Archive for January 2005
Jan Herman reports in a posting (2005.01.30) that John Zorn:
….repeatedly stressed that his music comes from some sort of higher power. He said that it would not have been possible for him to complete over 300 of his Masadic melodies during a very short time period without some sort of supernatural help. In the program, he writes that composition is at its best “when the piece is seemingly writing itself and the composer is merely an observer. He says that some of his works, “transcend my expectations and my abilities. I cannot explain them. They are part of the Mystery.”
Here we have an example of the need for a new language, a new understanding, of the creative process, one better informed by psychology than mystic mumbo-jumbo.
Psychologists tell us today that consciousness is a story teller. As Steven Pinker tells it on page 42 of The Blank Slate :
Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge (in fact, we are blind to detail outside the fixation point). […] One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who showed that when surgeons cut the corpus collosum joining the cerebral hemispheres, they literally cut the self in two, and each hemisphere can exercise free will without the other one’s advice or consent. Even more disconcertingly, the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the behavior chosen without it’s knowledge by the right. For example, if an experimenter flashes the command “WALK” to the right hemisphere (by keeping it in the part of the visual field that only the right hemisphere can see), the person will comply with the request and begin to walk out of the room. But when the person (specifically, the person’s left hemisphere) is asked why he just got up he will say, in all sincerity, “To get a Coke” – rather than, “I don’t really know” or “The urge just came over me” or “You’ve been testing me for years since I had the surgery, and sometimes you get me to do things but I don’t know exactly what you asked me to do”. Similarly, if the patient’s left hemisphere is shown a chicken and his right hemisphere is shown a snowfall, and both hemispheres have to select a picture that goes with what they saw (each using a different hand), the left hemisphere picks a claw (correctly) and the right picks a shovel (also correctly). But when the left hemisphere is asked why the whole person made those choices, it blithely says, “Oh that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”The spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-generator in the patient’s left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains. The conscious mind – the self or soul – is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief. […] Often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.
This coincides with Malcolm Gladwell’s reportage in his most recent book, Blink which I haven’t yet read, but in a presentation (audio file available here, a fuller transcription from where I take these quotes is here) presented last October, he says:
We don’t have access to our unconscious, [we don’t know where are thoughts] come from that bubbles up from the recesses of our brain. So what do we do? Well, we have a behavior that we just did, we just made a decision of a certain kind, we don’t really know where it came from, so we come up with an explanation, we make up a story. And we’re really really good at making up stories. I call this The Story Telling Problem. And this is something that happens over and over again.
So both arguments imply that we need language to self-narrate understanding. Zorn’s example goes back to Socrates arguing that artists were inspired. Now, at the dawn of the 21st Century, we can put aside such mystical and primitive tales. The language of inspiration has been the only one available to us since the time of Socrates, and Zorn’s lack of knowledge of contemporary psychology means that to explain his creativity to himself, he falls back on that language.
As a creative person, informed by Gladwell and Pinker, I would argue that the mind is made up of many processes, and we are only ever conscious of a brief portion of what’s going. We tell ourselves stories to explain our actions, but those actions are being processed beneath or above the threshold were the “PR person” gets a hold of them. In Zorn’s case I would say that his musical facility means that a portion of his mind has great facility with music, and when it comes time to compose, this is brought to the awareness of the PR person and the part of his mind that directs writing and all that. However, the PR person is at a loss to understand just what is happening, because it doesn’t have the language to explain it. The only thing it has available for his ‘Coke story’ is to fall back on the mystical stories inherited from the time of Socrates.
Malcolm Gladwell’s presentation at PopTech! Oct 21-23 2004 in Camden Maine
Audio file available here via IT Conversations.
[transcription beginning at 21:12/30:17]
We don’t have access to our unconscious, we don’t know what these thing are coming, where they come from that bubbles up from the recesses of our brain. So what do we do? Well, we have a behavior that we just did, we just made a decision of a certain kind, we don’t really know where it came from, so we come up with an explanation, we make up a story. And we’re really really good at making up stories. I call this The Story Telling Problem. And this is something that happens over and over again.
I spent some time when I was writing my book [ Blink] with this tennis coach Vic Brayden, and he had spent a lot time talking with world class tennis players, and one the things he noticed is that if you ask a world class tennis player how he hits a top spin forehand they will always say this, ‘Right at the moment of impact, I roll my wrist’. Well, Vic Brayden took video tapes of world class tennis players hitting top spin forehands and digitized them and broke them down to, you know, milliseconds and noticed that no one ever rolled their wrist when they hit the ball, ever, the wrist was always fixed. In fact, if you roll your wrist when you hit the ball you can’t hit a good top spin forehand. Yet all these are guys going around the country giving seminars teaching young kids how to hit a top spin forehand and saying, ‘At the critical moment or impact, you gotta roll your wrist just like that’. They had no idea. These are people who hit a top spin forehand better than anyone else in human history and yet they are fundamentally incapable of accurately describing the way in which they perform that task. And when they’re asked to describe it, what do they do? They tell a story.
Now this is a real problem, cause what it says is … that a whole assumption of this project is that we can ask people to explain what they’re feeling but then when we look at the various situations we say … that when we listen to the various stories people tell about why they think the way the do, or what they want there are no connections to reality. They’re just plucking them out of the thin air.
Problem # 3. And I think this is the most serious problems of all and that is that asking people to think about what they want causes this to change their opinion of what they want, in fact it screws up their ability to understand and recognize what they want. This problem in psychology is called the Perils of Introspection Problem, and a lot of research has been done by a guy named Tim Wilson at U.V.A and he once did this very simple experiment called the Poster Test.
