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

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

But back to the point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nedko Lucas - Emotions Without Masks

Colleen Asper - Portrait of the Artist as President

LEGO Mindstrom mod by some kids

BUT…

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

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

Some arguably relevant images I’m currently thinking about:

Christiania, Copenhagen - you are now leaving the EU

NSK

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

Renzo Martens - Enjoy Poverty

Albert Figurt - Notre CAM de Paris

Nathalie Bookchin - Mass Ornament - 2009

Michelle Teran's geolocative project

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

“And we inherit that, all at once, as if it were reality…” writes Nietzche in 1881 of the primordial poem which humans created, then proceeded to thoroughly forget they wrote. It seems that Joseph Beuys was somewhat late, then, in his simultaneous proclamation and (as Bill Arning points out) imposition that “Jeder mensch ist ein kunstler,” since perception itself was already the art in question. Perception is always a living-with, the partaking in a common but objectless substance, which Giorgio Agamben, with Aristotle in mind, calls friendship. And when Alan Kaprow observed keenly in 1971 that ‘everything is more interesting than art’ (art in the codified tradition of the mark-maker), it becomes clearer through Nietzche what he meant.

Wolfgang Schirmacher’s portrayal of Nietzche seems to suggest that the most artificial quality of life is its anthropomorphic quality. Artificial life (Schirmacher) is here the epic lie (in the most honest sense) motivated by our will to power, manifested by our emotive capacity with which we map moods and values onto the world, and undersigned later with the forged signature of a Christian God. In the very capriciousness of the story humankind has forged, Schirmacher would have it that the artifice is revealed. For Nietzche it seems that artifical life would show its rangy body nakedly to us after the mask of God has fallen. Schirmacher adds to this that it is the post-technological epoch which is truly chipping away at the patina which conceals our status as Homo Generator (one instance he gives is the post-mortem conflation of Lady Di and Mother Theresa calling natality and mortality into question once again). In the trajectory towards an awareness of Homo generator Schirmacher sets forth, there would have been less autonomy than symptomaticty in Daniel Birnbaum’s titling of the 2009 Venice Biennale, ‘Fare Mondi.’

Regarding the anthropocentricity of artifical life, Nietzche ruminates: “Nothing is beautiful, only the human individual is beautiful,” and one is reminded of Henri Bergson’ theory of humor that: only in the social and the human is there comedy, and that when we see it in the inanimate we are solely making the comparison to ourselves.

“In artifical life, only what my life facilitates to be fulfilled can count as real,” writes Schirmacher. I am not yet clear on Schirmacher’s level of commitment to a materialist world view, but for me one of his most piquant critical twists is that ethics are not ‘what one ought to do’ as traditionally formulated, but the question ‘what am I able I do to make a good life for myself.’ How can I not be reminded of late Wittgenstein’s suggestion that we ask not what something means, but what it is for (it makes me smirk to recall that it was Tiravanija who quoted that line, in interview). Without misreading either philosopher too foolishly, I would like to ask how this notion connects to Spinoza’s concept of free will as merely the knowledge that all our thoughts and actions are the only possible products of those conditions which precede them. I believe Spinoza, in Ethics, made reference to the passage of time as the vessel of the future steadily decanting its liquid into the vessel of the past.

I would also like to inquire into Schirmacher’s assertion that the calculable findings of natural science are instrumental, not artificial, while at the same time they serve as reality substitutes, perhaps heuristics? Does not the progress of science, from Leibniz’ calculus to Darwin’s theory of evolution, Feynman’s quantum electrodynamics, appear to reveal strata of reality without knowledge which calls for unpredictable redefinitions of artificiality in general would be less generative? How do we maintain a stable sense of ethics when the next revelation may negate those ethics?

Finally, regarding Schirmacher’s conception of ethics as self-determined: “Does my life achieve fulfillment? This is the only ethic question,” I agree that freedom is a secondary concern, but I wish to understand what the contingency plan is when two people’s personal ethics must compete over the same resources? If, as Schirmacher quotes from Schopenhauer, society profits from the failure of certain individuals, is Schirmacher’s personally-defined ethics a form of avoiding or shelving the humanistic project of a rescuing into the fold of the less fortunate, as difficult as this may seem.

