bigtime

Seen from the Right Height [Everything Comes Together]

2006-06-13T02:48:00.000-07:00

[Seen] from the right height everything comes together: the thoughts of the philosopher, the work of the artist, and good deeds…

The philosopher is the self-revelation of nature’s workshop; the philosopher and the artist tell the trade secrets of nature.

The sphere of the philosopher and the artist exists above the tumult of contemporary history, beyond necessity.

The philosopher as brakeshoe on the wheel of time.

Philosophers appear during those times of great danger, when the wheel of time is turning faster and faster. Together with art, they step into the place vacated by myth. But they are far ahead of their time, since the attention of their contemporaries only turns toward them very slowly.

A people which is becoming conscious of its dangers produces a genius…

...

After Socrates it is no longer possible to preserve the commonweal: hence that individualizing ethics which seeks to preserve the individual.

The unmeasured and indiscriminate knowledge drive is, along with its historical background, a sign that life has grown old. There is great danger that individuals are becoming inferior; Therefore, their interests are powerfully captivated by the objects of knowledge, no matter which. The universal drives have become so feeble that they are no longer able to hold the individual in check.

The Teuton used the sciences to transfigure all of his limitations at the same time that he transmitted them: fidelity, modesty, self-restraint, diligence, cleanliness, love of order—the family virtues. But also formlessness, the complete lack of any vivacity in life, and pettiness. His unlimited knowledge drive is the consequence of an impoverished life. Without this drive he would be petty and spiteful—which he often is despite it.

Today we are presented with a higher form of life, against a background of art: and now likewise, the immediate consequence is [the development of] a selective knowledge drive, i.e. philosophy.
Terrible danger: the fusion of the American kind of political agitation with the rootless culture of the scholars…

...

Enormous artistic powers are required in opposition to iconic historiography and natural science.
What should the philosopher do? In the midst of this ant-like swarming he must emphasize the problem of existence, all the eternal problems.

The philosopher should recognize what is needed, and the artist should create it. The philosopher should empathize to the utmost with the universal suffering, just as each of the ancient Greek philosophers expresses a need and erects his system in the vacant space indicated by that need.

Within this space he constructs his world.

**The above compiled verbatim from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge, conflating moments of pages 3, 6, and 8 as they appear in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, edited by Daniel Breazeale.

Two Years Ago Today [University of California, Santa Barbara MFA Graduation Speeches]

2006-06-12T02:48:00.000-07:00

It now gives me great pleasure to introduce Diran Lyons. Diran has been a terrific inspiration for me. One thing that anyone who teaches theory loves is a student whose work can never be shoehorned into the theory that you read and teach. I’m always trying to play catch-up with Diran’s work because it is very, very difficult to classify. He works in a lot of different media, working with the whole gallery space, indoor and outdoor. He makes objects. The work is also extremely conceptual, and after two years of working with him I’m still not sure I understand that much about what he’s doing [crowd laughter]. Those of you who saw my feeble attempts at the MFA opening last week will know that I didn’t do a very good job at describing it to the assembled multitudes there, but that doesn’t make it any the less important and interesting.

One great thing about Diran is that he really delves into extremely deep and difficult issues. A whole section of his dissertation and part of his work took on the Adam and Eve story in Genesis which he challenged and basically put a completely new spin on. He is probably better read in Nietzsche than I am, and I am probably Nietzsche’s biggest fan. But he incorporates these elements into a use of art that really develops the notion of the aesthetic object as something that intrinsically lies. It doesn’t tell the truth immediately or straightforwardly. In fact, it pulls the wool over your eyes to actually get you to discover a greater truth that lies behind it, which is of course a very, very Nietzschean idea. Diran is a master at that, and it is a very difficult thing to pull off. He also managed to explicate a lot of these ideas in one of the most brilliant MFA theses that I’ve ever read, so a lot of the work we put in on that paid off absolutely magically in my opinion.

So it has actually been quite a treat for me to work with Diran because I can discuss very deep philosophical ideas with him, we can talk ‘Nietzsche’ on a mutual admiration level, and he also loves baseball. His great magical sporting moment is the same as mine, which is Kirk Gibson’s home run in the bottom of the ninth in the 1988 World Series, first game for the Dodgers against the Oakland A’s, which happened to take place on my birthday and also that of Friedrich Nietzsche [crowd laughter]! Diran for me kind of cosmologically brings all these things together [crowd laughter], so I am going to get him to talk about that a little further. So, Diran, come on up…

--Colin Gardner, UCSB MFA graduation speech. June 12, 2004.

