New Calvino

How exciting! I just found out about a new Italo Calvino book, collecting autobiographical writings and interviews. It will be published in March by Pantheon (here is a link to the book at Powell's.) The first review of it, by Jeannette Winterson, was published in today's Times of London. I'm especially interested in the titular essay and the letter-diary from New York. Time to preorder! (Link originally found via The Literary Saloon.)

The semester is over!

Hooray! I just finished my paper for the seminar I attended this semester. I still need to edit it, but here's the introduction and the conclusion:"Museum exhibitions of contemporary art have recently expanded their foothold in the cultural landscape. From quilts created in the deepest corners of the American South to high-tech video karaoke pods designed in South Korea to giant chalkboards partially erased by an artist’s hand to a late-career retrospective of an important German painter, exhibitions and museum spaces are proliferating. There is much to the encounter between an individual and work of art in a gallery setting. An average museum visitor imagines their experiences as minimally mediated, believing in the primacy of the artist’s hand and the purity of an object’s representation in a museum, yet there is an expansive field of hidden actions that occur across time and space to bring visitor and object together. It is important to establish the agents who are active in this field and then to fill in the space between them, creating a network of connections through which one passes toward the understanding of an exhibition.A traditional conception of the encounter -- partially influenced by the ‘empty’ nature of the ‘white cube’ gallery setting -- involves two participants: the artist who created the object and the viewer who observes it. Let me immediately complicate this assumption by adding an intermediary participant: the exhibition curator. The line that connected the artist to the observer is now a triangular plane, and the events that precipitate the encounter – both outside and inside the museum – can be caught in its surface. Using a richly detailed conception of the public derived from Michael Warner’s titular essay in Publics and Counterpublics and examples from recent exhibitions at museums on the east coast of the United States, the highly active nature of this plane becomes evident."(insert about five thousand words)"It is natural for one to draw a highly subjective path through the terrain of contemporary art exhibitions and the actors in the discursive field that creates them. While that is undoubtedly important in creating a second layer of discourse that can be said to surround museum culture as a whole, it remains important to acknowledge the presence of mediating factors before, during, and after an encounter with a work of art. This recognition yields important opportunities for reflection and engagement on multiple levels with a specific exhibition. Taking this knowledge in hand, our participation as members of the museum public can become more directly engaged with the future direction of museum exhibitions as a whole. Not only does the museum shape the audience, but the audience has the power to shape the museum. To quote art historian and independent curator Hans Belting: 'Mobilizing a critical public within the rooms of the museum is a long overdue activity... have we thought enough about the museum as a medium? It is the medium of our usage.'" Phew.. I'm glad I took the course, glad to be done, and glad that I can now move on to other projects. I hope everyone is having a nice weekend.

A quote

"The mistake of philosophy is to presuppose within us a benevolence of thought, a natural love of truth. Thus philosophy arrives at only abstract truths that compromise no one and do not disturb. [.] They remain gratuitous because they are born of the intelligence that accords them a possibility and not of a violence or of an encounter that would guarantee their authenticity." - Gilles Deleuze, in Proust & SignsRan across this one in a review of the above book here.

Miscellaneous roundup

Images of earth from space via the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) cameras aboard the Terra satellite. Unlike weather satellites, this is a camera taking true-color images of the Earth's surface, often focusing on unique events (dust bowls, erupting volcanoes, etc.) Totally fascinating. I came across this via the Earth Observatory website mentioned in this week's issue of The New Yorker.- - -I've recently come to appreciate Mies van der Rohe's Lange House (1927-1930), which had previously escaped my focused attention. Some images: photo by Hans Engels, two views from the lawn</a>, a short essay by Kent Kleinman and Leslie Van Duzer of Columbia University, an image from 1985, and one last one. A beauty, no? Especially in the first image, which I've seen printed at a larger scale and in which the contrast between the dark brick and the white interiors is most pronounced.- - -There is a Spanish-language bank advertisement on a bus shelter around the corner from my house whose text says something to the effect of "Steering my life in new and better directions." The conscious act of translation works to separate the message from the company placing the advertisement, and, lifted out of its context, it serves as a little pick-me-up on my way to the train every morning. It gives me a (slightly Nietzschian) confidence in my own willpower to change things in my life, to make it better. I'm glad the advertisement is not in English.- - -Even though my posts on contemporary art seem to fall flat in terms of response, I'm drafting a top ten exhibitions/works list for the year. The items are selected, but I want to write a little bit about why I felt each selection was important. Coming soon.- - -Holiday reading list: The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau, The Critique of Everyday Life, Part 1 by Henri Lefebvre, and selections from The Everyday Life Reader edited by Ben Highmore. I also plan to re-read Miwon Kwon's One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity and finish Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism. Pretty hefty for one week, but I think I can manage. One question: Has anyone read Prague by Arthur Phillips? It popped up on a number of best-of lists for the year, and I'm curious for a slightly more in-depth opinion.- - -I'm in the middle of paper-writing purgatory (who isn't?) at the moment. Longer posts on specific topics returning soon. In the meantime, if anyone has any final comments to add to the thread on Susan Sontag's essay in last week's New Yorker, they're still appreciated.