And the Poster Test is you got a bunch of posters in a room, you bring in some college students in, and you say ‘pick any poster you want, take it home’. And they do that. Second group is brought in and you say, ‘pick any poster you want, tell me why you want it, and then go home’. Couple of months passes, and he calls up all the students, and he asks, “That poster you got a couple of months back, do you like it?’ and the kids, who in the first group didn’t have to explain their choice, all liked their poster. And the kids in the second group who did have to explain, now they hate their poster. And not only that, the kids who had to explain their poster picked a very different kind of poster then the kids who didn’t have to explain their poster. So making people explain what they want changes their preference and changes their preference in a negative way, it causes them to gravitate toward something they actually weren’t interested in in the first place.
Now, there’s a wonderful little detail in this – that there were two kinds of posters in the room, there where Impressionist prints and then there were these photos of, you know, kitten hanging by bars that said, ‘Hang in there baby’. And the students who were asked to explain their preference overwhelmingly chose the kitten. And the ones who weren’t asked to explain overwhelmingly chose the Impressionist poster. And they were happy with their choice obviously, who could be happy with a kitten on their wall after 3 months? Now, why is that?
Why when you ask someone to explain their preference do they gravitate toward the least sophisticated of the offerings? Cause it’s a language problem. You’re someone, you know in your heart that you prefer the Impressionists but now you have to come up with a reason for your choice, and you really don’t have the language to say why you like the Impressionist photo. What you do have the language for is to say, ‘Well, I like the kitten cause I had a kitten when I was growing up,’ and you know … so forcing you to explain something when you don’t necessarily have the vocabulary and the tools to explain your preference automatically shifts you toward the most conservative and the least sophisticated choice. Now you see this time and time again in for example, market research.
That the act of getting someone in a room and asking them to explain their preference causes them to move away from the more sophisticated, more daring, more radical ideas. The classic example is All in the Family. When the first pilot was made back in the 70s, it was taken to ABC and ABC had a big room full of people, as many people as this, and they showed them the test and they asked them to rate the pilot, asked them to rate it on a scale of 1 to 100. You need 70 to get on the air basically. This All in the Family pilot got 40. An unbelievably low score. And the comments were, ‘well, the real problem is Archie Bunker, he needs to be a little softer, more nurturing, more of a caring father.’ That was people’s response. So what did ABC do? They passed on it. Guys went to CBS, CBS tested it, did really poorly, but some guy at the top of CBS really liked it, and said, well why not, let’s just play it, they put it on the air and it was one of the most lucrative sitcom franchises in the history of television. So what does this mean?
Does this mean we can’t trust people at all? Maybe. What is really means though is that there is a class of products that are difficult for people to interpret. Some things really are ugly and when we say that they’re ugly they really are ugly and we’re always gonna think their ugly. They’re never going to be beautiful. But there’s another class of products which we see and we don’t really know what we think, they challenge us, we don’t know how to describe them, and we end up, if we’re forced to explain ourselves, in calling them ugly because we can’t think of a better was to describe our feelings. And the real problem with asking people what they think about something is that we don’t have a good way to distinguish between these two states. We don’t have a good way of distinguishing between the thing that really is ugly and the thing that is radical and challenging and simply new and unusual.
And so often when we use the evidence of what people say, to determine what we ought to do, what we ought to go forward [with], we end up throwing out not just the things that ought to be thrown out, but the very things that are most meaningful, and have the potential to be most revolutionary.
There are, I think, two important lessons in that; the first is the one I dwell on in my book, which is simply that because of this fact people who come up with new ideas and new products or radical new things need to be very careful in how they interpret the evidence of consumers, the people that they ask about, random people whose opinions they seek. That we need to be very skeptical of ‘no’ and very skeptical of ‘ugly’ and very skeptical of ‘I don’t like that’. Particularly when we’re dealing with something that is radical and in some way challenging and difficult for someone to completely explain their feelings about. That’s one implication.
But the second implication, which is really one that’s more relevant to this discussion here, is that we’ve gotten really really good in recent years at describing all kinds of things about the way that human beings work and the way the mind operates. We understand genetics, we understand physiology, we have a whole vast array of knowledge now about why we do the things we do. But there is one area, perhaps the most important area of all, where we remain really really bad, and that is interpreting the contents of our own hearts, and as we go forward and learn more and more about human beings, I think we need to remember this fact, and to be humbled, because I’m not sure this is a mystery that we’re gonna solve.
Last week, I found these two pictures on Franklin Einspruch’s Artblog.net:
While walking to YYZ that evening, I had the memory of the nude figure in mind when I thought about the materiality of painting. Through art school, I’d always hoped to become a Renaissance master, learn the techniques of glazes and sufmato. Not that I planned to paint like that for the rest of my life, but I at least wanted the ability. Of course, that ambition was a faux pas, and whenever I expressed interest in fellow painters who were good at rendering, or drafting, I usually encountered the snickers of my other painter friends. By their lack of interest in my own work, and their lack of engagement with me in terms of the craft, I knew that they thought I was a shit painter.
My best friend was the worst at this: I knew he didn’t take me seriously, but when it comes to my talents I don’t care what other people think of me.