===

Wow, thank you, Colin. I’m not really sure what to add [crowd laughter]. That was a very nice introduction. I would first like to echo some of the things spoken about by Eric [Beltz] and Penelope [Gottlieb] and Kelly [Hudak]. This faculty is extremely giving. The facilities are great for making basically whatever you want and completely exploring. So, I’m really indebted to the program. I think they really facilitate our growth, and put us into a position to try to go out and tackle the world somehow. I’m not quite sure how I will go about doing it, but I’m certain my colleagues will do a much better job than I.

Other than that, some of the other things that Colin mentioned: I would say he’s really being euphemistic about me knowing anything more about Nietzsche than he does [crowd laughter]. I just really would like to acknowledge Colin and my thesis committee, Marko [Peljhan], Jane Mulfinger, and the rest of the faculty. I’m just very happy I spent two years here. I enjoyed it. I was talking with some of my colleagues and friends too about how you get in this moment and you think you’re here forever, and now it’s time to move on and do something else...to hopefully jump into the vast waters of ‘fun’ as it were in the real world. So, anyway, thanks again. I really don’t have much else to talk about [crowd laughter]!

--Diran Lyons’ response to Colin Gardner’s introduction. June 12, 2004.

===

Thank you, Diran. I only want to add that it was also always challenging to talk with you about your exhibitions that you were building at a high rate. In my ‘little black book’ I wrote down that you were an exhibition factory, and you know what I mean. The especially enlightening moment was when you also secretly taped our conversations [Marko and crowd laughter]. And I hope that that gets into some history books, so...

How Do We Know [That The Changes That Happen In Language Are Arbitrary Or Random]?

2006-05-31T02:45:00.000-07:00

Drawing: Grace continues to instruct Reggie while Saussure and Big Rat play cards in the background. "The sign changes in time because the signifier has an arbitrary relationship to its signified. They do not mirror each other in this change." "Gin," yells Big Rat to Saussure.

Drawing: Reggie says to Grace, "The mirror theory helps to understand this idea. If signs reflected a real world, then the signified would be the real world. In this case, any change in the real world would trigger a corresponding change in the sign." "So," says Grace, "If trees disappeared, the word for tree would disappear. In this case, anytime a word disappears or changes, that means, according to mirror theory, the object in the real world would disappear." Saussure is seen in the background paying Big Rat out of his wallet.

Obscenity and Speech [Where to Draw Lines and Who Does the Drawing?]

2006-01-05T02:44:00.000-08:00

In Miller v. California (413 U.S. 14 [1973]) the U.S. Supreme Court established a three-pronged test for obscenity prohibitions which would not violate the First Amendment:

(a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Although much debated, this standard remains the law of the land, and elements of this language have been included in both the authorizing legislation for the National Endowment for the Arts (20 U.S.C. 95 et seq.) and the Communications Decency Act prohibiting "obscenity" and "indecency" on the Internet. The Communications Decency Act was struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 1997. The NEA legislation was been struck down as unconstitutional by lower courts but was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1998 (NEA v. Finley, No. 97-371, 1998).

One controversy over this exception to free speech is whether obscenity causes real harm sufficient to justify suppression of free speech. Does viewing obscenity make it more likely that a man will later commit rape, or other acts of violence against women, obviously real harm to another person? Does reading about war make it more likely that someone will start a war? Even if there is some evidence of such causal relationships, however tenuous or strong, is it sufficient to justify this exception to free speech? Alternatively, could the prohibition on obscenity be a reflection of moral values and societal standards which should more properly be handled in the private sector through moral education, not government censorship?

Another problem area is determining what counts as "obscenity". In Miller, the court tried to fashion a standard which could be adapted to different communities, so that what counts as obscenity in rural Mississippi might not count as obscenity in Atlanta or New York City. Is this fair? Do the people in those areas themselves agree on community standards? What is the "community" for art that is displayed on-line on the Internet?

[The above material via California State University, Long Beach]

...Further, the most critical issue to my view is the content of (c) in the Miller test, which seems to directly address the assumption which drives a spirit of concern in Jesse Helms' quote cited in the Haacke post below, the assumption being that Helms’ taste matches or surpasses that of a contemporary art curator/director ["No tax fund shall be used for garbage just because some self-appointed 'experts' have been foolish enough to call it 'art'." Italics within the quote administered by Diran Lyons]. The use of the term “self-appointed” is curious, particularly whenever a situation similar to the censorship imposed upon the Brooklyn Museum and its director, Arnold Lehman, occurs. Given that Lehman’s credentials as a scholar of art history [Ph.D. at Yale University, MA and BA at John Hopkins University, Director of The Baltimore Museum of Art for nearly two decades, Director of the Parks Council of New York, and Director of the Urban Improvements Program of the City of New York prior to his involvement in Brooklyn] speak to the fact that his training in the philosophy of aesthetics, art history, and art theory faced rigorous critique from some of the strongest in the field, Helms’ term “self-appointed” is in poor word choice. That Helms refuses to take the issue deeper - into the very content of the artwork itself, the artist’s intention, and the taking place of an overall social critique - is egregious at best.

