LeisureArts

Bye.

2014-02-12T16:36:00.001-08:00

Take Care...

2008-03-27T13:38:00.000-07:00

Hello, my name is Randall Szott. I am the founder of Dilettante Ventures which was a collective comprised of other collectives - LeisureArts, placekraft, and Studiolo54. All of these collectives had blogs that served as repositories of some activities, but did not serve as complete documentation of their activities. All of the collectives were comprised by myself only with the exception of Studiolo54 which had one other member. Maybe now some of you can understand why most everything written on this blog employed the collective "we" when offering up commentary.

LeisureArts helped me clarify many of my thoughts concerning how art and other forms of creative engagement with the world could lead to "the good life." My life, for better or worse, has been geared towards thinking about and attempting to embody, a vision of said good life. This blog provided a useful articulation of the theoretical/conceptual underpinnings of this exploration.

It is now time to turn my attention toward living and away from discursive arguments. I am grateful to all those who have taken the time to read and even take seriously the things I've written for LeisureArts. Much of the material here is obscure and it is often contrarian, but it is sincere. It is probably obvious that the dramas, protocols, and restrictions of the art world (the professional market/academic one) are of little use to me. Art has never been a vocation for me and probably never will be. In a funny way, I take it much too seriously. To paraphrase Luc Ferry in writing about the Greek view of philosophy - I see it as a mode of life rather than mere discourse. I'll be around, but Dilettante Ventures, and thus, LeisureArts are no more. I've got too much living to do.

P.S. I mentioned before a new curatorial venture outside Chicago called "he said - she said" and my final post here will be an announcement of the launch of its web site you can bookmark it now or wait for the final post.

2008-03-16T07:21:00.000-07:00

he said-she said is an exhibition and event series held in the home of Pamela Fraser and Randall Szott. They will take turns presenting what amounts to an ongoing conversation about art and culture - Ms. Fraser presenting art and artists, and Mr. Szott sharing the activities of people who work in other contexts. Together they hope to offer up a fun and thoughtful take on current ideas in art and life.

Post-LeisureArts Activity

2008-03-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

Sal Randolph's INTHECONVERSATION:

Art Leisure Instead of Art Work: A Conversation with Randall Szott

The end?

2007-11-17T12:23:00.000-08:00

We are currently re-evaluating the entire Dilettante Ventures empire. In fact, there might not even be an empire in the near future.

"The Artist’s Fall Collection" - Takashi Murakami - Art and Commerce [From the unpublished archive]

2007-11-08T14:36:00.000-08:00

"The Artist’s Fall Collection" in today's New York Times is filled with so many head scratchers (more so than the usual NYT fawning over the relations between art, fashion, and celebrity) that the thought of tackling them all is daunting. The article discusses Takashi Murakami's show at LA MOCA. We'll just hit the few things that really jumped out and leave the rest of the inanity for others to dissect.

The show, with its $960 handbags and $695 agendas for sale, created a flap even before its opening on Oct. 29. Art-world purists charge that it has eroded the line between culture and commerce. “It has turned the museum into a sort of upscale Macy’s,” the art critic Dave Hickey chided in an interview.

You have to wonder about Hickey's point of reference for luxury shopping. Macy's? The real zinger here is that unnamed "purists" actually believe there is some "line between culture and commerce." Maybe these are the same people that think the earth is flat?

Mr. Schimmel further maintained that the boutique is integral to the artist’s message. “One of the most radical aspects of Murakami’s work is his willingness both to embrace and exploit the idea of his brand, to mingle his identity with a corporate identity and play with that,” he said. “He realized from the beginning that if you don’t address the commercial aspect of the work, it’s somehow like the elephant in the room.

Such arguments have done their part to defuse potential controversy. The museum, said Gail Andrews, director of the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama and president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, “has made the case that luxury goods are a part of Murakami’s artistic expression. They are doing what contemporary museums do, pushing the boundaries.”

Apparently Paul Schimmel is now admitting that most art museum exhibitions have an "elephant in the room?" There's no plausible way he could think that the specter of financial value, the "elephant," is only germane to Murakami. Or could he? And pushing the boundaries? Art IS a luxury good...at least most of it that the NY Times bothers to write about and that museums exhibit. How could an entire article be predicated on some alleged separation? Maybe it hinges on the explicit claims of each domain?

“If you look at the world of art people interested in contemporary art, they are usually interested in luxury,” said Yves Carcelle, the president of Louis Vuitton. “The bridge between the two worlds is more and more obvious.” Mr. Carcelle underscored the point by noting that 60 of the MOCA Murakami bags were sold in the show’s first week alone.

