Thursday, February 18, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
February 2nd Recap - Part Two: Rogoff.
Part 2 - WE: Communities, Mutualities, Participations (Irit Rogoff)
Reviewing my notes from our discussion around this article, I am struck by how scattered they feel to me. I wonder whether it is because I found the article rather impenetrable or because my brain was fatigued and having trouble both thinking its own thoughts and capturing others’ at the same time.
Random flashes.
- Idea that meaning is present in the interconnectedness
- Idea of “mediality” (as opposed to reality)
- Hopeful movement from critique→criticism→criticality (proposal to define criticality as something that is moving and changing is maybe a better way to approach it than “critical standpoint” from which there are values …. because in some areas of life, lack of criticality is paralyzing and in others, certain kind of criticality has paralyzed it)
- If I try to tell a story about what I just experienced, I will miss some details; idea that audience won’t get anything unless everything is explained
- Both writers (Hickey and Rogoff) discuss their topics (beauty and community) as action and relationship, think of them as an ongoing process
- People have a fear of things being arbitrary when you talk about relativism (it doesn’t matter what I say, it’s all relative); but what we do have to land us is the social.
- Idea that we look at things differently but that the differences are not arbitrary.
Transforming the world via community cliff-jumping.
- Flash: “one does not learn something new unless one unlearns something old. Otherwise one is simply adding information and not rethinking a structure.”
- This requires a lot of risk, scary that we have to give something up and sit in limbo in order to create the kind of collective space that can actually be critical
- We have emotional attachements to the things we think are true; art as site for us to uncover and restructure our entire way of thinking (similar to psychoanalysis)
- Maybe this article is calling for psychoanalysis on a community level (re-envisioning)?
- “This is us, we who are supposed to say we as if we know what we are saying and who we are talking about”
- “The reason I would wish to think of 'art' in relation to such a 'space of appearance' is recognition that when something called 'art' becomes an open interconnective field, then the potential to engage with it as a form of cultural participation RATHER than as a form of either reification, of representation or of contemplative edification, comes into being.”
- Rather is the problematic word there (we did a lot of work with “Emancipated Spectator” to unpack the polarity between spectatorship as bad and participation as good, and here it seems we’ve moved back to “spectatorship is bad”)
- We all seem to like these ideas in theory. Does the fear enter the picture because we know we will need put these things into practice? Real-world practicalities make this desire to investigate and reimagine everything seem daunting … “I’d never get through my day, if I was always trying to reimagine how to do things.”
Call for “working with no models”.
- Is working without models about time? Political act happens in the present, no planning of space and time for it; no directionality in preparation for it.
- Constant desire for potentiality – is it born out of the fact that people are trying to protect themselves from the disappointment of whatever results when something is actually chosen or realized?
- Is the desire to keep potential open an easy way to not have to be rigorous in one’s artistic practice; a way to make excuses for not committing to anything?
- We seem to have this idea of wanting things to be organized in a rhizome-like way (decentralized), as compared to model of world as a tree (which has a base/centre). But is decentralizing control in this way related to too much potentiality?
- Maybe too much potentiality slows the process of growing one singular thing (editor’s note: to me, this is related to our discussion around relational aesthetics and the question of “what is the artist’s responsibility?”)
Reviewing my notes from our discussion around this article, I am struck by how scattered they feel to me. I wonder whether it is because I found the article rather impenetrable or because my brain was fatigued and having trouble both thinking its own thoughts and capturing others’ at the same time.
Random flashes.
- Idea that meaning is present in the interconnectedness
- Idea of “mediality” (as opposed to reality)
- Hopeful movement from critique→criticism→criticality (proposal to define criticality as something that is moving and changing is maybe a better way to approach it than “critical standpoint” from which there are values …. because in some areas of life, lack of criticality is paralyzing and in others, certain kind of criticality has paralyzed it)
- If I try to tell a story about what I just experienced, I will miss some details; idea that audience won’t get anything unless everything is explained
- Both writers (Hickey and Rogoff) discuss their topics (beauty and community) as action and relationship, think of them as an ongoing process
- People have a fear of things being arbitrary when you talk about relativism (it doesn’t matter what I say, it’s all relative); but what we do have to land us is the social.
- Idea that we look at things differently but that the differences are not arbitrary.
Transforming the world via community cliff-jumping.
- Flash: “one does not learn something new unless one unlearns something old. Otherwise one is simply adding information and not rethinking a structure.”