Hack or Haacke? [To Speak or To Be Silenced]

2006-01-03T02:43:00.000-08:00

From Hans Haacke's Sanitation, 2000, with wall texts reading as follows:

We will do everything that we can to remove funding for the Brooklyn Museum until the director comes to his senses.
--Rudolph Giuliani

I would ask people to step back and think about civilization. Civilization has been trying to find the right place to put excrement, not on the walls of museums.
--Rudolph Giuliani

Since they seem to have no compunction about putting their hands in the taxpayers' pockets for the exhibit, I'm not going to have any compunction about putting them out of business.
--Rudolph Giuliani

The elite cries 'censorship' and falls back upon that last refuge of the modern scoundrel, the First Amendment.
--Patrick J. Buchanan

Do you want to face the voters in your district with the charge that you are wasting their hard-earned money to promote sodomy, child-pornography, and attacks on Jesus Christ?
--Pat Robertson

No tax fund shall be used for garbage just because some self-appointed 'experts' have been foolish enough to call it 'art'.
--Jesse Helms

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
--Excerpt from the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States

===

In light of the quotations above, it would be of particular interest and entertaining at any rate to observe Helms and Giuliani actually entering into a discourse concerning the artwork's content, instead of merely asserting domineering blanket statements which have not been defended with any rigor beyond the posture, "I don't like something to which I did not give more than a second's thought." In any event, Giuliani's actions were declared unconstitutional by a federal judge soon thereafter.

Danto's 'After The End of Art': [The End of a Grand Narrative]

2005-12-11T02:42:00.000-08:00

Philosopher, author, and art critic for The Nation, Arthur Danto has been a major shaper of recent aesthetic theory. He is best known for a contemporary version of Hegel's "end of art" thesis, first ennunciated by Danto in a 1984 essay called "The End of Art", and developed most recently in his After the End of Artnot mean by it. He is not claiming that no-one is making art anymore; nor is he claiming that no good art is being made any more. But he thinks that a certain history of western art has come to an end, in about the way that Hegel suggested it would. He summarizes that history as follows:

"...the master narrative of the history of art--in the West but by the end not in the West alone--is that there is an era of imitation, followed by an era of ideology, followed by our post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes.
. . .In our narrative, at first only mimesis [imitation] was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story" (AEA p.47).

The Impressionists are the transitional figures between the era of imitation and the period of Modernism (what Danto calls the Age of Manifestos), since they are trying to be more accurate representers, but succeed rather in calling attention to the paint on the canvas (contrast a Renaissance painting, or for that matter a Vermeer, where the last thing you are supposed to see is the brushstrokes). The transition from modernism to post-modernism occurs with pop art. Danto discusses this transition in his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, AEA pp. 195ff.). In the source cited, Danto suggests that there is a third condition; but I have not yet been able to get clear on what the third condition is.

The new and curious thing about art in this era, according to Danto, is that you can no longer tell whether something is art by looking at it. Rather anything can be art, and anyone can be an artist. That is because art is about physically embodied meaning. All that is necessary for something to be a work of art, says Danto in the 1984 piece, is that it should be about something, and that it should embody its meaning.

After the end of this linear progress of western art, in a sense, anything goes. Pluralism reigns. Photorealism rubs shoulders with abstract expressionism; interactive installations stand next to color-field paintings and political statements. The only thing that is no longer possible, of course, is to paint as past painters did. It is possible to make paintings that look like Vermeers, as the Dutch forger Hans Van Meegeren did in the early part of the twentieth century. But such paintings cannot mean what Vermeers paintings meant, because they were made in a different historical context and for a different purpose. We cannot escape our historical situation.

If Danto's thesis is true, what does it mean for working artists now? What do you make after the end of art? In the last chapter of After the End of Art, Dando suggests that the message must be a kind of comedy or play, which does not take itself too seriously. "The true heroes of the post-historical period are the artists who are masters of every style without having a pianterly style at all..." (AEA p. 217). As examples, he cites the Russian emigre artists Komar and Melamid, who in a work commisioned by The Nation magazine first surveyed the USA to see what everyone wanted most and least in a painting, and then produced what they claim are America's most and least wanted paintings. They have since repeated the process for several other countries; the results may be viewed at http://www.diacenter.org/km/index.html, where links may also be found to a similar project involving music. The work, of course, is not the paintings themselves, but the play of ideas involved in making them, in thinking that they could be made, in kibbitzing on the different styles they use, in winking ironically at the art educated audience who will actually view the work, though they would never buy the painting if they found it by itself in a gallery, and so on.