</pardon me I’m only 23>

Peter Bruegel

Maurice Benayoun - Tunnel Under the Atlantic - 1994

Frances Flora Palmer for Currier + Ives - Across the Continent Westward the Course of Empire Makes its Way - 1868

Anne Collier - New Beginning - 2007

Lara Favaretto

William Wegman - Reading Two Books - 1971

James Croak Chandelier Mistaken for God - 2006

Helmut Smits - A Plastic Plant Acting Like a Real One by Losing Its Leaves

I’m not up on the legal or ethical nuances of the now mature debate about copyright/left, piracy, etc, but I think I know two things: I want to see the continuation excellent thought to be written and published and that requires money one way or another; and I think it’s right that my favorite authors, and even the ones I don’t like, get paid so that they can live.  But I also believe that the impulse towards piracy will not go away; the virtually irreversible way the Internet has been designed and then emergently developed, makes piracy, even ultimately ethical piracy, too easy too resist for mortals, perhaps especially when we say “oh, it’s just Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, they’re dead, they won’t mind!”  As it also clear, there are many living (and much less famous than the aforementioned) authors, breathing normal modern people who drive cars and have mortgages, on aaaarg, who, whether they are for or against, are not getting paid where they could (I didn’t say should) be getting paid.  One inchoate suggestion to mitigate comes to mind: the open-source software techie community has been leading the way for many years towards a highly permissive, tip jar model (definitely influenced by communist thought, though they call it common sense)… again, this usually operates under the threshold at which individuals become consumers in a knowledge economy, and points on a parabola, but is something like this model an option for philosophy with a niche audience? Should every writer, tenured or not, make a website with a little donation button; I bet many would be pleasantly surprised if they did.  This is sort of reducible to the argument I hear a lot regarding copyright; make it really easy for us to pay you, to which I’ll add: also pay you whenever we spontaneously feel generous or have some dosh in our pockets to. That’s to a degree the reality we’re working with.

But onto my more theoretical suggestion: I knew from critic Claire Bishop (via Artforum then via Academic Search Premier via Bard College wifi), to read up on Mouffe and Laclau (via aaaarg) who wrote at some length about an agonistic model of democracy.  This is one of the notions on which good relational aesthetics, of which I am a supporter even when I often cringe or get hypercritical about it, seems to be consistently grounded in… Things will probably never be perfect — until we are all uploaded to harddrives and allowed the Vanilla Sky life we all deserve, where we can meet our long lost lovers afresh, again and again, each balmy Jamaican evening or whatever your hetero/homo fantasy, forever, now, never bored, no existential void at the middle of things –  especially in this concatenous, multiplicitous, fragmented present in which we vascillate between advanced civility and brilliance, hopeless endless catastrophic barbarism, and not metaphysically knowing which way up is, what morality is, whether objective reality exists, whether we’re better off than our million year old early hominoid ancestors, whether it’s wrong to eat animals, whether men are all created equally, what historical actors can be legitimately considered in a materalist ontological framework, etcetera, but we can TRY GOD DAMMIT, we can strive (god meant in the secular sense of hetero ego love narratives of course).  We can create microtopias!  Out of recyclable, upcycleable materials.  We can read Bruce Sterling, E.O. Wilson, Stewart Brand, be kind when we can, and start free, ad hoc pedagogical interfaces.  I think the same can be said for the situation with publishing; war is peace in a sense it has been argued if provocatively, so I say let’s keep the agonistic relationship going… there’s more writing out there with more eyeballs getting to it, with more initiatives being orchestrated as a result, than ever before (even if this is partially a function of population increase) and somehow it’s working, agonistically.  There will be casualties!  Frivolous lawsuits against deceased Oklahomans, legitimate lawsuits against brat hipsters who know they’re pushing their luck and milking the radical political associations of p2p spuriously, authors struggling financially who could be struggling less or even well-off, career changes, but there will be more eyes on the prize: truth.  Publishers are going to invent more built-in self-destruct mechanisms, hackers are going to continue cracking DRM.  Non-activists will mostly keep reaping the benefits of using their ex-girlfriends’ Netflix accounts.

The goal is thinking and writing and acting our way out of the catastrophic car-wreck of history, out of technological determinsm (which the self-awarely agonistic model puts a wrench in), and of the fundamentally hostile conditions of the universe (disclosure: I’m a misotheistic agnostic currently, there have been many of us).  Even allowing for singularity and permanent virtual reality vacations, we eventually we need to be getting off this rock in large numbers within the next several hundred years (‘the eventual choice of ours is spaceflight or extinction’ to paraphrase Carl Sagan) and/or, probably both, majorly downsize world population.  Or we give up on the human project and turn to antinatalism, nihilism, a very very very grave form of Lewboski-ism.  I am suggesting the much less drastic but seemingly irrational plan of action that we actually draw out, protract the checkers-like, Tom and Jerry-esque, war over intellectual property, and more provocatively that we occasionally switch sides (we all feel like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man sometimes anyway), batting for the Lessigs, the slashdotters, the Estonian hackers, the spam-kings, and the Mark Taylors and even RIAA on ocassion; it’s a kind of dither that will confuse the hell out of them, and in the process we’ll get to keep our precious content, our precious celebrities and lionized heroes, and not pay that much for it unless we’re hardcore fans, patrons.  We’ll also continue to deal with invasions of privacy, mainstream media and news that panders to what I believe is honestly a mostly imaginary audience of dimwits, stupid ads, and occasional wrongful imprisonment: the secular sacrificing of a life; but you know what, 250,000 people died in Haiti a couple of months ago, and that was the universe’s fault; our ethical perplexedness is not completely unwarranted.

some related images:

Danny Snelson - Endless Nameless

anniversary letter from Richard to Patricia Nixon

Adrain Piper - Everything

Aeolipile - created by Hero of Alexandria, 1st century A.D.