Safety valves

We want every day and every action to be a manifestation of love, joy, confusion and revolt. - Refused, Final CommuniqueAs is often the case when I'm feeling a bit down, I have stayed in the past few nights, cleaning my room and listening to old hardcore records. Refused, Anomie, Born Against, Portraits of Past, Clikatat Ikatowi, His Hero is Gone, Frail, Palatka, Yaphet Kotto - all the music that still gets me going. I air drum, shout along with the lyrics, and reconnect with the energy that seems to have been sucked out of me. I write long e-mails and longer letters, dream up new projects, scribble notes on torn pieces of paper, reorganize and reprioritize. It happens every few months, when my relatively stable range of emotions drifts below the horizon line. An internal safety valve. When I think of close friends and lovers, it seems that they all have these mechanisms. I'm very curious to hear what yours might be. For now, I'm off to watch the lights go out on the Empire State Building, a midnight ritual. I'm sure it's done by computer, but I like to imagine that there's one man or woman somewhere up near the 86th floor, looking at a wristwatch and waiting for the exact moment to flip the switch.For those of you looking at this on your friends list: I also hope that, despite the voluminous contributions already made by myself and 3rdworldcinema, you will visit my last post regarding Susan Sontag's essay in this week's issue of The New Yorker and add to the discussion. Thanks!