Art has always been a form of self-entertainment, a way to kill time, a way to explore things. I create because I want something to do. After sometime doing this as a child and a teenager, you pick up some techniques, next thing you know, people are calling you an artist. So then you’re like, oh I could do this for a living, and art schools being business’ like any other, aren’t going to tell you that, no, you aren’t going to make a living as an artist. They don’t really have to, they are banking on your ambition and naivete, and there are plenty of hints that an art career is foolishness. But you think, no, I’m different, I’m good. You realize that many around you will fail, but somehow you think that you’ll succeed, even though the odds are against you. You develop a stubborn self-confidence when you go into art, because you are both na??ve and arrogant.
The stubborn self-confidence becomes really really useful. It may be one of the reasons I think art school should be a mandatory part of anyone’s education, because it humanizes you, in part because through the insecurities which you’re compensating for, you develop empathy for those around you who are also struggling towards self-confidence.
My friend, who didn’t take me seriously as a painter, never bothered to tell me why he thought my painting was shit. He dotted his professional esteem on another friend of mine, who has since decided that she’s no good as a painter and has decided to become an academic, which has led to some great conversations and some interesting and intense arguments. She and my friend shared the secret of what makes a great painting. So one night, during one these great conversations, I asked her what this was all about. A good painting, she told me, as it had been explained to her by my best friend, is about being able to represent a three dimensional image on a surface, but also about the materiality of the paint. That with a painting you can and should have both, materiality and image.
This struck me as nothing more than a 20th Century fashion, and to condemn paintings for the lack of this quality, and to hype others for it, seems shortsighted.
So these two paintings, by Tai-Shan Schierenberg, exemplify this very well. We have an image represented in space, but we also have the sensual ickyness of the paint visible. When I first saw the nude I thought it was by Lucien Freud, and a write up on his gallery’s website references that similarity. Both are British. Where Freud was born in 1922 (and will be a venerable 83 this year), Mons. Schierenberg is half that age, born in the early 1960s.
As a 20th Century fashion, we can assume that in the future historians will be able to date our paintings by this look, just as easily as we can with past centuries. We know that the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries have style, a theme of subject matter, a look. In the 20th Century, painting became obsessed with itself as a viscous medium resting on a surface. We don’t know what 21st Century painting will look like – this century’s look has not yet developed. It seems that in a world where all of our images are perfectly rendered on screens, the human touch evident in brushstroke and viscosity is what makes painting valuable. It occurs to me then that perhaps the traditional tales of the rise of Modernism, and especially Ab-ex painting in the 1950s, ignores the concurrent development of television. These things make me think that this style has legs to go into the 21st Century.
At the same time, we 20C folk are limited to thinking of everything as ‘human touch’ and go on and on about ‘humanity’ – this vast 19th C hangover of industrialization. We’re at a point now as a society that people enjoy sex that much more when it’s filmed and public. Whenever we are tempted to use the word ‘traditional’ we should stop and ask ourselves if this tradition isn’t rooted in the 1800s or earlier. I think that by the time I’m Lucian Freud’s age (2058) folk’ll be printing paintings they design with whatever grandchild of Illustrator has been developed … which they are already doing now, but aren’t being taken seriously. I think what I find most shocking as we move into the future is how much and how many traditions are falling away, or becoming so evidently obsolete as to have no hold on the young.
Having found a porn vid on the net consisting of some girl having sex in a nightclub with a male stripper, while girls over at the other table ignore it as if they were simply making out, unsettles one’s perceptions of the world, of what’s predictable, and of the wildness that is out there in our society now. The Instant Coffee make-out parties seem chaste by comparison. Orgies have had a place in civilization throughout the centuries, but after 150 years of Victoriana, marked by health scares, this old human behavior reasserting itself reminds us that our traditions are merely fashions that pass through generations as if they were the cut of a collar.
And the point I’m trying to make here, is that I’m under the impression that the kids (those under 25) don’t care. They don’t care about our traditions, our ways of describing things. I say ‘our’ as someone born in the 70s, near the end of the Gen X scale, as a thoroughly 20th Century individual. I say that as someone who’s turning 30 at the end of the month, that age which could not be trusted 40 years ago.
The kids (18-25 and younger) grew up with Nike telling them to just do it, and it seems to be their philosophy. They’re just gonna do it. If they want to print a painting, they will. They’re not going to give a shit about a discourse on the medium, they’re not gonna give a shit about art history. Indeed, the one thing that seems significant here is how little history seems to be involved.
As a child in the ’80s, ’40 years ago’ was World War II. My first experience of the history of the world, of the century, was that there’d been this great war ’40 years ago’. As I got older, I had to modify that lesson, so now, World War II was sixty years ago, and, to my shock, the 1960s (which had been ’20 years ago’) are forty years past. History for me is a gauge of experience, a reference point for TV shows and the news. For a younger generation, 20 years ago is colour footage of Live Aid, an indistinct memory of a world run by Grandpa Reagan, and of the earliest music videos.
One can’t see past the colour film stock of the late 1960s. I’m guessing here, but I’m thinking our future adult society thinks black & white is lame. I for one think black & white, now best called ‘grayscale’, is lame most of the time. So, I’m sympathetic to these challenges to tradition, habit, and academic fashion. Far from being conservative and feeling disgust or condemnation, I’m excited about this feeling of wild possibility. I see myself living through a transitional time which is even more significant than the industrial revolution of the 19th Century. As we move into what Greg Bear called in his novels, ‘the Dataflow Culture’.
Unfortunately, these quality-of-life technologies allow a sense of irresponsibility, because you can forget phone numbers or details that can be called up from anywhere at anytime. People can fuck around and smoke and whatever, because they’ll probably have disease licked in 30 years. But let’s hope that a feeling of duty toward others is ingrained enough in our psychologies that Prada Princess monsters and Paris Hilton Aintoniettes are late 20th Century aberrations, a product (like all other 20C products) not built to last.
