house slippery slope

Creates cynics

Rosa Parks was a myth

Create amyth Michael moore created myths

Clandestine insurgent rebel clown Ya Basta

Carnival against capitalism

But people have been reading through this. The other side is not converted . they are cynical about and love to get behind the curtain. Its not about creating narratives its about creating new models of discourse with which others can participate and translate.

Clinton handed the keys to the white house to Bush

p. Everything is theatrical says david solnit

art and revolution

traditional protest is bad theatre

Watergate spawned carter carter spawned reagen, 12 years of reaganism spawned Clinton, Clinton fatigue spawned bush….

Clinton fatigue kept hillary out

30’s 80’s conservatives were lost

Clinton pragmatism

Gay marriage-Dems will not embrace it …why? They can win that.

Gandhi … do the right thing no matter what

A lot of the biggest forms of progress to place the old way

p. 26 gustav lebon

irrational behavior of crowds

Edward Bernay

Walter Lippman (if you can’t beat em join em)

Chap2 learn from vegas (everyone knows its fake but come anyway)

The spectacle is a way of making an argument

Embrace the spectacle and fall on the sword of your own creation

Vegas and bush equal resentment

Industrial progressives

Venturi brown izenour

Learning from vegas (1972)

This does not account for dynamic analysis this is linear based

Analylsis

P. 32 preface to politics

He denies the duality of humans and thinks its an either or thing. It comes across as cynical manipulation

GTA –good bad, he seems to dismiss human altruism almost entirely

Acknowledging ROOT desires

Aristotle , reason beats desire into submission

The Apollo Project

2003

liberal think tank

Michael Shellinberger

(me: minds change from the ground up)

Las Vegas , fastest growing city in the uS

Vegas is an illusion not a delusion (really?)

I tell the truth even when I lie (Tony Montana)

But they still invest in humans Bassest desires

Lowest common denominators

Is this a further graying or blurring of empirical truths

p.46 Billionaires for bush (hyperbole)

Karl Rove is innocent (preaching to the converted) clever

p. 49 sporting events as spectacles

my boxing

Bertolt Brecht theatre---- Nazis

p.51 Chap 3 playing the game Thanatos (death instinct)

GTA Rockstar Games 9.9 billion sold cathatic function of tragic dream (Sontag and prurient)

Niggaz with attitude Gangsta Gangsta

p. 56 White negro hepcat  Norman mailer 1957

Rousseauean

Rebellion as nostalgia

Hillary against GTA

Nancy Reagan against drugs

p. 58 busy bodies

liberal seem clueless

far left and right no

stick it to the man mentality

identifying with what we are not

embracing difference

(is this anti-socratic?)

game theory narrativists – tell story

Ludologists

http://www.ludology.org/

Gonzalo Frasca Ludology.org    

Professionalism took the fun and access out of politics

p. 66 people with clipboards

ask for money for a cause but use money to hire people to carry out cause

circumscribes activists efforts disconnecting activists with activity

p.67

money buys professional activists

chuggers are charity muggers

What about pedagogic ideas that promote THINKING?!!!

RTS reclaim the streets

Literally demonstrates the ideals you want to actualize (ok , getting close)

Parties dancing block party type

Mini Woodstock (but its another slippery slope)

Drawn Together

p.69

protest (speaking to Choir?)

RTS NYC William Etunde

Imagine liberation--- magic circle

Valuing means in place of ends (yes)

Dramatization justice

Oscar wilde was a socialist  but it said it took too many evenings

Sierra Club is old and declining

Marshall Gary  (why)

p. 74

Advocacy groups have become top heavy leading to apathy

Games are inherrantly in efficient

Moveon.org joan blade wes boyd   (1998?)

In some respects this reminds me just a bit of what PR stunts and appearing on the talk show circuit do for books, movies , cartoons and more. No one gets paid for providing a "performance" on Conan O'Brien or any other similar venue. I guess one needs to have something tangible related (I.E. Barney's films drawings any residue etc.) to make money.

Sense of agency

Small stuff moveon user membership (amateur) to create advertising

Charlie Fisher who was an ex-republican ad was chosen showed children performing menial labor to show who debt will be paid by

Not just winning and losing but how game is played

Political scientist Matthew Crenson

Ben Ginsberg

Efficiency over participatory

p.76 depends upon the player

GTA engaging in virtual acts

Hypocrites or more complex

Old enlightenment ideals of authenticity seamless self

To deny primal instincts leads to hypocrisy

Self deception

Find safe expression for our instincts (gladiator)

p. 76-77

Chap 4 Think Different

But do we use these cynically? We need to understand the potential dangers

The 60’s and 70’s became comodified but not adopted really

Neal Postman-ads speak to the heart and dick (me)

Ads with ironic wink (capitalism subsumes everything)

Brazen Bull more chum for the bull

Get past the sizzle and get to the steak

Build from that core

John Berger advertising is never about the present

But the future p.80\Hi Karate fighting off women absurd

Burke and the natural hierarchy

P.82 false promise

Zoos museums parks free safe clean

Progessives used to pitch negative

Sacrifice versus dream

Personalization

The old way could never have worked

The new way underscores and burnishes mass markets and simply grafts bandaids onto an already fucked up system

p. 85Thatcher , there is no such thing as society

p. 86 LESC

personalize activities valued for being themselves

(what about reconfiguring corporations like that?)