Susan Sontag and photography's view of devastation and death

Susan Sontag's broad survey of photography, war and disaster, and, by association, an equally broad 'us' as viewers appears in the current issue of The New Yorker magazine. It is not transcribed online, so, before I go further, I highly recommend that you obtain a copy in print. It is a bit of a monster, probably around 25,000 words, all worth close attention.The essay, divided into six sections, traces the history of this three-way relationship, connects it to wider representations of suffering and pain in the arts, riffs on the role of photography (and "image-flow" media such as television) in contemporary society, touches on the role of photography and written narrative in our memories, contrasts the still image to the moving, throws in a quick shot at Debord and Derrida for claiming the "death of reality," and sums it all up with an explication of a 1992 Jeff Wall photograph titled Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986) -- like I said, a monster. I'll try not to summarize, as I can't do her rhetorical power justice.Before I get started, please let it be known that I openly invite criticism of all types. I am still working out my reactions to this essay and hope to learn from others' interpretations and reactions to both Sontag and my writing below. Here goes:Her first move is to foreground the fact that photographs - the one element in this triangular relationship seemingly without human involvement - are indeed constructed. "Photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric." And later, "It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude." With this setup in place, she is free to investigate the dynamic between three (more or less) equally subjective actors: the makers of war and suffering, the photographers of war and suffering, and the viewers of war and suffering.And what a complex dynamic it is. Semantic tip-toeing through the daisies is important when handling an issue as complex and sensitive as this, and my first question arises from her use of the world militant toward the end of the first section: " To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank ground in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance. To the militant, identity is everything." How do we define militant? The connotations of the term in contemporary Western parlance imply a certain fierce radicalism -- think of the Michigan Militia or those who killed the children described in her examples -- yet her switch from the specific examples to a very general term implies to me that all Israelis or Palestinians are considered as such. And what of Americans viewing these images, not explicit actors in those battles yet nonetheless closely involved? Are we militant as well? How do we separate the "innocent" from the "implicated"? I don't know exactly how to define the term, and at this point simply wish that she would do so a little more thoroughly.Sontag concludes the third section by stating: "Technically, the possibilities for doctoring or electronically manipulating pictures are greater than ever -- almost unlimited. But the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging them for the camera, seems on its way to becoming a lost art." Yet it seems to me (and, I think, to Sontag) that our taste for the dramatic is as strong as ever. She describes the photographs of the Vietnam War as being the first that we can assume were not set-ups (and therefore possessing moral authority), explaining this by the presence multiple witnesses in the form TV news cameras. I would argue, however, that it is the immediacy of these images that grants them their moral authority, reinvesting the camera with its supposed objectivity. The atrocity you see before you is happening right now, or, in the case of the Vietnam War, happened only hours ago. Is this what makes it dramatic, or "real"?The beginning of the fourth section segues briefly into the realm of the aesthetic, an area of particular interest to me. The notion of a "terrible beauty" is raised often by artists, but Sontag believes it doesn't function well when describing photographs. Photographs that depict terrible situations with formal grace -- and here the work of Sebastiao Salgado gets a light dressing-down -- are conceived as "aesthetic" and therefore weaker. Yet there is something to be said about the power of beauty to stir individuals to movement. One of the two theses in Elaine Scarry's recent book On Beauty and Being Just is that beauty, through its ability to move us toward identifying with (and maintaining and replicating) that which is beautiful, prompts us toward a greater sense of social justice. I agree with Sontag's view of the not-fully-thought-out politics of Salgado's photographs, but also feel that one cannot dismiss the power of aesthetic beauty so outright. There is value in the aesthetic value of pictures, as long as that value is taken in hand with all of the other data -- explicit and implicit -- the photograph imparts.Very worrisome for me are these statements: "The problem is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs. ... To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture. ... Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they don't help us much to understand." One of Sontag's greatest strengths lies in her ability to summarize the present, and I think it is important to place her observation more directly in line with the attacks of September 11. It is without a doubt that the televised and photographed imagery of the attacks on the World Trade Center (and Washington and Pennsylvania, lest we forget) was both abundant and the only way the disaster was experienced by a majority of the population. It is through this unending stream of imagery that we relate to the events, and how many people would eventually describe it as a "spectacle," an interpretation that Sontag cuts through quite sharply toward the end of the essay. She states: "To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment."(Here's where I really ramble a bit off topic, and I hope that someone can critique what I'm discussing.)What I'm interested in is a phenomenon experienced on the ground that morning: a sort of reverse-projection of the term "spectacle" that allowed people to, as they stood in New York watching the events unfold before their eyes, claim the unreality of the situation. That it was like a movie. That this couldn't possibly be happening. It was a distancing technique afforded these viewers by the relative peacefulness of their daily lives, one that allowed them to diminish the emotional response to the attack. In my opinion, one of the distinguishing characteristics of an advanced capitalist society like that of the United States is an inability to deal with emotions and emotional residue, especially in public. The immediate emotional distancing from what was happening preceded a later, much more codified version. As the site of trauma became a pilgrimage location, an immediate parallel response came in the form of the memorabilia of memory, trinkets and t-shirts and postcards and other commodities. The purchase of these items allowed people visiting New York (and many New Yorkers as well) an ability to feel closer to the events that unfolded, to substitute their public emotional reaction (and the potential for interaction that creates) with the purchase of goods. The mechanics of our capitalist system overtook a glaring need on the part of individuals to cope emotionally and psychologically with the trauma at hand. Admittedly, it's not that simple, and many of the commodities were offered by low-income New Yorkers attempting to revive displaced business by morphing their content of their push-carts and street tables to reflect the changing nature of the tourist money that supports them. However, it seems important to recognize this immediate substitution of the emotional with the economic, especially as we move forward in the process of determining what will fill (or not fill) the World Trade Center site. How can we begin to determine the form of a public site of mourning if we do not know how to mourn in public? The further removed from the attacks we become -- and the difficulties of any design process will take time to work through -- the more reliant we become upon the imagery of the attacks, which Sontag and others have long characterized as mediated. Do we wish to move ahead in the healing process through a haze of double mediation -- that of the capitalist response to the attack and the imagery by which we remember it? This speaks nothing to the amount of related material -- image-based or not -- that has piled on to our memories since that day nearly fifteen months ago.Anyway, to return briefly to Sontag. I wish that she would have allowed her essay a bit more of these kinds of ruminations. In the September 24, 2001 issue of The New Yorker, she wrote a "Talk of the Town" piece that was pretty directly critical of United States foreign policy, and she received a pretty thorough batch of criticism for it. I have to wonder if that experience shaped the writing -- or the editing by the magazine -- of this essay. The only somewhat political contemporary barb she throws in is a comment that says one of the reasons the Israeli-Palestinian has become such an international event is the former's direct ties to the United States. She also states that many people (herself included, perhaps) feel that "what is ultimately at stake... is the strength of the forces opposing the juggernaut of American-sponsored globalization, economic and cultural." A strong opinion, but in the context of this essay it becomes an small island floating in a sea of art history scholarship and close analysis of individual images.However, it is not her duty to examine everything, as nice as that may be for all of us. In the meantime, this essay serves as a starting point for what I hope will be an interesting public discussion. I've got my sights set on news.google.com looking for her name, and hope that something can happen here as well.UPDATE: Here is a link to collections of war photography online, presented in conjunction with Sontag's article, from The New Yorker's "Online Only" section.3rdworldcinema, I'm looking at you. I hope that a thorough discussion of this essay -- though not limited to the two of us, of course -- will soon get started.

working on your day off

There is an upside to working on your day off, especially when no one else is at the office. At home, I have approximately 150 square feet of space in which to dance to my favorite music, much of which is taken up by a bed, a chair, bookshelves, and other items. Here at the gallery, there is more than twenty times that amount of space and only a few paintings on the wall to watch out for. No one else is here, the cleaning guy is finished, and I have an hour to dance by myself to too-loud music before I have to meet a friend for our weekly lunch/study date. A pre-lunch workout of the best kind.Last year, everyone who listened to the micro/click-house type of electronic music that I like so much proclaimed their love for Akufen's "My Way" album and "Deck the House" single. I missed the boat so much on that one, and only now, a year later, do I get it. Such beautiful collages.