Just before waking the other morning, I dreamt I was in a club, it was someone’s birthday party, and I think it coincided with my own. Selena and Pol were the MC’s, so it had the feeling, revelry, and crowd of a Hive party, and people were coming on stage to read poems to the birthday person. I had a poem in my pocket and was looking forward to being called onstage. Something happened, and that didn’t actually take place … I went to the bathroom, and the stalls were divided so that one faced the other. There was a tall blonde girl in the stall in front of me … the wall that usually divided the space was missing, but I still peed nonchalantly. Then the girl punches me in the forehead, but in such a way that the effect was nothing more than a loud smack, and I was like, “What the fuck you do that for?” She then got really aggressive, and I caught her hands, and she began pushing me back. So here we are tussling and she basically saying that I was going to go on a date with her …. it wasn’t a sexual assault as much as it was a ‘dating’ assault. I’m like, sure, but calm down and can’t we talk about this without you trying to rip my hair out? Our fingers continually intertwining and mixing, hands squeezing, as I try to control her arms which want to grab me … and all the while I’m thinking, couldn’t we stop for a minute to wash our hands? I woke up thinking that my dreams are too fucked lately to write down.
I bitch about art a lot; here I am, a player in the scene, and most of the time I hate art. So I’m entirely sympathetic when dealing with people who only go to openings for cheap drinks and a good time. The fairest thing to say about this is that there’s something about Toronto which doesn’t encourage good art. That’s sort of the word on the street, you know, what artists here say amongst themselves: art here sucks. But that’s obviously a question of not seeing the forest for the trees, or ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’, an allusion Kineko Ivic was getting at when he named his gallery Greener Pastures, which I haven’t been to in a while.
But I have been to Mercer Union, just down the street – went to their opening last Thursday night. Regarding Toronto’s art – I’ll let you go to the galleries and decide for yourself. It’s a generalization, but whenever out of town artists show it can make one question why we don’t see more stuff of this quality in the studios of Toronto.
Mercer’s current show is such an example. It reminds me of why I like art, you know, when it really works. When it pops stuff into your mind that wouldn’t have showed up otherwise. In my case, it brought back childhood memories I’d forgotten about. Growing up in French, rural Nova Scotia, carpentry was a hobby for so many of us. I always enjoyed fooling around with hammer and nails in my Dad’s workshop, although I have little to show for it. In an area where so many expected to build their own homes, it’s a hobby that had very practical purposes. But as kids, it resembled art in that we did it for fun. I remember digging a trench with my friend as we worked on a ‘underground fort’. Later, in highschool, some classmates built a cabin off a logging road which was dubbed the ‘Schoon Lagoon’ and became the cabin party for our weekends throughout 1993.
If you’d been to Mercer before, at first you might think they’d renovated for the new year. And, you’d think that the roof was leaking – and given Thursday night’s nasty weather, it certainly seemed that was the case. But, nein, das ist die show. An environment, a series of rooms, entered by a hidden door, has been constructed in Mercer’s space. The usual Back Gallery is unchanged, and it contains only Marianne Corless’ Fur Queen II but once you’ve seen the picture, there doesn’t seem to be much point seeing the thing in person, except for that whole Benjamin aura/object fetish thing. The BGL experience, on the other hand, cannot be reproduced.
Thin drywall rooms, pierced by a car, which also serves as steps so that one can see why the roof is leaking. There is a wood stove, and a buggy light that goes on and off. Evidence of the construction and destruction everywhere – dust and drywall chips, the doorways torn out through hammer rather than saw. The decoration consists of the plaster patching pattern of any renovation. Given my youthful experiences with shoddy construction and what seemed like the constant renovations my parents engaged in while I was growing up, this environment has a charm for me. BGL’s show is familiar and cozy, and if the opening’s crowd had been larger, I might have felt like I’d gone home for a cabin party among my high school friends.
A Quebec City based collective, they take their name from the last names of the members: Jasmine Bilodeau, Sebastien Giguere, and Nicolas Laverdiere. The only BGL-relevant website I could find at the moment is this one, which shows them working on a pool made out of recycled wood, a slide of which they showed during their presentation.
Mercer has done modified environments before. Two years ago they installed a malfunctioning revolving door, which earned my all time favorite review, when RM Vaughan wrote in Lola, “Worst show ever”. I didn’t really agree, I didn’t mind the show that much. If someone is obsessed with building an off-centre revolving door, why not? And who else will let them but an artist run centre? So, if these three boys from Quebec want to drive a car through a wall, why not?
Maybe it’s the filtering process, but it seems to me that Quebec artists rock. It’s crazy how our Canadianess is divided into two cultures who communicate with each other as if by messages in bottles – in this case, stuff in rooms. There’s a whole other aesthetic and relationship to materials coming out of Quebec, one that makes things delightful rather than the anti-formalist disgustipations or boring conceptual works rooted in concerns 20-30 years out of date. Such work seems to have infected Toronto’s local scene like a bad cold one can’t shake.