Again we see this notion of a "bridge" between luxury and art. Isn't (market) art even more of a luxury good than a handbag which has a utilitarian dimension?

Such products, a kind of art couture, appeal primarily to a rising class of affluent culture chasers, “people who are very focused on having those hip luxury signifiers,” in the words of Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys New York. Owning such products “signifies informed consumption,” Mr. Doonan said. “They say: ‘I’m not just a shopper. I’m a super groovy shopper.’”

"Hip luxury signifiers" - could there be a better descriptor of mainstream market art? I'm not just a collector, I'm a super groovy collector!

[Yeah, yeah. This post is hyperbolic. A cooling off period might have served it better, but damn that article was amazing!]

LeisureArts = Art Blog? - So says one expert.

2007-11-07T03:34:00.000-08:00

Despite having taken a few swipes at Tyler Green and having a strongly divergent view of the professional art world, this blog (art or otherwise) has been included in his regional art blog links for Chicago. This is either an indication of the incredibly poor quality of Chicago art blogs, or it is another reason to respect Green's thick skin and the integrity of his convictions (of course nothing says it can't be both). Thanks MAN!

The Writers Guild of America strike has affected us more than we expected, but we should be back on track soon. A leisure enigma to tide you over:

It pays to be a slacker...

2007-10-20T13:10:00.000-07:00

Our blog is worth $17,068,302.36.
How much is your blog worth?

Recent Reads/Micro-Reviews - Experience, Leisure, and the Art of Living - Lucas Ihlein, John Neulinger, John Lachs, and Larry Hickman

2007-10-12T11:18:00.000-07:00

Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation ed. Larry Hickman - Excellent anthology of writings on John Dewey. Of particular interest to us were: "The Art of Life: Dewey's Aesthetics" by Thomas M. Alexander (micro-review of his book devoted to this topic) in which he outlines Dewey's argument for art as enriched experience and how the aesthetic ties into the core issues of Dewey's philosophy. "Dewey's Ethics: Morality as Experience" by Gregory E. Pappas in which he explicates the vision of a morality intertwined with the aesthetic and how both are rooted in experience rather than abstraction or as he puts it "...the moral life that is lived in the context of a situation, by means of the resources found within the situation, and for the situation." And lastly "John Dewey's Philosophy as Education" by James W. Garrison which Larry Hickman summarizes thusly, "Garrison argues that the flowering and fruit of philosophy as education is a kind of moral poetics, in which lifelong learning converts what would otherwise be disconnected and discordant into experience that is refined and harmonious." Excellent introductory text to Dewey and good supplement for those already familiar with portions of his oeuvre.

"Bilateral Blogging" by Lucas Ihlein - The essay appears in The International Journal of Arts in Society Vol. 1 Number 7. We like to imagine Ihlein as a kindred spirit. If nothing else we share many of the same interests and seem to draw on many of the same sources. Links to his various activities can be found here: bilateral. In the essay, Ihlein considers social art practices in the context of blogging and specifically contextualizes this with his own project Bilateral Kellerberrin. The official keywords for the essay are: blogging, practice-led research, participation, conversation, interactivity, relational aesthetics. We throw those out so you get a sense of the timeliness of the essay and its direct correlation to many of the issues explored at LeisureArts. In describing micro-utopian projects Ihlein notes the "...desire to make pragmatic models of living in the here-and-now (wherever one may be) rather than constantly deferring to some unattainable future." This dovetails nicely with the Pappas essay concerning Dewey's morality/ experience mentioned in the review above. Ihlein does a good job considering critiques of the micro-utopian impulse, including the now de riguer Claire Bishop. He grants some legitimacy to the "exclusionary" line of criticism before offering a trenchant alternative line of analysis - "When artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija create high-profile aestheticised versions of these ordinary spaces of resistance inside art galleries, they risk perpetuating the myth that the right and proper place for non-commodified exchange (and aesthetic experience), is a special architectural space, rather than recognizing that everyday life itself is riddled with such opportunities." This statement is crucial in understanding how we might develop the sort of critical-democratic aesthetic milieu that John Dewey (whom Iheiln draws from extensively) envisioned, and which Iheiln argues blogging enables, "...the blog as a tool of documentation and interaction is a useful alternative to gallery-based situations, in accommodating the ongoing rhythms of ordinary lived experience." Our only concern is that far too often artists that literally work outside the gallery still work within it conceptually due to internalizing the ideological and discursive constructs of the professional art system. They bracket off portions of their lives and list them as "projects" or "works" on their resumes, they "document" their explorations into so-called conviviality, etc. Of course, doing this is not inherently a problem, but doing so without understanding, and making explicit, the complications and contradictions of doing so, is.