Philip Glass at Society Hall

Last night I saw Philip Glass perform several of his pieces for solo piano. He played Mad Rush (1980) and five of the Metamorphoses (1989). After an intermission, Dennis Russel Davies performed six of the sixteen Etudes Glass composed between 1994 and 1999, showcasing his amazing dexterity. It was apparent that Davies is the more accomplished performer, and it was quite interesting to see how they both approached Glass' works. Davies approached the work with gusto, allowing his face to register emotional reaction to the pieces played, the technical ability of his fingerwork not interrupting a certain performative gusto. Glass, not as strong a player as composer, kept a straight face and bowed head while working his way through his two selections. The selection of pieces was wise. Glass' plain performance style was enhanced by the emotional tenor of the selections he performed. Davies played to his strengths, for in his short works the repetitive phrases were more complicated and shorter in duration, allowing for relatively wild (in comparison to Glass) fingerwork that wowed the audience. The man in front of me, obviously familiar with the Etudes, let out a "Yeah!" as Davies hit the last notes of the sixth piece. It was a stirring introduction to the live performance of Glass' works, and experienced for the meager sum of $10. Can't beat that.Update: I was glad to read that the New York Times critic who reviewed the concert had almost exactly the same response as I did. It kind of validates my critical response.. sort of! If you believe in that kind of thing! Here's a link to his review.

A short guide to my interests list..

Many people have unique items on their LJ interest list. Perhaps no one else thought to include them, perhaps those interests are genuinely specific to the individual. Here is an attempt to write a brief introduction to some of my interests that did not show up as anyone else's selection:"Damaged Goods"I was horribly late in discovering Gang of Four, and am entirely indebted to a former girlfriend who now lives in Oakland for forcing me to listen closely. "Damaged Goods" is my favorite song from the Entertainment! LP, and was in heavy rotation at my house this summer.Romantic ConceptualismI found a link to the article I described in an earlier post that coins the term "Romantic Conceptualism" to describe the art of many of my favorite artists.Benjamin H.D. BuchlochProfessor of Modern Art at Columbia University and also the subject of an earlier post. His Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry</i>, a collection of essays on American art of the period 1955 to 1975, is a critically important book in my collection. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys tackling difficult ideas (both in presentation and subject matter) in modern and contemporary art.Eduardo Souto de Moura (Link 2)A Portuguese architect who is difficult to find information about on the web. His works are often compared with Alvaro Siza, who is much more well known and with whom he collaborated on the Portuguese pavilion at the Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany. If you find yourself in a library with a good collection of architecture books, I recommend browsing through a monograph. Beautiful, simple forms.Homemade bikesI built my bike with spare parts at a place called Bikes Not Bombs near my old house in Boston, MA. I highly recommend that other people patronize places similar to this one, either to build their bikes themselves or to have them custom-built from salvaged parts. Bikes Not Bombs also organizes bike rides and activist interventions, rides with Critical Mass, provides job-training for neighborhood teenagers, and donates bikes to persons in poorer countries. Several great reasons to support them.Labyrinth BooksAlthough new books are generally beyond my price range, this store - on 112th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam - has all the ones I could possibly want. An academic and independent press specialty bookstore, it's the place to go when you want that new critical anthology of texts about _____ (insert subject here.) Conveniently located about two blocks from the Hungarian Pastry Shop, many of my Sunday afternoons have been spent buying a book at the store and then devouring it - and some cookies - at the Shop.Michel and PatriciaThe two main characters in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, which is perhaps my favorite movie. I have the enthusiasm for French New Wave films of another ex-girlfriend to thank for getting me to watch this one for the first time. I came this close (insert fingers-just-barely-parted gesture) to writing a paper for the graduate seminar I'm attending about Godard's treatment of the urban environment in this film. Simply gorgeous (for example, the scene when Patricia kisses the journalist while Michel looks on, and after they drive away there is a shot of Michel against a Boulevard's traffic right at the moment when the streetlamps turn on for the night. A lovely detail that evokes a specifically Parisian moment.)Neil LeachAn architectural theorist from Britain whose writing I like. Especially his essay "The Aesthetic Cocoon," though I can't quite find the book its in right now. I remember reading it while sitting in one of the comfortable chairs at Labyrinth Books, though. They all weave together.Steffen Basho JunghansA German guitarist who became obsessed with Robbie Basho, adopted his last name as a middle name, and began playing gorgeous Minimalist composer-inspired works on the steel-string guitar with no accompaniment. I've only come across a handful of songs, but if others are anything like "Inside the Rain," I'm sure I'll like them all.SANAA ArchitectsAn architecture firm run by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. Some of my favorite works include the M-House, Apartment House in Gifu, O-Museum, and their multiple pachinko parlors.Stephan MathieuA German improv drummer and electronic musician. Some of my favorite releases of his are the Sad Mac Studies limited edition 12", the Gigue live 3" CD, and the Touch mp3ep. He also records as Full Swing (with a series of 12" remixes on Orthlong Musork) and Stol. His production on Ekkehard Ehler's (also on my interest list) "Plays John Cassavetes 2" makes it one of my favorite Ehlers tracks.Vegetarian Dim Sum HouseCheap and plentiful. On Pell St. in New York's Chinatown. I've gone there with my friend Jonathan so many times that when I show up alone, or with other people, the waitresses ask where he is. We also get free food. I can never have too many steamed sesame paste buns. I wish I could end every meal with them.

Good news..