And maybe that’s just my way of saying I should get out more and meet new artists in Toronto, because that’s been my experience of the scene. If you know of anyone making work like Elizabeth Belliveau, now showing at YYZ, please let me know, or at least chastise me for my forgetfulness, because none come to mind at the moment. As this show has already been written about here, I want to weigh in to encourage you to check it out. Last week I’d been hearing about a glowing review in The Star, and it’s deserved. Belliveau takes used purses or other things left to second hand shops and charity and has turned them through vision and scissors into little animals, or whatever other creature she sees possible. The results are charming and delightful, and give me a new way to consider a baseball, a hot water bottle, or a pair of gloves. In the other gallery, Karim Zouak has a show that I’m told is supposed to be about animated paintings, the effect of which is betrayed by the clacking of the projectors, so it doesn’t really work. But, I haven’t spent that much time with the work, so I can’t rave or diss it. Whereas with Belliveau’s, one can rave with the sense of ‘how could you not like this?’, with Zouak’s work, it is much more along the lines of, ‘see it, think about it, decide for yourself’.
There is though, nothing to think about at Paul Petro’s gallery, and that’s because the gallery has magazines on display as if they were so many drawings, drawn over 20 years through the CMYK process of various print shops downtown somewhere. Boxes boxes oh my … and what do with them? Why not have a show, offer back issues for sale? The PR for this show says, “know your history” highlighting how C has had a good run of publishing on, by, or about the players of the Canadian and international art industry. Inasmuch as the art community is a community is reflected in the pages of C Magazine. So, if you’re looking for some reading material, and are interested in 20 years of graphic design and magazine formats, check out Petro’s before the magazines come down January 29th.
Greener Pastures: 1188 Queen St W, Th-Sat 12-6 (416-535-7100)
Mercer Union: 37 Lisgar St, T-Sat 11-5 (416-536-1519)
YYZ: Suit 140, 401 Richmond St W, T-Sat 11-6 (416-598-4546)
Paul Petro: 980 Queen St W, Wed-Sat 11-5 (416-979-7874)
I sat in her kitchen
I laid on her floor
Beneath the blanket that her brother bought.
Of course I heard that story
And many others that night in November
when longing was silence, and longing was unsaid
We walked to the corner store
Up the street from where C used to live
And there we saw a dancing Santa
which she found hilarious
And I found dumb
but said nothing
Finally, told her in a moment of appropriateness
that I was annoyed that she kissed me and acted like it was a mistake
I went home, she called and was crying
Confessions begged themselves
She apologized that I knew her
“I’m so sorry that you know me”
She had fed me fish and potatoes. It was very good.
And she had fed me dried fish bits and Clare orange pop
like I used to have at Grandmère’s house.
The streets were wet, I was biking home once again
feeling bad. I was reading Heidegger when she called.
The problems of being.
I have problems being. I thought of manifestos to write.
Statements to make. Thing I must tell people.
Toronto Women’s Bookstore
CMCE / Centre for Media and Culture in Education (OISE/UT)
+ University of Toronto Cinema Studies presents
Quien es mas macho? The Abu Ghraib Photos: A Presentation by Susan Willis
Tuesday, Jan 18, 05 / 6:00 PM
Toronto Women’s Bookstore
73 Harbord Street (at Spadina)
FREE + wheelchair accessible
Reproduced here with RM’s permission.
———————————————–
Art, like rust, never sleeps
No art is worth leaving the house for in the first week of January.
I mean that.
Were Warhol himself to rise from his Brillo box tomb and offer me a stable of rent boys and a free silk screen portrait, I???d fake a headache. After a solid month of art auctions, holiday art sales, artists??? parties, all the good films Hollywood saves for December, special invitation only viewings, open houses, charity exhibitions, studio sales, and, most tiring, the slack jawed inattentions of Air Canada during the Christmas rush (has Air Canada forgotten that Christmas happens in winter, when it snows, when runways have to be ploughed and wings de-iced, that they are called Air Canada because they???re located in Canada ??? you know, the same country as the Artic?) the last thing I want to do is haul my shortbread padded backside to a gallery.
Next week, I???ll go next week.
For now, there???s the internet. When I first started wandering the internet 7 years ago, I was convinced that, like television, this new medium would be art proof ??? because any entertainment device that simultaneously connects the user to images of naked pregnant ladies eating burritos and a lengthy, heartfelt monograph on the plot possibilities of a love child between Captain Kirk and Fembot, is too democratic, too freewheeling for the art world, which relies on creating an aura of exclusion and inimitability.
Wrong again. Art, like rust, never sleeps.
Several Toronto artists have taken to the internet like ticks to a bare ankle, and us shut ins (with high speed connections) need never do the opening night shuffle-and-grin again. Among the best of the lot are those artists who use their sites to promote not only their own creations but to direct the visitor???s attention to other on-line resources, many of which, inevitably, link the visitor to even more sites. As the poet Lynn Crosbie once noted, surfing the internet is like picking an endless scab ??? a gratifying, compulsive, and joyously counterproductive experience (like the best art). The plethora of online art sites coming out of Toronto are gradually building a local and international gallery that never ends ?? a frequent nightmare of mine, granted, but you can always turn the computer off.
Multimedia artist Sally McKay???s website is easily the most informative and lively of the lot. Packed with links to everything from cyclist advocacy sites to other artist???s diatribes, as well as McKay???s own sparkling animations and photography, the site has more going on in it than most traditional print art magazines.
McKay???s seemingly limitless curiousity means that the viewer will be treated to ruminations on quantum physics??? latest fad, string theory, a brief essay on the fate of Luna/Tsux???iit (the BC-based whale determined to hang out with his human friends), and a randomly collected assortment of art show Top Tens for 2004 submitted by readers ??? all decorated with McKay???s images of DNA strands, animated particles, wacky models of the earth, and a sad but sweet set of photos of bizarre gadgets found in a Radio Shack catalogue. Beats flipping through Fuse or Art Forum.