Means valued  as much or more than the end

Truth through linear logic

p.88 associations –equations Sergi eisenstien (quick edits and juxtapositions)

Clio award winners

Just entertain and they will like you  (reminds me a bit of warhols axiom about liking music who’s muscians we love)

Associations logic

2004 Ted Nordhaus Michael Scheelenberger

The Death of EnvironmentalismP.90 industry weather

Drawing more threads

p.91 McDonalds ad  (parent spending time with daughter )

Bring troops home , shorter work weeks ,

Not a lie but manipulative (machievellian?)

“we believe politics can be fun”

Alice Meaker Leslie Kauffman

Sullen Sue Ideological man

Duncombe admits to wincing here too.

p. 93 Kevin Roberts CEO Saachi and Saachi

Lovemarks loyalty beyond reason

Liberals need to learn from corporations (very slippery slope)

Progressive brand

Do these ideas help to further burnish capitalist ideals?

p. 96 Clinton’s new convenant cynical

is this episteme flawed?

Everyday life shopping malls

Sheena Bizarre

The problem is not desire but where it has been channeled

p.100 progressive politics can free the fantasies trapped within advertising

recognize everyone

do we create this progressive society leveraged off our base desires?

Can’t we tap into human’s better half Altruism? If progressives win this way won’t it only re-inforce the capitalist model?

Anything can be leveraged using illusion look at the walmart ads

Woodstock only ultimately created a whole marketing scheme for youth marketers

Lippman Burke

Duncombe taught an olsen twin

The Americanization of politics

p.115 De-celebritization Bush did it

Nascar Dads

What popular dreams does celebrity culture fulfill?

Greek hero gentleman noble

Also make celebs more like us

Celebrities have what progressives “sell” pay, less work, vacations and universal healthcare

Paris Hilton is famous for being famous

Ralph Ellison invisible man invisibility is the worst thing

The desire to be visible

Is that a western motif ---identity

Recognize everyone (and no one is recognized they are placated)

p.111 Naomi Klien No Logo

movement of “movements”

1999 tons of little groups access versus the conglomerate model

top down

Hayek –against central planning for better distribution of knowledge and incentive.

Keynes for central planning

Anti-keynsian

New deal- equal access Murals

What about professionalism, elite,parcelization of skills?

Being recognized is not enough

It must be translated   as a form unto itself  (bourriaud)

Sharks in Tuxedoes mack the knife

Collective social realism

Go local

Kazen Japanese

But local spend nationally contradiction

Gossip is where values are mediated  being “in the know”

p. 115 specialization Cashiers are the number 1 type of job

Rancierre the politics of aesthetics

Knowledge/power------needs an agent of connective tissue

p. 117 fireside chats

condescending Robert Sherwood staged by

like kids books about how capital can be good insulting of course

Stuart Ewen  Faith in ordinary people

Olgivy on advertising the an 8^th grade mentality in the world , every 5^th grader has one

Making densities accessible endorses a capitalist episteme

Debbie Stoller  Bust (zine)

1993

“one handed real”   of erotica

p. 120 not sublimation but cultivation of ingredients

our value judgment with celebrity gossip insulates us AND them

p.121 we create subjectivities that are fuel for more packaged desire appeasements

Joshua Cameron Sociologist claims to fame

Tom Cruise Make Time for Tom

The desire to disengage from consequential activity

Chap 6 imagine an ethical spectacle

p. 124

fascism and commercialism appear to have cornered the use of commercialization of desire WHAT? They created it!

So then everything stays the same because of the threat of mutually assured destruction

They invented the illusion of desire

Avoids core wholeness of being human

Horror of fascism and banalityof commercialization is the same “make time for tom”

p.127

 direct democracies

conflict with republic forms

situationists-fight against society of spectacle DeBord

construct situations

collective ambiences-(Bourriaud?)

“bit playing public’ transformative acting

what a failure it was

ethical spectacle –duncombe

transformative play ethical spectatorship

p.131

In 1729 Jonathan Swift proposed eliminating hunger by eating the poor.