To Leisure: An Introduction by John Neulinger - A nice overview of the various definitions and conceptualizations of leisure. Neulinger prefers using to leisure rather than leisure "...as leisure is not a thing one has (as one might 'have' free time), but an experience, a process, an ongoing state of mind." His emphasis on the experiential dimension of leisure is a welcome move to get outside of the more conventional idea of static leisure. The book, like many on leisure, suffers from textbook syndrome and a faith in a technocratic solution to the equitable distribution of leisure potential outside of political struggle and other forms of sociality, but there is plenty of worthwhile material here.

In Love with Life: Reflections on the Joy of Living and Why We Hate to Die by John Lachs - Speaking of technocratic faith, this book is tough slogging for anyone who might think that society might need to be re-configured along more humanely centered lines than it is currently. Lachs, through the book, aims at "...making a good life better," but too often seems to be an apologist for the status quo and doesn't concern himself enough with making bad lives better.

Stolen Art [for Douglas Huebler]

2007-10-07T16:24:00.000-07:00

Update on current activities

2007-10-05T16:18:00.000-07:00

We've started diagrammatic to replace the web presence of the now defunct Studiolo54 [R.I.P.].

To replace the off-line portion of Studiolo54We'll be starting he said...she said... - an irregularly ongoing collaborative curatorial-ish project in Oak Park early next year. A website is currently in the works with all of the details.

And the founder of LeisureArts will be speaking at Alogon Gallery as part of Other Options on November 4th. Lord help us all.

Experience Economy - Art as Experience - Relational Aesthetics

2007-10-02T10:39:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's obvious that one of the central texts guiding LeisureArts is John Dewey's Art as Experience. Then again, it might not be considering how marginal the text is in contemporary art discourse. The book was published in 1934 and yet we can still have legions of artists and critics discussing Nicholas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics published some sixty years later as if it raised something new. In some sense, admittedly, it did, but the current amnesia about Dewey's rich theoretical precursor diminishes its significance. Judith Rodenbeck does an excellent job exposing the same amnesia with regard to the history of art practices that precede those Bourriaud dubs as "relational" in her lecture "The Open Work: Participatory Art Since Silence."

Art as Experience does a good deal to complicate the simplistic division between object based work and experience based work by noting the experiential dimension of all art. From the opening paragraphs [emphases ours]:

By one of the ironic perversities that often attend the course of affairs, the existence of the works of art upon which formation of an esthetic theory depends has become an obstruction to theory about them. For one reason, these works are products that exist externally and physically. In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience. Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favorable to understanding...

When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement. A primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of the fine arts. This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.

Likewise much of the discussion of the experience economy (Pine and Gilmore) and its various critics would be well served by reading Dewey. While we're at it, the current champions of Jacques Rancière would benefit from coming to terms with Dewey as his work on the relationship of aesthetics to ethics precedes Rancière by about a half century. Of course Dewey, will never have the theoretical sex appeal of the "continental" intellectual set. He, like the other American pragmatists, and their Transcendentalist antecedents just don't seem to captivate the art intelligentsia the way the French seem to even though they worked out anti-foundationalist, and radically contextualized epistemologies many decades beforehand. Don't get us wrong - Bodies without Organs, Différance, and the litany of other poetic-theoretic tools invented by continental theorists and their progeny are important and useful, but there is much to be done with the tools of the American philosophical tradition in art circles as well.

Social Practice - Revelry and Risk - Art/Life

2007-09-26T12:04:00.000-07:00

In April of this year, on Friday the thirteenth, the founder of LeisureArts initiated a field trip to Reno, NV (by way of Carson City and Virginia City) for some students in the Social Practices program at CCA. We visited, among other things, a gold nugget collection, the Donner Party Museum, happy hour at the Peppermill Casino and subsequent buffet, a replica silver mine, the Bucket of Blood Saloon, the Red Light Museum housed in the bottom of a Chinese restaurant, the Wagon Wheel diner, and the craps tables at Circus Circus. The following piece of writing was a reflection on the experience and is published in Revelry and Risk: approaches to social practice or something like that.