It appears that my review of the Nick Relph and Oliver Payne exhibition (see below) will be published. January will see the simultaneous publication of my first article and my first review. Quite exciting. Maybe this freelance writing thing will start working out after all.

(Auto)biography

"As we are now aware that great men no longer make history and that history shapes the individuals who satisfy its needs, we tell our stories to make our lives comprehensible as those of real people. History is comprised of layered events that are linked in some way, and the bond between memories and the contents of other containers is cemented by the telling. The transformation of an individual's life into a museum exhibit influences the future course of that life when it provides encouragement to continue the story, in other words, to live life in such a way that there is something to tell. Living solely to create a biography is in any case more productive than a life lived in unconscious repetition of the life itself." - Bozon Brock, "God and Garbage - Museums as Creators of Time" in The Discursive Museum, MAK, Vienna, 2001, p. 25, emphasis mineThis quote is meant to illustrate the influence a museum has in the career of an artist, specifically with regard to the mid-career survey. However, it struck me for two reasons, one in relationship to the Derrida documentary I saw two weekends ago and the other in regard to my own thoughts on (auto)biography.In the film, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, Derrida was consistent in his probe of the artifice of biography. He was especially fervent in his denial of biography as relevant to the lives of philosophers, though when asked what he wished earlier philosophers had written about but didn't, his answer was "Their sex lives." A biography immediately distances the life lived from the life described, and a battle between the two - assuming the person in question is still alive, as in Derrida's case - begins almost immediately. He explained that elements of his biography had slipped into his texts throughout the years, an assertion we can readily believe given the intensely personal nature of some of his published reflections (Circumfession, Memories for Paul de Man.) He seems to refute the idea of a life lived in the service of a biography, working instead from the assumption that the life/work and reflection upon it are necessarily intertwined. Yet for me consciousness of the making of a biography (whether by oneself or by others) automatically separates the two. I have noticed a disturbing trend in my own mind of late: my concern with the creation of a unified 'line of thought' that can be understood as a red thread running through my writing. The relief I felt the other week when discovering links between Jorg Heiser's article on "Romantic Conceptualists" and music I listened to at age sixteen perhaps only half stemmed from the excitement of my discovery. The rest came from my happiness at being able to link seemingly disparate parts of my life, thereby implying a certain coherence will eventually come of my future thought and writing. Is this consciousness of 'the big picture,' so to speak, common? Does anyone else think about this kind of thing? I was alternately energized and afraid of my responses to the last line in the above quote. On the one hand there is the idea of subsuming your life's work to a greater arc in the hope that a comprehension of the whole corpus can impart greater meaning than the individual parts. On the other is the fear of abstracting a life still unfolding. Can a balance be struck? What do you think? I'm sure it's something I'll continually grapple with, and no doubt this problematic relationship to (auto)biography will become a central aspect of my own.PS - I hope this line of thinking doesn't come off as pretense, especially in so blatantly juxtaposing Derrida's thoughts with my own. I am in no way making direct comparisons between the two, it's just that his words in the film are fresh in my mind and relevant to what the above quote made me think about.

Midtown Mondays

I finally made it to the Austrian Cultural Forum to visit the Erwin Redl/Christian Fennesz exhibition. It is a collaborative project in the loosest sense; two site-specific light installations by Redl have been paired with Fennesz's Gustav Mahler Project, a series of audio recordings made at an earlier time and presented this past spring at the ACF. The two projects are quite different: Redl's grids of L.E.D. lights suspended on thin cables and presented in dimmed rooms evoke Minimalist art while Fennesz's source material is utterly Romantic. The two meet in the realm of the digital: Redl's lights evoke computer motherboards and the power indicators on the ubiquitous machinery of contemporary life while Fennesz dutifully layers his symphonic works with static, hiss, clicks, and other remnants of digital processing. But I don't want this to be a review. I just wish to somehow convey the beauty inherent in the incongruity between these two projects. They play off of each other wonderfully. The perfect symmetry of the lights begins to waver under the influence of the music. The music itself feels structured in some way, as if the architecture of the physical installation extended outward to the sound that fills the room. The exhibition is only up for two more days - 10am to 6pm Tuesday and Wednesday - so if anyone is in midtown and has half an hour, I definitely suggest stopping by.

Wanderlust

london, paris, vienna, oslo, buenos aires, brussels, montreal, hong kong, helsinki, berlin, budapest, dublin, milan, fukuoka, tokyo, (2), seoul, amsterdam, moscow (2), barcelona, zurich, san francisco.I am a virtual tourist. Right now, I cannot visit these places, yet often find myself staring at their beauty, watching people halfway around the world scurry across plazas from work to home to the restaurant to the barber shop to the grocery store. As perverse as this may seem, it is nice to be reminded (in relatively real time) that all of these other places exist, that people inhabit them, and that one day I may also be there, with them. It also serves as a reminder to appreciate what I have in my immediate environment, for it too has its own beauty and value.