The granddaddy of Toronto art sites is Year Zero One, an online gallery specializing in art made specifically for the internet. Headed by artist Michael Alstad, Year Zero One has been showcasing web art since 1999 ??? in fact, it helped create the movement. Recent projects include an exhibition staged in a taxicab (with interactive art triggered by GPS transmissions presented on a screen in the cab), a forum on new media art sponsored by the Banff Centre, and teleconferences on a ???microprocessor platform??? called Art Interface Device (don???t ask me to explain, ask Alstad).
If some, or all, of this sounds too much like reading your laptop owner???s manual, don???t worry. One of the guiding principles of Year Zero One is accessibility, making new media comprehensible to both practicioners and audiences. My only critique is, as a fan of Alstad???s provocative multimedia installations, there is not more of the head honcho???s art on display.
Pete Dako, on the other hand, is decidedly not shy about sharing his work with the world. His personal website offers free samples of his own videos, songs, and idiosyncratic, comics-driven art, as well as more ramblings about culture and politics than you may be able to get through in one visit.
What, I asked Dako (via email, of course) prompts him to put so much free art on his site, to create his own personal museum, when he needs, like any artist, to sell his work?
“Mainly because it’s fun! The web is a kind of on-going conversation about everything. The only drawback is that the audience has to be mildly techno-savvy or equipped to make the site work, which is not a problem in a gallery, where you can just walk in.”
And, Dako reminds me, buyers do purchase art off the web, just like clothes or groceries. If anything, he argues, having a never-ending exhibition on line means that his potential sales are not limited to a month long run in a stationary gallery.
Limitless access is also the key to painter Timothy Comeau???s on line project Goodreads. Like Readers??? Digest (without the stories of miraculous rescues by dogs or profiles of sitcom stars), Goodreads sorts through the enormous amount of culture and politics essays on line and sends the subscriber (at no charge) links to what Comeau considers the best. And he has excellent taste.
In any given week, expect dozens of articles about, for instance, voter fraud in the recent American election, the rhetorical problems inherent in trying to give a name to the first years of this century (the zeros? the O???s?), and current developments in mathematical theory. Phew!
While the majority of Comeau???s varied selections link the reader to the latest – and often choicest – bits of unintentionally hilarious art world sniping and counter bitching, Goodreads is not, oh happy day, another incestuous art world bulletin board. Rather, it???s more like a clipping service for anyone with an interest in art making, the social sciences, or the downright weird.
When, I wonder, does Comeau sleep?
www3.sympatico.ca/petedako
www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay
www.year01.com
www.goodreads.ca
–National Post, January 8 2005, page To5
RM Vaughan wrote about art on the internet for his article last Saturday. Goodreads got some press:
Limitless access is also the key to painter Timothy Comeau’s on line project Goodreads. Like Readers’ Digest (without the stories of miraculous rescues by dogs or profiles of sitcom stars), Goodreads sorts through the enormous amount of culture and politics essays on line and sends the subscriber (at no charge) links to what Comeau considers the best. And he has excellent taste.In any given week, expect dozens of articles about, for instance, voter fraud in the recent American election, the rhetorical problems inherent in trying to give a name to the first years of this century (the zeros? the O’s?), and current developments in mathematical theory. Phew!
While the majority of Comeau’s varied selections link the reader to the latest – and often choicest – bits of unintentionally hilarious art world sniping and counter bitching, Goodreads is not, oh happy day, another incestuous art world bulletin board. Rather, it’s more like a clipping service for anyone with an interest in art making, the social sciences, or the downright weird.
When, I wonder, does Comeau sleep?
-“Art, like rust, never sleeps”, National Post, “The Big Picture” Sat. 8 January 2005, page TO5
He also wrote about Sally McKay, Michael Alstad, and Pete Dako.
Again, Star Trek (this vast PR machine for technology) provides the model of tech as an enhancement to the quality of life. That is certainly my attitude toward it, reared as I was on it’s philosophy. But, it’s also in line with 20C sci-fi speculation, and here Greg Bear is the best promoter of quality-of-life technology. His future is the one I hope and expect to live in. But, as I want to say, his fiction itself is a 20C vision, and the 20C was delusional.
Before 2050, we’ll speak no more of “‘isms” and academic critics will have discredited themselves. I think Bear’s anticipation of Thinkers is spot on – becoming safe, kind, controlled, and respected authorities, on subjects which will be too complex for humans to fully master. The authority-human is too subject to bias and the whims of our genetic nature. The idea that we’d sell our souls to machines and that they’ll take over the world is an example of the mental illness of the 20C, a projection of our negative tendencies, rather than a sensible viewpoint. It reflects the 20C’s affair with violence, rather than a reasonable expectation. The 21C will recognize people as people as fundamentally good, rather than the 20C’s view that people were essentially shit. That negative view is everywhere in the ‘isms and has produced so many dogmatically angry and disagreeable people, who want to perpetuate the 20C’s cycles of violence. While the ‘isms articulated the nastiness we’re capable of, giving us a language to understand what we need to avoid in ourselves, beyond that they aren’t helpful, and we can’t expect the rest of the century to consists of more refined and better articulated views of our bastardry. I would think that the future will instead build on ‘quality of life’ and focus it’s attention on articulating the good things about life, helping us become good people, as opposed to beating us over the head with our shames.