Jokes leave out information and the spectator finishes the social bond

Hitler thought the masses were stupid and needed complete answers served up

Carnival against capitalism (bad name?)

p.132

Carnival-Drawn Together

Spectacle is anti-democratic

Participatory spectacle puts us all behind the wizards curtain

Rudolf Hess never leave room for thought

p. 135 directed toward a political goal

helped with Mein Kampf

fashioned into a coherent BRAND (?!!)

open spectacle

Umberto Eco

Opera Aparta---open work

p.136 convention replaced with contingency

how much should the artist trust of the “spectator”

p.138

L.M Bogad Performance theroist1994 Xerocracy takes everyone’s ideas (GOOD)

OWS

p.142 meaningless disorder broadens the view (look for broader patterns in disorder)

make peace with indeterminacy

Benno Von Arendt  stage designer for Nazis

p.143 Beautiful reality mass chocolate

p. 144 Production notes

Hypnotise masses

TOM

Rouseau 1758

Theatre was vicarious

Parceling their values

Brecht and the alienation effect

Never forget IT IS A PLAY

Wrestling and Vegas

Recontexualize the familiar

p.148 Bechtel 31,012 reform

Irish Hunger MemorialBrian Tolle

A mile of simulation and real David Frankel Artforum

Left the landscape blank spectator fills the blank

Fascism Americanization ---one truth

IDEA: have audience look into camera and do something silly

Progressive –false juxtaposition-spectator- truth of spectacle

p.152

Cindy Sheehan Rosa Parks (fake)

Bredits Mother Courage

(I’m like a pendulum here)

Fenton Communications True Majority

Another truth yet people are still dying creating a deeper wedge

Was Cindy Sheehan’s mission accomplished?

We are still as blind as ever

Cindy Sheehan is now a Brand

Fold and sold

SCLC MLK

Bull Conner and fire hoses

Abstraction from original and re- abstracted meaning

Resentment from this idea is what put Bush into office

Because Dems tried to sneak in through the back door

t-ball for Rush Limbaugh

He’s not converting anyone , preaching to the converted and creating a marketable brand

Ether activism

Material change

Change the way conservatives think by humiliating them?

Not change what people think but change HOW they think

On the base level

Values are formed and sustained by HOW we think

Maya Lin Drawn Together

We want people to identify with OUR politics

US-Them

Binary

There is no we  there is no THE PEOPLE

Its one whole –animism

Indigenous is not about this separate ideology

Reality as a foundation absolute?

Because MLK became a brand upon which to market (taboo to even utter)

Oprah,Colin , Condaleeza etc, Brand identities packaged on the dream MLK was subsumed by the blob

p. 162 understand the present

60’s agent of revolution( subsumed)

163

Marx antiutopian

Foucault microphysics

Devolution has replaced revolution Baudrillard

Negation –pot calling kettle black

Empire Hardo Negri

Reverand Billy

Zapatista Army

p.166 EZLN

Gabriel Garcia Marqwuez-  Don Quixote –political theory

Church for stop shopping

p. 169 think impossible

excuse for remaining marginal Slavo Zizek

possible -----

impossible marshaled as possible

lodestone to orient a political compass

WH Auden eulogy of Yeats

p.171 poetry transposts us to another place

prefiguration politics doesn’t work

totality---there is no outside  (Nazis)

Cindy Sheehan flashlight

p.173 Eduardo Galeano

utopia

ethical spectacle

expressing dreams ethics through spectacle

spectacle –what model?

p. 176 Machievelli Prince Clinton Gandhi

Chap7 Dreampolitik

 Integrity in the spectacle

p.178 carressed or annihilated

conservative construction

Real----------------Ideal (god)

The dichotomy between real and imagined

Reason for failure

p.180 Progressives movements too this too that

DLC and Clinton

p.182

Bill Clinton was a powerless  because he was a fox in the hen-house (he illustrates the ultimate danger of this slippery slope)

Provide cover for political horror

Serious about winning!! to gain the victory; overcome an adversary: The home team won.

Essays on the blurring of art and life, Allan Kaprow:

Art as experience by john Dewey: kaprow wrote notes in margins of

Art not separate from experience

Environment is a process of interaction (relates to bouriard?)

The industrial west separated itself from authentic experience 9 relates to railway journey, debord, bouriard)

Idealized esthetic experience was done so by assigning them to classes in the west

Professionalism and parcelization contributes to that hierarchical separation

The meanings of life interested kaprow more than the meanings of art (yes, and how can be in service of that pursuit)

Experience as medium

Meyer Shapiro Columbia

He rejected the dreary formulas of formalism but did not entirely reject the “vaguely magical attributes” of forms

Non-art professions ( a way of conceiving the creative enterprise)

The formal esthetics of experiential art as mental metaphors not greenbergian universals requiring aesthetic synthesis through essentialism.