- This requires a lot of risk, scary that we have to give something up and sit in limbo in order to create the kind of collective space that can actually be critical
- We have emotional attachements to the things we think are true; art as site for us to uncover and restructure our entire way of thinking (similar to psychoanalysis)
- Maybe this article is calling for psychoanalysis on a community level (re-envisioning)?
- “This is us, we who are supposed to say we as if we know what we are saying and who we are talking about”
- “The reason I would wish to think of 'art' in relation to such a 'space of appearance' is recognition that when something called 'art' becomes an open interconnective field, then the potential to engage with it as a form of cultural participation RATHER than as a form of either reification, of representation or of contemplative edification, comes into being.”
- Rather is the problematic word there (we did a lot of work with “Emancipated Spectator” to unpack the polarity between spectatorship as bad and participation as good, and here it seems we’ve moved back to “spectatorship is bad”)
- We all seem to like these ideas in theory. Does the fear enter the picture because we know we will need put these things into practice? Real-world practicalities make this desire to investigate and reimagine everything seem daunting … “I’d never get through my day, if I was always trying to reimagine how to do things.”
Call for “working with no models”.
- Is working without models about time? Political act happens in the present, no planning of space and time for it; no directionality in preparation for it.
- Constant desire for potentiality – is it born out of the fact that people are trying to protect themselves from the disappointment of whatever results when something is actually chosen or realized?
- Is the desire to keep potential open an easy way to not have to be rigorous in one’s artistic practice; a way to make excuses for not committing to anything?
- We seem to have this idea of wanting things to be organized in a rhizome-like way (decentralized), as compared to model of world as a tree (which has a base/centre). But is decentralizing control in this way related to too much potentiality?
- Maybe too much potentiality slows the process of growing one singular thing (editor’s note: to me, this is related to our discussion around relational aesthetics and the question of “what is the artist’s responsibility?”)
February 2nd Recap: Hickey.
Thinking Out Loud – February 2nd, 2010
Part 1 – Dave Hickey (Vernacular of Beauty)
Intention.
- Important distinction between “what it looks like” and “what it means”
- Where does intention fit in? Can beauty reside within intention?
- What is the difference between having an intention and successfully realizing one’s intention? If we are going to evaluate based on the intention, does it matter whether or not the intention was achieved?
- Is it even possible to perceive intention in a work?
- When an artist makes a work, can they discover intention after (“I want the work itself to tell me what it’s about”)?
- Some artists claim art-making “is not about intention” as an excuse for not being rigorous with their practice.
For the last time, what is beauty? Maybe our “definition” is somewhere in this brainstorm.
- Is beauty a judgement or an experience?
- Beauty as something communal, something that involves influence from others, related to received knowledge and brainwashing, etc.
- Black and white wall experiment as proof of the role of influence or suggestion on our experiences
- How does relativism come into play (we talk about beauty as this hierarchical thing)?
- Personal engagement or relationship to something as where we locate meaning; is this the closest we can get to idea of “universal beauty”?
- “Beauty is what the object and I agree on”
- Manmade beauty – and where is that in relation to what is beautiful in nature?
- How we experience or understand beauty as something that shifts with time?
- Beauty as a safe place? Beauty as power to be dangerous.
- Space between beauty and pleasure.
- Struggle or resolution of struggle as what makes something beautiful?
- Beauty about when one is authentic with one’s search. Through struggle, there is some kind of engagement with it on part of artist, which becomes beautiful to audience.
- Beauty as reception of something in a certain way. Then there is this question of is that beauty important?
- Why do we need to come to a consensus? To figure out how to use it? Do we need a consensus? What happens if we say “There is no consensus about what beauty is, but I’m still going to set out to create something beautiful”
Which leads us to …. the use of beauty.
Beauty as Functional.
- Foucault has this idea that we don’t even see the world as it is, we see it as others want us to for their purposes (for example, in the current economic climate in North America, we are encouraged to value profit over caring for ones’ neighbour)
- This raises an important for artists: “Do I know or understand enough about the world enough to even say anything? “
- “A good friend is someone who unsettles you”
- Is our job as artists still to shatter beauty with ugliness to offset all those “others” that are trying to manipulate us with beauty?
- Can we use beauty to unsettle?
- It seems unfortunate for artists to sacrifice our access to beauty (artists shouldn’t give that power up)
- Questions: “how do you let beauty back in?” “Can we ever get beauty back?”
- How might an advertiser’s intention manifest differently than an artist’s?
- Problem as an artist who needs to sell work of how we brand ourselves.
- Is what is a comfort and what is unsettling also depend on context? (i.e. are magazines and tv a comfort because they invisibly reinforce your world and what is familiar to you … and it is only when they become foreign and thus visible to you that they are unsettling?)