Danto has surely noticed something true when he claims that pluralism now reigns in the art world in a way that it never used to do. Does this mean that the rest of his thesis is correct? Whether it does or not, the thesis and the observations on which it is based provide a healthy challenge to anyone trying to think about the state of contemporary art (in the west or indeed in the world) and the directions it may now be taking.

1937/2006 [Picasso]

2005-12-01T02:41:00.000-08:00

A great piece. And yet, what to do now?

Coffee Breaks and Muffin Cakes [I'm Not Sure It Is Sticky]

2005-10-28T01:56:00.000-07:00

..I saw a thirty-ish yuppie rollerblade into Starbucks screaming at his broker. As he paid for his coffee, he actually fired the guy on the spot. What spot? Except for his raised voice, erratic arm movements, all of which we normally assume are directed at a person, there was no sign of another--only the empty space between his eyes and the blackboard menu he perused on the wall. This is all very existential: He directs his anger at once to no one and to everyone. On the other end of the line, we have to assume someone was feeling good, bad, or indifferent--someone human.

Swept off Our Feet [And Under the Rug]

2005-10-26T01:55:00.000-07:00

…The evidence of Mr. Cheney's direct involvement in the effort to learn more about Mr. Wilson is sure to intensify the political pressure on the White House in a week of high anxiety among Republicans about the potential for the case to deal a sharp blow to Mr. Bush's presidency.

Mr. Tenet was not available for comment Monday night. But another former senior intelligence official said Mr. Tenet had been interviewed by the special prosecutor and his staff in early 2004, and never appeared before the grand jury. Mr. Tenet has not talked since then to the prosecutors, the former official said.

The former official said he strongly doubted that the White House learned about Ms. Wilson from Mr. Tenet.

On Monday, Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby both attended a cabinet meeting with Mr. Bush as the White House continued trying to portray business as usual. But the assumption among White House officials is that anyone who is indicted will step aside.

On June 12, 2003, the day of the conversation between Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby, The Washington Post published a front-page article reporting that the C.I.A. had sent a retired American diplomat to Niger in February 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq had been seeking to buy uranium there. The article did not name the diplomat, who turned out to be Mr. Wilson, but it reported that his mission had not corroborated a claim about Iraq's pursuit of nuclear material that the White House had subsequently used in Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address…

[Un?] Pure [Reasoned] Painting and [Repercussions for?] Foundationalism

2005-10-06T01:49:00.000-07:00

In one way postmodernism is marked by antifoundationalism, as in the thought of Richard Rorty or Jacques Derrida, or at least by the recognition that if there are to be foundations, they must be consistent with an art world as unstructured as Hans Belting has found ours to be. “Western civilization is not the first civilization to turn around and question its own foundations,” Greenberg wrote in 1960. “But it is the one that has gone furthest in doing so.”

Greenberg sees “this self-critical tendency” as beginning with Kant, whom he somewhat archly classes as “the first real modernist” because he was the first “to criticize the means itself of criticism.” And he sees the “essence of modernism” to lie “in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline.” This is internal criticism, and it in effect means, in the case of art, that art under the modernist sprit, at every point, is self-questioning: and this in turn means that art is its own subject and, in the case of painting, which was essentially Greenberg’s concern, the subject of painting was painting. Modernism was a kind of collective inquiry from within by painting into painting in the effort to exhibit what painting itself is.

What makes Heidegger a “modernist” philosopher is that he takes ancient questions of Being, and, rather than confront it head on, he asks what kind of being it is for whom the question arises, so that in effect his inquiry is about itself. What makes Modernist painting modern is, on Greenberg’s account, its taking upon itself the task of determining “through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself.” This essence of art coincided, Greenberg thought, “with all that was unique in the nature of the medium.” To be true to its essence each modernist work was obliged to “eliminate…any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art.” In consequence, each art, under self-criticism, would be rendered “pure,” a concept perhaps Greenberg really did borrow from Kant’s notion of pure reason. Kant called a mode of knowledge pure when “there is no admixture of anything empirical,” that is, when it was pure a priori knowledge. And pure reason is the source of the “principles whereby we know we know anything absolutely a priori. Each modernist painting, in Greenberg’s view, would then be a critique of pure painting: painting from which one should be able to deduce the principles peculiar to painting as painting.

Greenberg notoriously identifies the essence of painting with flatness: “It was the stressing of the ineluctable flatness of the surface that remained…more fundamental than anything else to the processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under modernism.” While emphasizing flatness did not exclude representation from painting, it did exclude illusion, which requires the use of three-dimensional space, itself a borrowing from another art and hence a contaminant of painting construed as pure… Painting had a developmental and progressive history only by usurping the prerogatives of sculpture.