A review from last month

Nick Relph & Oliver PayneMixtapeGavin Brown's EnterpriseMost of the mixtapes I've made and received over the years are thematically constructed, collaging disparate elements under rubrics of love, summertime, quiet nights, long drives. Nick Relph and Oliver Payne follow this model with Mixtape (2002), a video that evokes youth through the carpe diem reappropriation of situations and objects.The visuals are accompanied by Terry Riley's 1968 woozy, multitracked remix of Harvey Averne's "You're No Good." The soundtrack structures the video, determining its length (22 1/2 minutes is the length of one side of a vinyl LP at 33rpm) and editing style. Two singers intone "you're no good, you're no good, you're no good" on repeat, hypnotically overlapping while ever more images pass by, mostly pegged to the incantations. However, in defiance of these assertions from the narrative voice, an underage rock band enthusiastically rehearses, a woman breakdances on a sidewalk chalk rendering of Botticelli's "Venus," the artists' "Besht Mate" kisses a statue at the center of a park fountain, another quintessentially British youth leans against a building wearing rainbow-colored pants and walking a rhinestone-studded turtle on a leash. All have discovered unique forms of self expression, as have the artists.Relph and Payne often zoom in on details, emphasizing the songlike rhythm underlying daily life; the repeated rhythms of the teenager's drumstick beating the ride cymbal, the tapping of the old man's cane against the sidewalk, the all-white trainers of the breakdancer swishing back and forth above the pavement. But not all is happiness and spontaneous creativity. Several scenes in Mixtape remind us of the underside to all this dancing and celebration; most direct are images of hunters and their prey, tied to the sexual tension of the scene that introduces them. Yet this knowledge is to be taken in stride, never fully derailing the sense of euphoria imparted by this mixtape. "You're no good" begins to sound like "you look good" as these actors celebrate life's little moments and their own idiosyncracies. Relph and Payne stress that there is beauty and value in youth (mis)spent.(October 2002)

Miscellaneous roundup

Has anyone read any writing by Masao Miyoshi? Specifically The Afterlives of Area Studies? If so, any comments?- - -Susan, I had a nice talk with Jonathan at dinner tonight about many of the things we were discussing on one of my earlier posts. Did I also mention that Morgan said I should get to know you?- - -It was almost too foggy to make out, but at the stroke of midnight, I watched them switch off the lights at the top of the Empire State Building. It's becoming a ritual, no matter where in the city I am.- - -I'm at a point where I am making a lot of difficult but exciting decisions for myself. I am glad that I started a journal again, and already have enjoyed the dialogue that has resulted from my few short posts.

Another long one..

As I write this, I'm eating around the mold on my pita in an attempt to use up all the hummus before it goes bad. Some dinner. Maybe I'll blame this rambling, even worse than yesterday's, on malnutrition. This one might be a little opaque, but I really hope to get some feedback.- - -I have spent a lot of time thinking about the structurally-created omissions in capitalist systems, both the unacknowledged and the repressed. A message recently posted to a mailing list that I subscribe to crystallized a number of these thoughts. It seems to be the tail end of a discussion that I missed, but the basic gesture involved was an attempt to broaden the concept of capitalism's "residue" to include not only labor and laborers, but "everything that is unnameable within a capitalist symbolic." This residue, both material and representative, lies just on the other side of what the poster calls a "limit of intelligibility."The e-mail then defines the concept of "progress" (however simplifying that term is) as a device that allows those inside the capitalist system to render intelligible all of these unintelligible things. Now to quote a larger part of the e-mail before going on: "However, the progress narrative is obviously a massive simplification, covering over the unintelligibility of certain modes of existence with the certainty that in time they will become more like us."What becomes interesting is that not only are non-standard (often read: non-western) modes of thought and production rendered unintelligible by this system, but also certain things that can be considered within the system (even caused directly by it): feelings of hopelessness in people who are otherwise not 'victims' of capitalist culture, any problem on its own terms ("depression without cures"), anomalies like people 'going postal.' To oversimplify, large parts of the emotional sphere are within the system yet unexplained by it.While the e-mail seems to be discussing this issue on a largely social or political level, it gains added significance for me in relationship to a text I read in the current issue of Frieze magazine (a contemporary art journal based in London.) Titled "Emotional Rescue," it attempts to carve out from within the field of late 1960s and early 1970s conceptual art a space for what the author, Jorg Heiser, calls "Romantic Conceptualism." Artists like Bas Jan Ader and Robert Smithson and contemporary descendants like Jan Timme and Didier Courbot fuse the conceptual with the emotional tenor of Romanticism, thereby connecting what Heiser calls the two endpoints of 'modern artistic subjectivity.'For me, the article was like suddenly turning on a bright light in a semidark room. All of the artists my tastes had me groping toward were suddenly presented before me in contrast to their contemporaries, wrapped up with a neat rhetorical bow that elucidated many of my own thoughts on their artistic production. I was slightly frustrated that Heiser had beaten me to the punch - I was clumsily drafting my own text on several of these artists (is it worth noting that both Ader and Smithson are on my livejournal 'interest' list? Not for nothing, as they say here in New York.) - but nonetheless relieved that I wasn't alone in my thoughts.Then - that's right, there's more! - after reading this, I happened to put on the sole LP of a mid-1990s band called Portraits of Past (record label link). I bought the record for its cover without having any idea who they were or what kind of music they made. At the time, I had been listening to pop punk alone. When the first notes rang out from my speakers - sixteen low throbs from the bass before an explosion of guitars and screaming - I realized that I was in for something incredibly different from anything I was familiar with. It was filled with such emotion, charged with such a dramatic flair, that it refused to be ignored. It ignited in me a search for that particular quality in music that I have not yet stopped. Now, I mainly listen to quiet, experimental electronic music, but nonetheless what registers is that which fuses concept with emotion (for example, Herbert's "Around the House" album, or Autopoiesis' "La Vie a Noir" [both label links].)I gravitate toward the emotional, that which is potentially unintelligible when viewed through its structuring system, when looking at art and listening to music. To return to the e-mail from the mailing list: "The significance of all this is that [by exploring this 'unintelligible' content] we are gesturing toward the outside of 'common' sense, toward things whose exclusion is desirable for a certain framework of meaning to continue, toward things which, if they were allowed to pour into the center would transform it considerably."- - -Is anyone familiar with books I might begin reading that explore the structural limitations/omissions of capitalist systems? I think that this is an issue I'd love to explore from within the realm of artistic production.