Analytical Engine - unbuilt proto-computer 1829, replica, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace

Yann Arthus-Bertrand - 6 Billion Others Project

Benjamin Edwards

Ben Fry

Daniel Bozhkov - Training in Assertive Hospitality - 2002

cellular automata

Dylan Stone - Lifesize Watercolor - 2005

Christian Phillip Muller - Passe Immediat

Yes to All - Sylvia Fleury - 2007

from Brucennial - on the cover of Bookforum

David von Schlegell (they look like laptops)

Erwin Wurm

Helmut Smits - Unseen Work - 2008

Jan Hoeft - Hallo herr lewitt

Matthew Barney for JCrew

e-toy corporation - Mission Eternity

Jochem Hendricks - Tax

Rivane Neuenschwander - Joe Carioca - 2008

Ashkan Sahihi – Face series

Anna Jermolaewa – Kremlin Doppelganger

Lina Viste – Gronli 2

Matthieu Laurette – Artists Biopic CinemaThomas Demand – Tunnel

Valentin Hertweck

Superstudio – Supersurface life – 1972

]]> http://blog.selfportrait.net/2010/05/05/has-it-all-happened-before/feed/ 0 http://blog.selfportrait.net/2010/05/05/has-it-all-happened-before/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/antartica/~3/u8frwbNprcQ/ http://blog.selfportrait.net/2010/04/26/arts-writers-grant-program-2010/#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:14:33 +0000 Selfportrait http://blog.selfportrait.net/?p=1128 via e-flux:

The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program supports individual writers whose work addresses contemporary visual art through grants ranging from 3,000 to 50,000 USD.

Writers who meet the program’s eligibility requirements are invited to apply in the following categories:

• Articles
• Blogs
• Books
• New and Alternative Media
• Short-Form Writing

We regret that due to legal constraints we can only fund U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and holders of O-1 visas. For guidelines and additional eligibility requirements, please visit http://www.artswriters.org.

ART WRITING WORKSHOP

In partnership with the International Association of Art Critics/USA Section, the Arts Writers Grant Program offers applicants consultations with leading art critics. For more information, please visit http://www.aicausa.org.

In January edge.org posed it’s 2010 Annual Question, “how is the internet changing the way you think?” to 172 artists, technologists, and intellectuals.  Posing the question was John Brockman, the literary agent and impresario who has had a hand in bringing to the mainstream many of the house-hold scientific surnames of the last thirty years (Dawkins, Hitchens, Brand, Kurzweil, Dyson, Dyson…). In 1998, he picked up the idea of The World Question Center after the death of his friend and the project’s founder, the artist James Lee Byars.  Brockman wrote the following about the project in 1971, which did not come to fruition until 27 years later:

“James Lee inspired the idea that led to the Reality Club (and subsequently to Edge), and is responsible for the motto of the club. He believed that to arrive at an axiology of societal knowledge it was pure folly to go to a Widener Library and read 6 million volumes of books. (In this regard he kept only four books at a time in a box in his minimally furnished room, replacing books as he read them.) This led to his creation of the World Question Center in which he planned to gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world together in a room, lock them behind closed doors, and have them ask each other the questions they were asking themselves.

The expected result, in theory, was to be a synthesis of all thought. But between idea and execution are many pitfalls. James Lee identified his 100 most brilliant minds (a few of them have graced the pages of this Site), called each of them, and asked what questions they were asking themselves. The result: 70 people hung up on him.”((http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wqc/index.html))

The 2010 iteration of the Annual Question, “how is the internet changing the way you think?” has largely been taken up by technologists in terms of cognitive processes, and as the Internet and its information-sharing model, the WWW, mature, this has been one of internet discourse’s main focuses.  Some examples: Jaron Lanier has long been concerned with ‘Digital Maoism’ and the risks of horde mentality defining knowledge on the web, wikipedia in particular.  Nicholas Carr worries that the externalization of knowledge facilitated by the web might be making us stupid (similar is George Dyson’s stance).  Carr is also concerned with the cultural phenomenon of Nowness, as is David Gelernter, claiming that “We are choosing nowness over ripeness” (and he’s not talking about Art Fag City or Modern Art Notes). Frank Schirrmacher thinks we are becoming ‘informavores’. Playwright Richard Foreman thinks we might be becoming Pancake People, spread wide and thin over networks at the cost of a dense inner core of personality and selfhood.