This is much more easier to say now that it would have been a month ago, even two weeks ago, which was Christmas Day, of ‘joy to the world’ propaganda. We’re living through this historic moment of global consciousness, we’re everyone is talking about the tsunami, and rebuilding, and giving, and the distribution of wealth. The interview on The Current this past week on charity was really great and added to my sense of embarrassment over my actions on Wednesday. People do care about others, politicians do need to wake up to the sense of community among human beings. I suddenly do have a sense that 2005 will be a remarkable, even revolutionary year. The revolution may come at some later point, but historians could look to this year as its beginning. Since researching chronologies again last month, I’ve been taken with the Mayan problem – the well known fact that their long-count chronology ends in December 2012. One of the interpretations I read was that it would signal a change in human consciousness, as I don’t believe in the end of the world. I’d hate to think that there’s an asteroid out there with a Winter Solstice due date in 7 years. I’d think they’d have found that sucker by now. Of course, perhaps that’s the date of a nuclear war, and another environmental catastrophe …. an earthquake that devastates Central America?
Whatever, I’d like to think that we will find ourselves living in a kinder world in seven years, precipitated by the momentum initiated the past two weeks. 2005 is already supposed to be devoted to the reduction of poverty, as the letter from Bill Gates and Bono published last weekend in The Globe and Mail attested. The tsunami disaster has redefined the world’s problems, as did 9/11. Bush and oil and Iraq has been trivialized by a certain degree, and the global community reacts, the stirring of world government and culture are here.
Spent the early afternoon reading, thinking, writing, in Nanny’s bedroom. It’s too bright though, and the inside of my eyeballs are lit up like lamps, and the floaters are really distracting. Around 2 ATL I put on my new red hat and go for a walk – up the treacherous hill, past the Catholic church, and turn left into town. Go to Tim Hortons, have a double double (the second for the day, since Michelle delivered some to us earlier) and sat and thought. Two memories came to mind. First, as I sat at T.H., was the dream I had as a child in the 80s. At that time I dreamt I was in Campbellton, and bombs were falling from the sky. Soviet planes flew overhead. The explosions caused the sidewalks to come apart in their square sections. This had been a nightmare, not terrifying as I recall, but anxiety causing. I told my Dad about it the next day and he told me not to worry, we wouldn’t be bombed (this was equally true of Clare as it was of Campbellton). My thought sitting at Tim Hortons and looking over the town was that it would survive a nuclear war. There’s no reason to bomb it at all. This also means it would be a good place to hide a war criminal (though in a town like this, one would have to be careful about rumours).
As I walked back, approaching the playground by the school, I remembered the time (again in the 80s) that the plow had created a great mound of snow in the front of the school (Jean Marie-Gay) we played on that mound at recess until in melted. I lost my mitten playing on it. We would climb to the top and then jump down, and also slide on our bums, since we were all wearing snow suits.
Having been watching as this decade unravels, this time without a name (people do not speak of the decade the way they said “the 80s” and “the 90s” since no one knows what to say —> I find this quite odd, since it’ll be another 20 years before it’s truly applicable again, and thus will go out of fashion —> but then again, every century has delt with this haven’t they, and Beckett wrote in Waiting for Godot about being the first to climb the Eiffel Tower, “a million years ago, back in the 90s”. That is, the 1890s, which brought a smile to me when I first heard it in the Shakespeare by The Sea production of 1999).
Having been watching the decade unravel, watching the style of the 80s turn to the style of the 90s, and now, the style of the 90s turn into this decade, my feeling is that this time is both more prosperous and stylistically appealing, but that it is also far more vacuous. One could almost compare it to the screen of a laptop (upon which this is being typed at the moment). The liquid crystal display fades in and out depending on the angle, but also presents a rich colour when viewed dead on. But it is only an inch or less thick. The increasing defeat of those who believe there is something more than buying things, and the increasing presence of the “inauthentic” in all ways, creates a shiny mirror of what? A mirror too shows a world without depth, a world reversed from what we’d consider the actual.
At least I have this laptop here —> now with cd in the drive, headphones on, and Fischerspooner singing about hypermediocrity.
The old classic I’ve been thinking about for the past week and half:
Conversation Concerning Life and Death
MARAT:
[speaking to SADE across the empty arena]
I read in your books de Sade
in one of your immortal works
that the basis of all life is death
SADE:
Correct Marat
But man has given a false importance to death
Any animal plant or man who dies
adds to Nature’s compost heap
becomes the manure without which
nothing could grow nothing could be created
Death is simply part of the process
Every death even the cruelest death
drowns in the total indifference of Nature
Nature herself would watch unmoved
if we destroyed the entire human race
[rising]
I hate Nature
this passionless spectator this unbreakable ice-berg-face
that can bear everything
this goads us to greater and greater acts
[breathing heavily]
Haven’t we always beaten down those weaker than ourselves
Haven’t we torn at their throats
with continuos villainy and lust
Haven’t we experimented in our laboratories
before applying the final solution?
[…]
We condemn to death without emotion
and there’s no singular personal death to be had
only an anonymous cheapened death
which we could dole out to entire nations
on a mathematical basis
until the time comes
for all life
to be extinguished
MARAT:
Citizen Marquis
you may have fought for us last September
when we dragged out of the goals
the aristocrats who plotted against us
but you still talk like a grand seigneur
and what you call the indifference of Nature
is your own lack of compassion
SADE:
Compassion
Now Marat you are talking like an aristocrat
Compassion is the property of the privileged classes
When the pitier lowers himself
to give to a beggar
he throbs with contempt
To protect his riches he pretends to be moved
and his gift to the beggar amounts to no more than a kick [lute chord]
No Marat
no small emotions please
Your feelings were never petty
For you just as for me
only the most extreme actions matter
MARAT:
If I am extreme I am not extreme in the same way was you
Against Nature’s silence I use action
In the vast indifference I invent a meaning
I don’t watch unmoved I intervene
and I say that this and this are wrong
and I work to alter them and improve them
The important thing
is to pull yourself up by your own hair
to turn yourself inside out
and see the whole world with fresh eyes
– Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade (1964), translated by Geoffrey Skelton
book here and DVD here.