Critical Mass and my relationship to my past

Forgive me, this one's a rambler.Yesterday, I read two essays from a book on Critical Mass published by AK Press. Credit goes to my professor for including anything published by AK in the course syllabus. However, there is a maxim that states we are most critical of what we hold dearest, and this proved to be the case: after twelve weeks of being assigned rigorously researched and grammatically sound academic articles, I found myself disappointed by the two texts. I feel that Critical Mass, as a phenomenon, should be examined intellectually in conjunction with the largely anecdotal and instinctive essays collected in this book. Is this just a symptom of me not thinking something is legitimate until it has been academically analyzed? That could be part of it, and, if so, the disappointment I felt could be a problem with my expectations. However, I'd like to think that I'm still a bit more open-minded than that, however much time and energy I spend with things related to the academy and academic writing.Would an academic analysis drain the movement - as represented to a wider public - of its sense of spontaneity? Worse for me, would it remove the fun I have in monthly participation? I'd be afraid of fixing the levity referred to by both authors in the structured nature of an analysis, of missing 'the point' in an attempt to research the point. However, there is a whole network of relationships (to other social and activist movements, to other critiques) that I feel should be explicated so that proper context can be given to the movement for those who might approach it in this way.Anyway, while I wrestle with the idea of undertaking this project - if I'm even able to complete it - I am reminded of numerous other issues I have thought about lately. The short version is that I feel a conflict within me concerning what I will overly simplify as a "punk rock" past and a "bourgeois-leaning academic/salaried employee" present. Twenty-three years of age is not particularly old, but the past year has brought about a wholesale change in my life. I'm no longer in school. I'm no longer a "dependent." The cycles of my everyday life in New York are quite different from everyday life in either Boston or Chicago.In a way, this spring, I suffered a little identity crisis. This manifested itself in a "punk rock summer" filled with hardcore shows, hanging out with friends that I hadn't seen in four or five years, a road trip, getting tattooed, attending protests, etc. I wanted to reassure myself that, despite the fact that I draw a salary and have a "career path," I hadn't lost touch with the elements of my life that sustained me over the past few years. To what extent does participation in a specific subculture condition the later reactions to/against it? Do hip-hop kids or goth kids later grow up to face similar dilemmas? I'm sure I'm not the only one to feel this way, but I'm curious as to when and how it comes to the foreground of other people's lives. By the end of the summer, I felt that I had reconciled the two. Now, as the cold weather settles upon the city, I feel the pendulum swinging back in the other direction, and these thoughts come to mind again.

Early mornings

Waking up at 7AM on one of my few days off never seems like a good idea at the time. I need to think ahead to all of the things I will accomplish today! It seems that I'm going to be really dependent on the E train this morning. Let us all hope that it doesn't let me down.