Gambling in Reno, Some Notes on a Social Practices “Field Trip”

“After the conference papers are over, we go slumming in their bars.”

Like many things in my life, this essay begins somewhat obliquely. The above quote is from Richard Shusterman's Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. He's writing about what comes to count as legitimate experience in the professional world of philosophy and literary theory. For an experience to count in these domains it has to take an institutionally recognizable form as a conference, a paper, or a book. This same question of legitimacy plagues the professional art world - roughly analogous substitutions might be exhibitions, works, and projects. Shusterman writes that we are impoverished by academic practices “...[which fail] to recognize the value of non-professional responses which seek neither interpretive truth nor publishable novelty but simply enriched experience, experience which may perhaps be communicated in writing but does not need to be to count as legitimate and meaningful.” When one engages in such non-professional practices, when one goes “slumming” in Reno, you run the risk of academic oblivion.

How does “enriched experience” find articulation? Does this essay enhance or undermine the experience of our field trip? How do you provide enough of a structure for something to become legible without allowing the structure to be the only thing that's experienced? Perhaps these considerations are central to social practices, or maybe this is merely my conceit. My interest has always led me to teeter as far on the edge of evanescence as possible – allowing, for example, the trip to Reno to live or die in the memories of my fellow travelers rather than making a video, or taking photos, or creating a Jeremy Deller like travel guide.

This essay may undermine this anti-ambition, but it can at least specify that no guide book is possible for the trip. It was a singularity comprised of a specific set of people at a specific moment in time. This is not to say that fruitful discussion/interpretation cannot take place, but if the trip was “successful,” discussion, documentation, and exhibition, would never adequately capture its complexity. This is dangerous territory. I'm sounding awfully “arty.”

Perhaps there's little else you need to know about the trip other than the fact that it was bookended by free appetizers when we arrived in Reno, and sage cheddar cheese on crackers on our way home in the white mini-van. Perhaps that is all you can know unless you were there. It was never a “project,” but it was something more than spontaneous revelry, although that happened too. Above all, it was a gamble.

I've gambled with others in Reno before, in more and less serious ways. Neil Young has indirectly asked – Tell Me Why Only Love Breaks Your Heart? To this I can only offer the corniest of replies – love is a gamble, and that gamble, if it is to have any meaning at all, must have failure as one of its real possibilities. Without the risk of losing everything, gambling/love is just another game, one hardly worth playing. Maybe my deepest ambition for social practices and the art/life tension it embodies for me, is that it too is a game worth playing, something more than a profession, something more than a series of projects, a game with something tragic at stake – something that could break your heart...

The eye of the storm...

2007-09-12T16:45:00.000-07:00

The LeisureArts Mobile Command Center is currently anchored off the coast of Galveston, TX and hoping to ride out Humberto gracefully.

AT 700 PM CDT...0000Z...THE CENTER OF TROPICAL STORM HUMBERTO WAS
LOCATED NEAR LATITUDE 28.8 NORTH...LONGITUDE 94.8 WEST OR ABOUT 35
MILES... 55 KM...SOUTH OF GALVESTON TEXAS.

HUMBERTO IS MOVING TOWARD THE NORTH-NORTHEAST NEAR 7 MPH...11 KM/HR.
THIS DIRECTION OF MOTION IS EXPECTED TO CONTINUE WITH A GRADUAL
INCREASE IN FORWARD SPEED OVER THE NEXT 24 HOURS. ON THE FORECAST
TRACK...THE CENTER OF HUMBERTO SHOULD BE CROSSING THE UPPER TEXAS
COAST WITHIN THE WARNING AREA LATER TONIGHT OR EARLY ON THURSDAY.

MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS ARE NEAR 50 MPH...85 KM/HR...WITH HIGHER
GUSTS. SOME STRENGTHENING IS EXPECTED PRIOR TO LANDFALL.

TROPICAL STORM FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 60 MILES...95 KM
FROM THE CENTER.

THE LATEST MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE REPORTED BY AN AIR FORCE RESERVE
UNIT RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT WAS 998 MB...29.47 INCHES.

469689.5

2007-09-11T04:40:00.001-07:00

the new "is the new"

2007-09-10T17:05:00.000-07:00

We published "is the new" some time ago and interest in it flares up every so often. Roo Renyolds has done a new "is the new," but he did it using automated techniques. We did the whole damn thing manually. Nice to see this thing live on.

Our old school style diagram:

And the gateway to the new "is the new" :

He loves US! [for PF]

2007-08-31T17:32:00.000-07:00

Our founder loves US (weekly)!