Happy New Year everybody.
I, like many, have been hungover today, because I went to the Mercer Union “Dirtier New Year’s Eve Party” last night, the poster for which featured two humping bunnies outside a car wash. Which was apt.
Last year Mercer Union went out a limb and held this party at Studio 99 as a fundraiser. They called it the “Dirty New Year’s Eve Party” then. I say ‘out on a limb’ because they weren’t really sure how successful it would be, and they were going to invest a lot into it. Well, it turned out really well and the gallery made a killing, although there was nothing dirty about it. This year seemed much more successful. At 6am last year, the light’s went up and the place was pretty sparse, with the usual crowd of people such as myself who stay up until there’s nothing left to do (i.e my friends). This year, 6am came and there was still a crowd dancing.
Now let’s get back to the humping bunnies, because I want to tell this story. First, if you haven’t seen the poster, it’s two folk in bunny suits simulating a rear entry, or, as it could be called, “a backward hug”. It’s certainly more cutesy than erotic, but I guess that’s because of the fur. It’s very apt because it’s a bit of an inside joke. It refers to how much dry humping has been happening at art parties this past year, all because of Instant Coffee.
Like I said in my year in review, the Instant Coffee make-out parties began in November 03 in collaboration with Darren O’Donnell, a local playwright who’s interested in sociality, and the different ways strangers can interact. He’s been following a line of research over the past few years that basically involves getting strangers to meet one another and talk and whatever … and it’s always some example of friendliness that emerges. So anyway, the make-out parties was another example of the folk going out on a limb … as a member of Instant Coffee at the time, I can say that we weren’t really sure if it was going to work, or if it was going to make everything awkward. What ended up happening was that couples were more than willing to get it on in Emily Hogg’s ‘make out fort’.
Emily is an architect, and as I understand it, she began re-doing the couch forts that we’re probably all built as kids with blankets and cushions while she was still studying architecture. So Emily’s fort wasn’t considered gimmicky as much as we saw it as an art/architecture project. The thing with Instant Coffee is that you become a collective member through collaborating with them, so over the past year, Darren and Emily became members.
At the same time, Instant Coffee formed a relationship with Hive magazine, because Hive’s publisher really liked them/us and wanted to promote what I.C. was doing. So at magazine launches, I.C. was involved in helping to throw the party. Jinhan Ko, one of the collective’s founding members, had a old camping trailer that was known as “the Urban Disco Trailer” and over the past several years, went through various manifestations of what I think we can safely call pimping. I.C. pimped that ride over and over again. But since Jin moved to Vancouver last the summer, I hear the trailer’s in storage somewhere. So basically, the trailer became a make-out venue last spring, and by June they had installed the ‘bass bed’ which I think had sub-woofers built into the frame, but by that time I was no longer working with I.C. so I’m spotty on specifics. As I said in my year in review, I have fond memories of slow kisses at 4 in the morning at the Hive launch, which all happened in the trailer. My favorite kiss that night came when I walked into the trailer looking for my friend, and I was suddenly pulled into a very sweet make-out session. In the morning’s early hours, the trailer became a socially liminal space where being there meant you were only there for one reason.
Well, with the trailer out of the picture, and with Instant Coffee’s relationship with Mercer Union (which I know I haven’t clarified, but basically the whole art scene here and anywhere is incestuous, and I’ll tell that story some other time) it made sense that I.C. would have a presence at Mercer Union’s party. With the trailer out of the picture, the bass bed was re-invented and installed against a wall of the dance floor, and, as Mercer’s co-director Dave Dyment wrote in a last minute reminder/promotion email yesterday, “The Instant Coffee Make Out Bass Bed is a 12 foot by 12 foot bed with sub-woofers built into the frame, connected to the soundsystem. It’s gonna be incredible.” Standing on the platform next to the bed, you could really feel the sub-woofers, but the effect didn’t really carry over on the bed, as the mattress cushioned the effect. Nevertheless, this was designated make-out space.
Early on, to get the action started, there was lazy-susan in the middle of the mattress with a bottle on it, and I ended up having to kiss Darren. Because I’m straight this was my most awkward kiss of the whole night. But, this night is memorable for me because I sat down around 5 and started chatting with this girl next to me, and I asked, “We’re sitting on the bass bed, does that mean I should kiss you?” And she said, “Yes,” and so I began to make out with the pretty brunette for a good while. That was totally the highlight of my night.
I can’t say how much I love the fact that just by being in a certain spot means that everything is straightforward with no guessing game and risk of misinterpretation. It also becomes this way for couples to stray in a totally legitimate way. Playing spin the bottle, I kissed a girl who was engaged.
Like the first make-out party, in which lots of couples took the opportunity for public displays of affection, which did include lots of dryhumping, the make-out spaces become a venue for couples to make out, kiss other people, and for strangers to meet and kiss.
So, unlike last year, in which the moniker “dirty new year’s eve party” was simply rhetorical, this year it was aptly called ‘dirtier’ and the humping bunnies made lots of sense. I left shortly after 6, but it probably went on for another hour. So far I’ve had an memorable 2005, and if they do it again next year, that’s what I’ll mark on my calendar.