Art has communicative intentions apart from experience. Experience contextualized re-configure the communicative components of artistic expressions.

Verb-like versus noun like communication

Passive regard in conventional art may be a form of polite participation but…

Pollock essay. The paint encompassed space. Beyond the edge of the canvas

Actual participation courts anarchy

Participatory art is about recovering the continuity of esthetic in everyday existence

Pollock did not take the leap into the per formative and environmental which was the real more subtle tragedy

To avoid making art of any kind

The avoidance of art and the impossibility of avoiding non-art

Thoughtful forms of copying

Imitating imitation

Play and frivolity (creative gibberish)

Play as a remedy for gaming (competitive “play”)

Winning a place in the world.

Noun verb , process product

Quantifiable and mundane rather an expression of extraordinary qualities

More observation or calculation versus revelation

Not a style of artist genius but of artist accountant

Accounting as ritual

Meaning  emerges in process

Doing and writing is reciprocal

Ego centered control is avoided by the zen method

Avoids formalist logic

Esthetic experience in the raw

Dewy as kaprow’s elder

Preface:

Art idea : perform shorts for one audience member at a time. The audience must not reveal the short simple performance. Some will be repeats some will be different. No record.

A filmed rehearsal performed at the same time as the actual performance

Kaprow had one foot in the present and one in the past

essay on Pollock 1958:

surrealism was an attitude not a collection of examples. The examples were perhaps unconvincing clichés

form as : beginning middle end

(could this idea of no beginning middle and end be applied to a work literally having no beginning middle or end as well as no actual author or even definable authors. All over could mean everyone all over)

notes on the creation of a total art. A play between fixed components of work and the unexpected/undetermined.

Spaces between art and life ( here and thereness)

Only the changing is enduring; the only universal is instability (possibly relates to Duchamp’s statement about the instability of science and “truth”)

It is the fragility of art that makes it

Happenings in the new york scene 1961 (p.15)

The use of “ambient events as mediums much as one uses paint or clay.

Artists do not determine particulars in happenings much as the words of a play are written (happenings generate chance)

The pudding more a proof than a recipe (chance risk failure) Failure as an misunderstood word. (my own work is exploring aspects of failure)

Accepting chance in this culture is no small feat

Tradition of realism (western)

Happenings become art paradoxically  in spite of itself

The only success occurs when failure is a success

The state of america’s success america’s strength has nothing to do with success.

Artists capitulate once they succeed

Out of the discomfort of “smiles” comes stillborn art (all that happy gallery opening horseshit.)

Our taste for fads and movements

Anxiety lies close to the surface

Everyone known by no one wants to be addressed by a nickname

Groups of successful artists are insensitive to their differing values

A happening is not a commodity

Clarifying constants armed change (past) versus putting values in motion (bouriard?)

Chapter on impurity

Purity is non-empirical and uncontaminated _ impurity is a mongrel a truth of nature

Of course, they need each other to exist (black needs white to be truly black)

Purity and impurity : thinking of them in the binery either or way or in the zen ying yang way

Mondrian

Derrida’s ideas of time and space – Railway Journey

And Mondrian’s neo-platonic ideals and Calvinist doctrines

Psychological settings that must be impure for the pure to take place

The less we can feel time as a part of a work , the more time it takes to make

Referring to Myron S. Stout

Time itself is not enough

In contemplation there is little room for gesture

Styron hints at separation between us and art

Styron/Pollock

Manifesto 1966 (p. 81)

art becomes life but life refuses to be itself .

once a mundane art paid recontextualized attention it has been re-framed  and thereby re-modeled

not quite art – not quite life (the inbetween) art frames life socratically 

art becomes philosophical and in turn replaces philosophy which only has words with which to discern and map life.

Words lose its ability to convey life “philosophy” will fall on the shoulders of artists.

Art used as “proxys” for words. Art stands in for words art replaces words.

Pinpointing Happenings 1967 (p. 84)

“Whats happenin” whats happnin capt.?

1.     pocket drama , fight club, cock fight intimate closed

2.     extravaganza large audiences and public

3.     event deadpan wit (man walking back and forth for 2 hours

4.     guided tour (echoing wanderlust)

5.     idea- a happening of thought fill a glass of water for 2 days – only takes place in the mind

6.     activity combines situation and manifest through ACTION (he believes is the most compelling.

7.     Cindy Mossler murder trial Buddhist monk burning himself in Saigon

8.     Happening as a moral action (jaques Rancierre the politics of aesthetics)

(play devils advocate here; this is not new, all art is a moral action, all action is , in a sense a moral action based on prevailing or new value systems thereby rendering the happening in this context impotent)

we still use words to frame meaning

modern information deluge

throw a rock out a window and trace its place in art

the Shape of the Art environment (1968) p.90

Robert Morris’ felt pieces playing with the idea of the rectangle as frame

Anti-form means non-form?