- When the argument becomes visible, you cannot be seduced by it as much. Intention is revealed. As we become aware of platform from which we are experiencing things, we move towards new level of criticism.
- Boiling pot of water and the frog metaphor. If boiling water is contemporary dance, how do you throw people in that pot, and get them to stay? Make it beautiful? Then beauty becomes a functional tool.
- Do we need a Vanna White (a beautiful thing directing people’s gaze to the object)? If work itself is not beautiful, isn’t that enough?
- Importance of welcoming people to engage with things they don’t have ‘expertise’ around and giving permission to people to just have experience
Criticism.
- Relational aesthetics: there is only a relationship, there is not an object around which we meet… so what do we evaluate or critique? It becomes about ethics: we evaluate based on how artist treats the people involved (not about how aesthetically pleasing it is)
- When ethics become more important than product, isn’t it better to not have people wondering about your soul, but just worrying about your appearance?
- Challenging question: maybe being under authorial rule of king is more useful than being under constant self-censorship (maybe it makes resistance more possible)
- Do I want to be judged on both my appearance and my soul?
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Study Group March 2
We'll return to WE: Collectivities, Mutualities, and Participations by Irit Rogoff for the first half.
After the break, we'll take a pause in our readings to spend some time with Youtube and questions of "amateur" production and aesthetics.
We'll reference An anthropological introduction to YouTube and Margaux Williamson's video Dance Dance Revolutions Co. / Tomboyfriend's End of Poverty, made mostly from clips of teenagers dancing in their basements. Feel free to add links of "amauteur" performance in the comments.
Study group meets at 6:30 at Dancemakers. In March we'll be in the office.
(it's true that conversations are better if you've read the readings or watched the videos, just gives us something solid to talk about...)
After the break, we'll take a pause in our readings to spend some time with Youtube and questions of "amateur" production and aesthetics.
We'll reference An anthropological introduction to YouTube and Margaux Williamson's video Dance Dance Revolutions Co. / Tomboyfriend's End of Poverty, made mostly from clips of teenagers dancing in their basements. Feel free to add links of "amauteur" performance in the comments.
Study group meets at 6:30 at Dancemakers. In March we'll be in the office.
(it's true that conversations are better if you've read the readings or watched the videos, just gives us something solid to talk about...)
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Part 4. Dave Hickey and Beauty.
Background
- Text from the article comes from a book “Invisible Dragon” published around 1993, which he pulled off the market when people got so angry about it.
- When he heard it was selling on ebay for about $500, Hickey thought it was ridiculous so he allowed it to be published
- Writings are largely centered around Robert Mapplethorpe, National Endowment Fund issue (series of photographs created a huge controversy)
What is beauty?
- “Beauty is not adoing thing. The Beautiful is a thing. To images, beauty is the agency that causes visual pleasure in the beholder” (David Hickey)
- What do we think this means/how do we feel about it?
- Maybe it means beauty is about our relationship to the thing: so that it’s a process or an agency – not inherent in the object, but not post-reflection – somewhere in between (“comes before our analytical reflective engagement thing”)
- Object is thus not arbitrary, and our initial response to things as beautiful doesn’t necessarily change
- It seems to come down to the degree of pleasure that one has in engaging with something
- Text from the article comes from a book “Invisible Dragon” published around 1993, which he pulled off the market when people got so angry about it.
- When he heard it was selling on ebay for about $500, Hickey thought it was ridiculous so he allowed it to be published
- Writings are largely centered around Robert Mapplethorpe, National Endowment Fund issue (series of photographs created a huge controversy)
What is beauty?
- “Beauty is not a
- What do we think this means/how do we feel about it?
- Maybe it means beauty is about our relationship to the thing: so that it’s a process or an agency – not inherent in the object, but not post-reflection – somewhere in between (“comes before our analytical reflective engagement thing”)
- Object is thus not arbitrary, and our initial response to things as beautiful doesn’t necessarily change
- It seems to come down to the degree of pleasure that one has in engaging with something
Monday, February 1, 2010
Online conversations. Who knew?
On the eve of the next Thinking Out Loud (info here)
I wanted to draw attention to a great discussion in the comments around Ranciere. Two people I don't know having a great conversation about the reading - very nice and exactly what we hoped for. Perhaps we need to Skype in from Argentina.
I wanted to draw attention to a great discussion in the comments around Ranciere. Two people I don't know having a great conversation about the reading - very nice and exactly what we hoped for. Perhaps we need to Skype in from Argentina.
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