An interesting conversation ensued when I posted the Question as recommended reading to a philosophically oriented discussion group on Internet Studies as part of the grad school I attend.  One of my colleagues remarked on the paucity of philosophers on Brockman’s list, given how front-and-center the Internet is for many contemporary thinkers; where were Badiou, Zizek, Zielinski, Ettinger, Ronnell?  I’ll preface that I am not quite clear how the lines are drawn between philosophy and other overlapping but different practices, other than that Heidegger gave up philosophy to be a thinker (Noga Arikha was on the list; is she not at all a philosopher?), but I too took interest considering that Edge is also supposed to be founded in service of a ‘third culture’ (a concept John Brockman developed after being inspired by C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture ‘The Two Cultures’), which would synthesize the ‘humanities’ and ‘sciences’ after their long period of communication breakdown and mutual ignorance/hostility (the fact that, for example, in the 1930s great mathematicians and physicists were not considered “intellectuals”).

However, it was explained to me that Brockman and the techie-culture contingent which he anchors seem to include the designation ‘philosophy’ in the territory of snobbish aloofness that for Brockman defined the literary world he witnessed the 1960s.  Artists, for Brockman, seemed much more attuned to the most relevant discourse, as when John Cage shared with him a book on cybernetics by Norbert Weiner.¹

It seems, according to critics of Brockman, that much contemporary philosophy often does not share the entrenched techno-positivism and fundamental optimism and/or complicity with techno-industrial culture, and so gets occluded from the conversation.  But aren’t there heretical arguments going on in this discussion, outside of academic philosophy?  Would the censorship advocating right-wing, for instance, constitute a heretical philosophical contingent?

Also, I bring this argument up often when I’m less than permissive about the arrogantly complicit honorific way many people talk about art AS THE default (like that art owns creativity but occasionally mere scientists are capable of it), but I have read in a few books, most memorably Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’, that given the wild complexity of much modern science and mathematics, especially since the early twentieth century, philosophy (and yes, visual art) has been ‘unable to keep up’ – to paraphrase Hawking – with the technical developments in many fields, and thus there is a difficulty in sharing the highest levels of discourse other than as cargo cult.  Sometimes this yields influential results, eg. Alain Badiou’s modeling after mathematics.  Maybe this just another techno-elitist stance, but it bears weight considering how very much beautiful  philosophically oriented writing is produced today from within laboratory-research communities.

1. http://www.brockman.com/press/2000.02.21.derspiegel.html

Sylvère Lotringer: Absolutely. This has little to do with individual works – whether good or bad – only with the dizzying change of scale, the massive production, circulation and consumption world-wide. The art market has expanded exponentially and has been losing its shape to achieve monstrous proportions. It is occupying all the space, wildly metastasizing in every possible direction. It is so bloated at the core that it doesn’t seem able anymore to digest all the data. It is on its way to surpass its function. The early 1980s orchestrated the return to painting, and gave the art market a chance to fasten its hold. But it didn’t stop there and it didn’t take long before art started outgrowing its own boundaries, opening itself up to the exchangeability of capital. First it absorbed photography, until then considered unworthy; then it move to architecture, fashion and design. Along the way, it has integrated ‘outsider art’, abolishing its own internal limit, and put together ubiquitous ‘installations’ liable to be pitched anywhere and provide a fast pedigree for ‘rogue nations’. Today it is difficult to imagine anything that could be excluded from art. Its field has expanded exponentially to include the entire society. Along the way, it has grabbed anything that could be used for its own purpose, recycling garbage, forging communities, investigating political issues and perfumes, tampering with biology, etc., simultaneously appearing and disappearing with an ambiguous promiscuity. Art has finally fulfilled the program of Dada with a vengeance, embedding art into life. The only thing left for art to do is ‘auto-dissolve.’ Most avant-gardes promised too much and never delivered. Their manifestos of ‘auto-dissolution’, on the contrary, revealed them at their most radical and paroxysmal moment. This moment has come to contemporary art, and it may even spare itself the trouble of publicizing its own exit. Forget art then. Unless it is capable of bringing us up to the next paradigmatic shift, as Andy Warhol once did, forgetting about its own name and past history. Artists themselves maybe have been showing the way by venturing so far astray from home. All it would take is to cut off the umbilical cord that still ties art to the market, or rather turn it into a rich rhizome. Some art groups are already working at it. Autonomists used to say, ‘The margins at the centre’. We haven’t yet given art a chance to grow autonomously.

from “Intelligence Agency” in Frieze, Issue 125, Sep 2009