Getting free of the rectangle

Art made in the gallery not the studio one is forced to deal with the specific place as a frame thereby making the context crucial to the art making during creative synthesis.

Mental rectangles and frames

Shape scale and content of “envelope “ changes the object much as gaining purity in art depends on the surrounding impurity

Context can contain more meaning than the art but the art can shape the meaning of the context … right?

Museum and high profile art  gallery can frame art as achievement which may transcend the original intent of the art thereby rendering the art in sense impotent

ART being non professionalized and collaborative among our community

Education of the un-artist part 1 (1971) p.97

life as spectacle . when all is rendered spectacle then we are synthesizing art as art

Real experience surpasses representations of such but it is circular

Fine art informs us of commercial art (spectacle) which in turn informs commercial art  (Escher)

Which is then fed back into a fine art representation

Ancient battlefield being the most beautiful pregnant “music” possible

Art is whatever you can get away with mcluhan

p.105 abbey hoffman throws dollar bills into a trading pit on wallstreet (todays wallstreet protest is toothless comparatively)

intermedia is all about context of the frame work

TV arcade

Increasingly participatory  (reality TV)p.108

The education of the artist part 2 1972 p. 110

Duchamp snow shovel –actual shovel had more of an aesthetic synthesis than Duchamp applied to what is considered high art. Or was contextualizing the frame an aesthetic itself?

Machine imitating machine like tailfins on cars imitating airplanes

 Meyer Shapiro the nature of abstract art  Marxist quarterly (1937)

Abstract is real experimental

The mockingbird mimics the voice of other birds

We mimic nature we do not master it.nature’s technology surpasses man. On a linear level yes but on an empirical level we are the same.

We are outside that technology?

Play is considered a dirty word

Idleness immaturity play-immitation

Play is to survive but it is not done intentionally

Man is god’s plaything

Is the atomic submarine an imitation of jonah?

childs play is a survival ritual…. Sport

work internalized as truth on high

work is distribution of what is produced

service work implying a dead end implying death.

Intent to eliminate and falsify work

We don’t want to work but feel we should so we brood and fight

Pursuit of happiness we spend far more time pursuing happiness than being happy

Because we pursue having not being

We struggle not to struggle

Work hard-get ahead- to be ahead which means we play a competition… sports

Playing in itself is a win

Gaming is about the anxiety to win

The food network has made a channel of that distortion

Not enough has been made in arts celebrated uselessness

Art has failed as a social instrument-drawn together

Art is too separate and that is partly rooted in its qualitative hierarchical gamesmanship

Only when artists cease to be artists can it be turned into the currency of play

Re-learn to play by non-artists art  will recede into irrelevance

Because of its ubiquity into life/play

Art work- part of the exhausted idea of the work ethic

Doctor MD (1973) p. 127

Duchamp-art in service of the mind Calvin Tompkins

He questioned purely verbal intelligence

Wit is keen thought

Large glass as a superimposition

The freeways of l.a. are art.

Video Art: old wine new bottle (1974) p. 148

he’s not too impressed with what he’s seen with video art. Exploring old themes with fancy equipment. It becomes ritualistic

three forms 1. Taped art performance (acconci, Joan Jonas, wolfgang stoerehle) 2. Environmental closed circuit ( douglas davis, juan downey, frank Gillette, bruce nauman, pulsa group 3. Documentary , political video

Formalism (1974) p. 145

formalism is about establishing controllable norms (tangible ?) and wholeness, sum of parts , spiritual platonic. Echoing what is desirable in society

pure-formal impure-anti formal

the esthetic state needs only itself , its virginal

but it can be a dreary set of controllable norms without the vibrations of instability

Hans Hoffman

Anti-formalist is about the release of energies rather than control

Part of the morbid conviction that the universe has no design

Deals with the obscure

Not clarity

Helgean closure: thesis , antithesis , synthesis

after an extended viewing of a Pollock things become resolved, calm and clear. After extended viewing of a Mondrian things become unstable.

Cage music and noise become one. Cage does not have the anti-formalists virulence

Cage may be more of an informalist

A lot of contemporary art becomes more about motives than means. i.e. switching an ironing board with a Rembrandt (my fight)

Formalism encompasses an ideal versus context

Are bionics a metaphor for biology? Are there distinctions between natural states and artificial?

The artist in virginal isolation from society

Nontheatrical performance (1976) p.163

Wolf Vostell Berlin fever

Seven kinds of sympathy by Kaprow

Force participants to pay attention to secondary actions as primary. There was a connection derived from common (while absurd) experience.