Exclusive web offer:

2007-08-31T17:31:00.000-07:00

Stephen Wright - Spy art - Escape artists

2007-08-30T20:24:00.000-07:00

The following excerpts are from Stephen Wright's essay "Spy art: infiltrating the real" in Afterimage Sept-Dec, 2006. For those very few regular readers of this blog, the connections to our writing/thinking should be obvious. For those who have somehow stumbled here, the quick and dirty parallel is to be found in this mention of the figure of the escape artist: Escape Artistry - Richard Roth - LeisureArts. The much longer parallel can be seen here: Allan Kaprow - Refusal/Un-Artist - Keith Tilford.

"I am referring to an art without artwork, without authorship (not signed by an artist) and above all without a spectator or audience. It is visible, public, and indeed, it is seen--but not as art. In this way, it cannot be placed between invisible parentheses--to be written off as "just art," that is, as a mere symbolic transgression, the likes of which we have seen so often, whose principal effect is to promote the artist's position within the reputational economy."

"It is on this basis that I feel art needs to avoid artworld framing devices. I also sense that many artists today feel that intuition, although many shy away from taking the necessary steps toward a genuine stealth art practice--one that requires forsaking artwork, authorship, and spectatorship."

"Stealth art is a clandestine border crosser, like the secret agent. So why then does art so adamantly refuse to forsake its artistic visibility--even though doing so would have the explicit advantage of giving it more use value and even make it better art (providing adequacy between form and content)? I suspect it is because the reliable signature (attesting to the artist's occupational identity), and the artworld recognition it provides, is the ultimate art commodity still valued by enterprise culture."

"There are more stealth practices going on than the artworld ever acknowledges, or even knows about. This is for the self-evident reason that they are, by definition and by design, hard to see let alone recognize, but also because they subvert mainstream artworld values, for there is nothing to exhibit and thus, nothing to sell. Stealth practices tend to be written off as non-art, if not quite nonexistent. The art-critical challenge is to draw attention to them in an appropriately elusive way, both for their intrinsic worth and because they obey a certain art-historical logic. Stealth and spy art practices have become a viable way of pursuing art at a historical moment when art has withdrawn from the world--though that may appear grossly counterintuitive to anyone whose only sources are the official organs of the artworld like Flash Art or Art Forum. In the face of the omnipresence of the cultural and consciousness industries, art has withdrawn from the world and has hidden before our very eyes--the only place it is safe from artworld recuperation, the only place left where the artworld is not looking for it."

Art world snobbery at its finest

2007-08-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

Item one in Tyler Green's recent post Five things I think I think deserves attention for both its brutal honesty and sadly elitist attitude:

"1.) If I hear one more museum podcast feature visitors to the museum and what they think of ______, I'm going to delete them from my feeds. Museums all employ armies of people who do interesting things: conservation, research, building, installing, curating, and so on. Podcasting was made for telling us what cool things those people are up to. Instead we too oft get Joe Schmoe saying that the comb in a Magritte looks soooo reallllll."

How dare a museum provide a venue for "Joe Schmoe" to engage in art dialog! Apparently, museum patrons are a necessary evil that art professionals must merely tolerate in the course of their "interesting" lives. Museums, or at least those with podcast feeds that Green subscribes to, need to keep the great unwashed masses (with such lowbrow tastes that they might actually experience a sense of wonder at trompe-l'œil) from wasting the time of those with more sophisticated art perspectives - the ones who are up to "cool things." You've got to admire his unadulterated disdain for the plebs - Roger Kimball would be proud.

Recent Reads/Micro-Reviews

2007-08-25T12:48:00.000-07:00

We wanted to mention a few books we read in the past month or so. These micro-reviews may be useless, but for what it's worth:

John Dewey and the Lessons of Art by Philip W. Jackson - Decent enough, but a little on the art education side of things for our taste.

Prescribing the Life of the Mind by Charles W. Anderson - A political philosopher thinking through the purpose of liberal education, and along with it, the university. The cultivation of what he calls "practical reason" is ultimately the aim for both. Practical reason is largely a re-working of pragmatism - "...thinking need not be shown to be irrefutably true to be considered rational. It just has to be shown to be better than the evident alternatives in pursuing some particular human purpose."

Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture by Douglas R. Anderson - An outstanding book, not only for its content (which is engaging mind you), but especially for its approach. Anderson broadens the range of philosophy without dumbing it down. He writes about Dewey and James, but also Tammy Wynette and Hank Williams. It's good stuff, especially the material about Thomas Davidson's education/learning as "world building."