Derrida and book shopping

I say the documentary biography of Derrida at Film Forum this afternoon, by myself because I couldn't think who to ask to join me (If you're into this kind of thing, contact me!). He acted the part well; recalcitrant about the details of his personal life, always pointing out the artificiality of the documentary/biography setup, rambling at length on minute topics and grand themes. It was quite entertaining, but of greatest interest to me, it turned out, was my own viewing; there is a schism during parts of film between word and image that I could not reconcile. In between direct interview and lecture footage during which Derrida is speaking, a woman's voice quotes passages from his published texts. She speaks in English, and the image on screen is not accompanied by subtitles, as is other dialogue. I was unable to focus on the audio soundtrack of her reciting his words, unable to process their meaning because my eye was instead seduced by the image on screen. It was usually a tracking shot of Paris streets and my interest in the beauty of that city consistently won out over my desire to understand what the narrator was saying. It is rare that I am able to dole out my attention in full, but rather can devote gradations to multiple objects/fascinations simultaneously. When there was text on the screen to read, I could simultaneously read and understand it while also processing what was happening visually in the background. Both cognitive processes were visual. When the text disappeared into the ethereal realm of the spoken word, that cognition was much more difficult. This is interesting to me, because it opposes the experience I had on Thursday night (see below post), when Buchloch's spoken words, accompanied by slide projections, made so much more sense to me than when I have previously attempted to read his essays. Do I learn better visually or aurally? If it's the former, was I somehow visualizing Buchloch's words as he spoke them? If it's the latter, was I 'speaking' the subtitles via an inner voice? I'm sure there are texts (audiotapes? ha.) about this kind of stuff, but for now I'm content to simply have the questions suspended before me.- - -After the film, I walked up to 12th Street Books for my monthly bulk purchase. Nine books, one of which I've already given to a friend. Of the remaining eight, The Problems of Modernity, a reader on Adorno and Benjamin, and Modernist Radicalism and its Aftermath seem the most promising. Both were published by Routledge, which, although last night a friend claimed the house is "past its prime," remains one of my favorite publishers. Perhaps I'll intern for them once I finish my current internship?

Benjamin Buchloch on Gerhard Richter

Last night I attended Benjamin Buchloch's lecture on Gerhard Richter's glass works at the Dia Center. The lecture was a surprise on several fronts: I did not expect to be as intrigued by Richter's glass projects as I was, I did not expect the lecture to be so crowded, and I definitely did not expect Benjamin Buchloch to come across as affably as he did.Richter's glass works largely take the form of rectangular monochrome panes mounted to the wall on adjustable steel supports. At the beginning of the lecture, Buchloch's analysis focused on the monochromes as a sort of 'dense Minimalism.' He contrasted the ideological complexity of these pieces - notably Eight Gray, a series of eight of these panels recently executed - with the 1960s American Minimalists' absolute rejection of interpretation and 'meaning.' Buchloch stated that Richter's monochromes are so loaded with dualisms and tension - the definitions of painting and architecture, the relationship between painting and architecture, the history of the monochrome, issues of transparency, perfection, reflection, translucency, opacity, and industrial fabrication, among others - that a dialectic is hidden within the work, ingested by it. Richter's becomes an all-inclusive Minimalism, like a vacuum that sucks meaning and interpretation into the work, supporting the contradictions like Atlas and leaving the space around it airless and 'minimal.' It's an interesting inversion that provides a road out from the resolute muteness of the Minimalist work with which I am familiar while not abandoning its formal characteristics.At the end of the lecture, an hour and a half later, Buchloch described Richter's project commissioned by the unified German government and installed in the restored Reichstag building. In its development from the original proposal (using images of Holocaust victims through a stage of abstraction via randomly chosen colors to its final installation [scroll down] as a triptych of colored glass monochromes bearing the three colors of the German flag), the project mirrors the process by which the creation of a national identity masks the ‘victims’ that do not fit into its picture. This is especially true in Germany, a country whose national identity was sewn together, ripped apart, and was in the process of being re-stitched at the time of this project (it still is). Also, none of those questions touch on other complications: the fact that the government sponsored/commissioned the work, that it is intended as a memorial, that it has plenty of formal issues worth discsussing, its status as an ‘anti-monument’ (Buchloch’s term), etc. As Buchloch stated in the Q&A afterward - a whole paper could be devoted to any one of these glass works without bringing up every issue they engage and still ignoring their relationship to Richter's paintings and other work.The middle part of his lecture was devoted to historically situating the work within a larger arc of 20th century cultural production. It can most easily be summed up as 'an aesthetic history of glass in art and architecture of the twentieth century,' which seems like it would be a quite interesting book on its own.- - -As I mentioned, the lecture itself was packed. There were hundreds of folding chairs and still plenty of people were sitting on the floor and leaning against the walls. I found myself thinking during the middle of the evening that New York City is amazing in its ability to hold within its borders so many people devoted to such an admittedly arcane topic. It was heartening, and the fact that I made a new friend also helped.- - -Prior to the lecture, Buchloch seemed to possess an impenetrable mind: his writing has almost universally come across as opaque and the structure of his essays as labyrinthine. Last night, in his speaking voice, he came across not only with clarity, but with character - a likeable character at that. It imparted to me a desire to go back and work my way through his earlier texts. This was the opposite of my response to Dave Hickey's lecture on Alfred Jensen, held at the same venue perhaps eight months ago, where I was turned off by the very bravura and swagger that first attracted me to his writing. It is interesting how one's impression of a person's character can influence something as seemingly stand-alone as a body of writing. In total, I'm glad to have attended.And it didn't hurt that, as a response to the very last question from the audience, he took a few shots at Jorge Pardo's work, confirming my own take on a body of work that I feel is vastly overrated.- - -Welcome to the journal. I intend to fill it with reflections on cultural forms (mostly art and architecture, I imagine) I come into contact with and my life in the city. I hope it proves to be of some interest. "In search" is a thinly veiled reference to Bas Jan Ader's final art project, In Search of the Miraculous, as well as a description of my perpetual state of mind.