George Brecht’s “Events”

Two elimination events 1. Empty vessel 2. Empty vessel

Object other

Tehching Hsieh

Art / Life: One Year Performance 1983-1984 (Rope Piece)

In this performance, Hsieh and Linda Montano spent one year between 4 July 1983 and 4 July 1984 tied to each other with an 8-foot-long (2.4 m) rope. They had to stay in a same room while not allowed to touch each other until the end of the one year period.[7] Both of them shaved their hair in the beginning of the year, and the performance was notarized initially by Paul Grassfield and later by Pauline Oliveros.

[edit]

One Year Performance 1985–1986 (No Art Piece)

For one year, Hsieh did no art, spoke no art, saw no art, read no art, and did not enter any museum or gallery.

Participation performance (1977) p. 181

presupposes certain assumptions about language signs and cues.

Ritualizing life-like elements and getting rid of “staging”

The Real Experiment (1983) p.201

two kinds of western avant garde art…

artlike art (specialist) institutional 9gallerys , museums etc. reframes life work into conventional art

 and lifelike art (generalist) secularizing of entire art experience. Where art began and life took over are of no consequence. When you look closely at your suffering it can be pretty funny. Tragedy and comedy blurred. Over specialization, precision, professionalism, industrialism

 maybe it is expanding the IDEA of what a frame is?

Right living (1987) p.223

Ramifying or expanding a mode ; separates the generative idea from the fad

From cubism Mondrian flattened further to his non-spaces

Or cubisim expanded to the readymade as Duchamp

Regenerative traits

(the re-introduction of pregnant moments into this “happening construction, me)

Cage put these into the Frame of art

Kapprow gets rid of the framing constructions  or even playing with the framing devices

Using the frame as a way of “achieving” art.

To John Cage the world is perfect and we must derive meaning and content fropm that. We must configure our mind to see how that world functions perfectly

Versus the tortured artist who sees nothing right and must resist.

No need for an artist to create a substitute for the world

Art can be by passed

The meaning of life    1990

art itself has played a major roll in its own unloading

art may have been unnecessary for today’s experiment (Danto, After the End of Art?)

art as a thing apart

example of Mike believing that productive work is a supreme virtue in life

Mike only believed in virtues that are socially approved

(harry’s “leaving life to find its meaning is relative to my metaphysical retreat from socially accepted virtues of the corporate life)

is Harry’s leaving life to search for meaning a an excuse to abandon responsibility

the reader can close the loopholes

art-like artists do not look for the meaning of life, they look for the meaning of art

jokes told by using coded numbers in prison because they told so many . the guy says 16 and no one laughs because he didn’t tell it right

ordinary behavior changes when we PAY attention or separate it as in re-contexualizing it as art

it turns into PLAY (playing with the ordinary )

an abstraction cannot be experienced ( HMMMM) Rothko!

Words are tokens of experience    (Jackass)

Part of life (and art) should be playing with life (!)

(Socratic?)

life as an idea

Maestro Macuinas (1996) p.243

He did not get along with him Fluxas was (too conventional)

Happening conflicted with Fluxus

Just Doing (1997) p. 247

Stepping on shadows as power constructions?

Tail wagging dog life dynamics to embody a life aesthetic

Light on and off switch (too simplistic?)

I question why must these be strictly “commonplace” experience. What about seaking “pregnant moments” as in the famous battle paintings. We as humans seak and dream of lifes pregnant moments.

Common- (art forgetting art)Gaming and playing dichotomy )

Experimental art is an agreement with American philistinianism

Art which can’t be Art (1986) p. 219

Expanding the mediums of art arts dissolution is its lifes source

Modernism secularized its tendancies (irony?)

As far back as helenistic art (the lean of a figure in the statue)the artist concerned with life-like art oscillatesbetween ordinary and resonance into a larger context but if only “framed” it becomes conventional (?) must include paradox

Regarding the pain of others: Susan Sontag

Virginia woolf: some satisfaction in fighting

Lens of warWhy War Einstein freud

To the militant identity is everything

Captions on photos change

Me( famous photo of Sudanese child and buzzard

Franco claimed basques destroyed their own place

Guernica april 26^th 1937

Bosnia breadline massacre

Notions of valor emptied of meaning

Simone Weil the iLiad or the poem of force

She died in an English sanatorium1943

Tyler hicks nov 13^th 2001 taliban soldier

1938 woolf  three guineas

1921

war against war

Ernst friedrich

Kriege dem kriege

War against war

Larry flynt and Vietnam death as real porn

Ideas: death mask

 Made into cartoons

Instruct other to paint other

Slap stick deaths

Fill your eyes with this horror

1899 gustav  moyhier

Crimean war 1854-56

Breech loading machine gun

Spanish civil war 1936-39

First war covered in modern sense

9/11 “it felt like a movie”

Robert Capa

Pyrotechnic insanitarium

Beauty will be a convulsion or it will not be

Andre Breton

Orlan and krieg

Objectivity and a point of view is the dichotomy of photo making

Somme 1916 sixty thousand die in a day

Photos taken without the taint of artistry. With art in war it becomes problematic.