John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience & Nature: The Horizons of Feeling by Thomas M. Alexander - A solid philosophical book. To be honest, it was exactly the sort of technical, tightly argued and subtle book that we usually avoid. Highly academic (in both the laudatory and pejorative sense), but if you enjoy that sort of thing read it all the way through. If not, skip to the last chapter "The Art of Experience" to see why Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics is much ado about nothing in our opinion and about 60 years late.

Karaoke Nights: An Ethnographic Rhapsody by Rob Drew - Henry Jenkins characterized this book as a rare "academic page turner." We couldn't agree more. If you hate karaoke or look down on it, read the book to see if you might be persuaded to reconsider. If you love karaoke, read the book to see a smart ethnographic analysis of the culture of U.S. karaoke.

Shusterman - The "linguistic turn" - Guattari

2007-08-24T11:27:00.000-07:00

This post (Guattari on Postmodernism) from Larval Subjects, which we discovered via Metastable Equilibrium, had us looking back through Richard Shusterman's Pragmatist Aesthetics to find this quote which seems to resonate nicely with Guattari's own suspicions regarding the linguistic turn in theory/philosophy:

...[the linguistic turn] has come to seem more like a sophistic paradox about talking without language than a deep truth about human experience and the world. Surely, once we have to talk about something, even merely to affirm or deny its existence, we must bring it into the game of language, give it a linguistic visa or some conceptual-textual identity, even if the visa be one of alien or inferior linguistic status like "inexpressible tingle" or "non-discursive image." But this only means that we can never talk (or explicitly think) about things existing without their being somehow linguistically mediated; it does not mean that we can never experience them non-linguistically or that they cannot exist for us meaningfully but not in language.
We philosophers fail to see this because, disembodied talking-heads that we are, the only form of experience we recognize and legitimate is linguistic: thinking, talking, writing. But neither we nor the language which admittedly helps shape us could survive without the unarticulated background of prereflective, non-linguistic experience and understanding. Hermeneutic universalism thus fails in its argument that interpretation is the only game in town because language is the only game in town. For there is both uninterpreted linguistic understanding and meaningful experience that is non-linguistic. They reside in those unmanageably illiterate and darkly somatic neighborhoods of town that we philosophers and literary theorists are occupationally accustomed to avoid and ignore, but on which we rely for our non-professional sustenance and satisfactions. p.128

An initial stab at a semiotic square [David Robbins]

2007-08-23T13:10:00.000-07:00

This is our first sketch of a semiotic square illustrating ideas from our previous post Art/Life - David Robbins - LeisureArts:

Art/Life - David Robbins - LeisureArts

2007-08-23T11:28:00.001-07:00

The old art/life distinction.

The "triangulation" theory of David Robbins.

This notion is worked out in various ways throughout his book The Velvet Grind, but the essay "On Talent" spells things out pretty directly:

That something might stand outside art and report on it, comment on it, editorialize about it in an iconic language of its own - this was, and apparently still is, disorienting. The reason, I submit, is that it instantiates a complication of the modernist dialogue between life and art. Talent suggests that the old binary model has been superseded by a triangulated model whose points are life, art, and entertainment - a competing communication system no less madly self-sustaining, self-referential, and self-celebratory than art. "Showbiz" adds another category that's neither Art nor Life. pg.24

Robbins's triangulation is an important step to finding new forms and languages for what he calls "imaginative practice" - creative, funny, thoughtful forms of invention that are not art. We at LesiureArts find Robbins incredibly useful [We hope to write more, but being the slackers that we are, this might be as far as we get]. He also writes about inventing experience which he distinguishes from producing culture. This is a welcome relief from all of the talk about cultural production, as invented experience resonates nicely with John Dewey's aesthetic theory which is in dire need of being read by the legions of curators and artists who are reinventing the wheel of experience based practices.

The LeisureArts modified model.

As we mentioned, the triangulation theory is an important step, but LeisureArts is interested in expanding the terrain of inventive practices and theory to cover a host of other activities that Robbins's triangle can't account for. That leads to the above modification. In leisure, we have a broad field of activities that fall in between the various oppositions, some closer to one vertex or the other, but the field itself exists in a kind of equipoise (ideally). Adding leisure to the model allows for the inventiveness of car customizers, tea cozy makers, coat hanger collectors, home cooks, and others to mingle on equal footing with so called "high" forms of culture be it entertainment or art.