IDEA: see morgue

The less polished ther more authentic

A democracy of photographs

Amatuers and pros (egalitarian in a way) actually the amateur photo gains more cred (drawn together)

Here is NY

Some try to read what a photo should be saying

Lee Kuleshov 1920’s theorist of film

David Semour (Chim)

Image alters memory needs studied seeingp.30

IDEA: art assembly line

Condor Legion German Air  (Guernica) 1880 newspaper photos

American Life 1936 Nat Geo p. 32

Life July 12^th 1937 Capa Republican soldier killed (shown next to vitalis ad) Kind of like capitalisms ability to liquefy

Originally showed in French VU

1940  photojournalism

p. 34Magnum was started by Capa Chim and Bresson

Memory of wars is local

Chaco War Bolivia  1932-35

Photg will Ruge

Spanish Civil War as dress rehearsal for WW2

Werner Bishof-fammine india

War is the largest crime

p. 37 Larry Borrows Vietnam 1962   first full color war

p. 38anti-war photos can be used to show courage pathos unavoidable struggle, heroism

photographers intentions do not determine meaning (same with artists, what they intend is often the least interesting aspect)

p.40 Chap 3

Acknowledge or protest

IDEA: surgical atlas of mishaps and slap stick accidents

Also: real bragging veiled braggingBodies in pain –Christian ideathe pleasure of flinchinh

Titians Flaying of Marsayas

Faces of Death

1633 Jaques Calto  miseries and misfortunes of war

Freud and Lorraine

1643ish Hans Ulrich Fr

Goya Disaters of war 1810-1808 P. 44-45

Everyone is a literalist in photography P. 47

IDEA:  soundtrack of the three stooges

p. 48 Roger Fenton Crimean War

1855 British Dignified all male group shots

Edmund Goose Father and Son

Russian British war

Plymouth Bretheren

Tennyson Valley of Death

The Charge of the Light Brigade was a charge of British cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 in the Crimean War. The charge was the result of a miscommunication in such a way that the brigade attempted a much more difficult objective than intended by the overall commander Lord Raglan. Blame for the miscommunication has remained controversial, as the original order itself was vague. The charge produced no decisive gains and resulted in very high casualties, and is best remembered as the subject of the poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose lines emphasize the valour of the cavalry in carrying out their orders, even "tho' the soldier knew / Some one had blunder'd".

Felice Beato  Italian british

Sopoy  Indian rebellion  opium war

Civil War Matthew Brady

The camera is the eye of history

p. 56-57

Alex Gardner and Tim O’Sullivan

Made photos for Brady

Nov. 1857 Sikenouragh Palace

Bean Staged pics of Gettysburgh WWII (staged pics remind of jeff wall and Stephen glass of the new republic

Pregnant moments of war

Painters during 19^th century

Gardner posed the sharpshooter

Robert Duisneau 1950 Paris Hotel Deville (staged kiss)

Feb. 23 1945 Joe Rosenthal iwo jima flag

YEVGENY KHALDEY. Raising of the Hammer and Sickle over the Reichstag, May 2, I945.

May 2 1945 Yeu Geuy Khalder

Reichstag

1940 London Holland House p.57

Vietnam authentic Huynh Cong Ut

Reality /simulation Baudrillard

Eddie Adams feb. 1968 brig Gen Nguyen Ngou loan

p. 60 1975-79

HS in Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh

Starring into camera before execution

Walter Benjamin – Acting before camera

Art is the face starring back Bourriaud

Photo Nhem Ein

War destroys what identifies people as human (my tsunami portraits)

NYT’s comments on Brady’s Antietam oct. 1862

p.62

dripping bodies waiting for gapiing trenches

1898 battle of san juan hill  Stagedp. 63 vitagraph

Boer war enemy showed dead british spion kop jan 1900 p. 69

Pyrotechnic insanitarium

p. 65 Falklands  1982 Thatcher limited access to war by photogs

p. gulf war 1991 Feb. 27

people leaving Basra slaughter was called a turkey shoot

there is no war without photography

p. 66 Ernst Junger 1930

shooting a subject shooting a human  (dualism)

Freeze a moment (modern personified)

IDEA: before and after pics (before and after various things I’ve done

US Central command afganistan 2001 -02

Daniel Pearl Karachi 2002 Boston weekly paper posted vid

p. 70 George Strock Life sept. 1943 New Guinea Dead marines on beach (no faces

Rwandan tutsis 1994

RUF Sierre Leone Hackings

Balkans –not part of Europe Europeans in denial about genocide in Europe

Asia and Africa its ok to show mass deaths

p. 72 exhibit exotic humans postcolonial

Luna again

The tempest trincolors “we can put an exhibit in England”

Chap 5 p. 74

 Peace is a norm

Da Vinci’s instruction for painting a battle

Pity is the natural twin of fear

Violence a challenging beauty

9/11 was called surreal

gilles peress susan meiselas joel meyerowitz

if its aesthetic (sudan dying baby and vulture) staging photos

saving private ryan based in part on Capa D-Day pics

Sebastian Salgado the inaethenticty of the beautiful

Migrant woker photos. Gold mines

When pain is global  ones compassion flounders

Exploitation of sentiment(pity cpmassion indignation)

Making spectacular NOT spectacular

Spectacle DeBord

Religious narratives regarding the Aura of spectacular photos. (staged)

Pieta W. Eugene Smith  minumata

p. 80 descent from the cross Don McCullin

Tampa Fla. Bombing afganistan from office. The dehumanizing components of industrial capitalism

Vietnam dying American

p.81

photographs objectify something then can be possessed

photos beautify

or uglify – shock –didactic- a needle is thread here in the prurient quality of death (gladiators)

Hannah Arendt

Death camps Omarska  bosinia war

Herere in Namibia

German colonial 1904

Climes rape in nankingp. 85 Russia on germany

Totems of causes

Photos a fiction

No- collective memory or collective guilt

But there is collective instruction

Ideologies create archives of images Y Vashen

Holocaust museum

IDEA : A memory of my failures

Museum of the history of slavery (not in the states)

It would be acknowledgement that evil WAS here

The problem is not remembering through photos but we remember ONLY through photos p.89

W.G. Sebald elegistic

Photos can haunt but not explain

p.90 John Kifner on serb kicking dying muslim

ron haberle my lai 1968

1890-1920lynching

without sanctuary clinical “examine”

what do barbarians look like? Anyone US

p.92 Make Time For Tom

RAF bombingf13 1945

100,000 people

p.95 1899-1902 US V phillipines Chap 6 mutilated bodies arouse pruient (porn)

p.96plato a source of inner torment

the self is angry with part of its nature

plato-reason anger indignation

Freud appetite desire

Leonitis agaion

Two dead criminals feast yourself on this lovely sight

Appetite for pain

Tropisic toward gruesome

Burke

p. 97 1757 ideas of  sublime and beautiful

George Batialle 1961 the tears of Eros

In extreme pain we form(?)

Trsansfiguration-religious component

Death of 1000 cuts

I am not feeling this TV, Comics, film, games (pyrotechnic insanitarium)

 p.101Mahem is entertaining in most modern cultures

Boxing transfiguration-religious

Innocence –impotence

Images of death abroad  Warhols image of mushroom cloud

Chap 7 first idea quarrel with her own idea thirty years ago

p. 104

CNN effect media attention-public attention

Second idea is converse

Overload weakens image

1800 Wordsworth lyrical ballads  (authenticity in common language)

uniformity of occupations producers a craving for extraordinary incident

(cheaters, Harleys, tats, jersey shore)

overstatement

savage topor

1860’s

p.102 Baudelaire  horrors are appetizers

p. 108 to ration horror to keep it fresh

sense of reality has eroded

chewed up reality and spat out as images

p.109 society of spectator

DeBord Hoax

Baudrillard

p.110

Andre Glucksman

War worn or lost in media

Bourgeoisie spectator The Others tragedy

Violence as spectacle

Cynical about the possibility of sincerity

Keep themselves from being moved (stoic)

(lazy?)

superiority

war photogrsphy as a profession

p.112 1994 – Paul Lowe English

Somolia Sarievo

Comparison

Chap8 p.115  too much value assigned to seeing not enough to thinking

To make peace is to forget

p.117indignation compassion cannot dictate action

mediation of image

Greeks thought sight was the noblest of senses

Chap9

p.119 1943 Warsaw Death camps

seeing pain as an art (art gallery)

white cube

IDEAS Atrocities hanging behind sofa

Benetton---- Capa’s pic near vitalis ad in life mag

p.121 Imperial War museum

Somme –with shell sounds (NO SMELLS)

Disneyland – appropriation of image without translations

Women are more apt. to ask about ther seduction of war

p.122

Dreiser

Jeff Wall 1992 Dead Troops talk recreating ambushIwo Jima Goya

IDEA: last judgement film

Gance Jaccuse p.124

Can’t understand p. 126

Can’t imagine