Southern · Hyperbole · on · High

Anyone following these short and not so short bursts of writing will have by now realized that I am focusing most of my readings on the visual and performing arts, though right now my focus is a bit more on the visual arts, which I have less familiarity with. I read about exhibitions that I will not be able to see not just to torture myself, but because outside of going there or spending money I don’t have for show catalogues, it is as close as I can get to experiencing the art. Besides as a writer, I am fascinated by how art gets framed by text.

What follows is rough, there are some dropped words and the writing needs to be tightened, but I’m too damn tired right this minute to fix the errors I actually have caught (we won’t speak of the ones I miss even after reading a piece over and over and over again).

Take the Money and Run is a show in Amsterdam co-sponsored by de Appel, Witte de With and Christie’s (two art galleries and an auction house).

Some very big names in the art world have donated work to be auctioned off. The auction will benefit new projects and programs. This show’s work supposedly manages to reflect “within the context of the auction upon the relationship between the economic and the symbolic value of art.”

The three curators, members of de Appel’s staff, have invited the artists to make a new work on A4, in which the changed value system within the art world in these times of financial crisis, is being brought up for discussion. After being exhibited, the conceptual works, texts, drawings, promises, understatements, ideas, visions and performances will be part of the “Two in One” auction taking place at Christie’s on 20 May. The project is an empathetic critique from within, in which de Appel and the artists assume the simultaneous role of contemporary collaborator and critical inquirer.

Of course, I would have to see the work to be sure, but my bullshit meter is dinging. Does having a performance called “Strip the Auctioneer” the night of the auction by Christie’s really equal to a “critique from within?” Mind you, it sounds like a grand good time, but it could as easy be called a publicity/fundraising stunt if fraternity boys raising money for the hungry and homeless did basically the same thing, we wouldn’t call it art. (I know, I know, the frame is a key piece of what makes it art puzzle, but still it is important to remember the cleaver/joke/stunt is not unique to the art world and not necessarily any more thought provoking or worthy of critical comment than the fore imagined frat fundraiser).

It sounds more like what flaming lefties like to call co-optation. Basically, the idea is that capital is a wiley bugger and quick on its feet and takes what was a critique, what was a form of resistance, swallows it, digests it a bit and pukes it back up in a slightly shifted form that it then uses to sell records, gizmos and yes, even art.

Perhaps, my problem is with their use of the word “empathetic” before “critique from within.” I think that is what has my bullshit meter ringing like I’ve hit the jackpot. The sassy, working class Southerner in me translates “empathetic critique from within” as “we have to talk about the market and symbolic value of art, because that’s what all the smart shows do when looking at the issue of economics and how it relates to (runs) the art world, but because we really, really want Christie’s to help us raise some cold hard cash, we have declawed all the catty critiques (don’t want to mess up the guests’ nice clothes) so they can be friendly, fun, festive events like “strip the auctioneer.”

Of course, I’m pulling all of this out my ass based on a small scarp of curatorial writing, but unless “you’ve got the money, I’ve got the time” to get me over there to see the show we won’t know if I’ve I’m right on the money about Take the Money and Run.

Genius: The Modern View is an Op-Ed piece by David Brooks. One reason I am counting it as one of my readings and writing a little blurb about it is that I want to share it with my students in the fall and writing helps cement something in my memory. Another reason is that relates to one of my art projects, An Exercise.

Brooks gives a quick gloss of what the latest research is finding out about this thing we call genius.

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours rigorously practicing their craft.

Brooks points to two points that summarize the latest research, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle and Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin.

The most interesting nugget/pearl of wisdom is that practice, practice, practice “delays the automatizing process.”

The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance.

What seems to be key (I say seems because I haven’t seen the research and take any science findings reported in newspapers with a salt shaker worth of salt) is “the ability to develop a deliberate, strenuous and boring practice routine.” I have to quibble with Brooks characterization of it as boring.

Having had long spells where I have worked in a similar way on my writing (I am in one of the spells right now, in fact) and performance skills, I seldom am bored by the hours and hours I spend paying close attention. Exhausted and depleted, sometimes, yes. But I rarely am bored. I find it satisfying to pay close attention trying to catch mistakes (though some always get past me), arranging and re-arrange the words, reading a section over and over and over again to find the small things that need fixing.

I am trying to balance the hours and hours I spend on pieces with some short writing assignments. Bishop Bishop’s Off the Cuff Daily Doses are an attempt to conceive, write and edit something in under an hour. It also is a type of practice, an attempt to hone my ability to community by focusing on time.

Last quote from Brooks piece, “the brain is also phenomenally plastic. We construct ourselves through behavior . . . it’s not who you are, it’s what you do.”

In It’s Official: Models Look Good, a fluffy promo piece disguised as a piece of journalism with only the faintest hints of a whiff of a trace of art criticism, Guy Trebay suggests that muses must be silent and that fashion models are “perhaps the last silent film stars” because they do not speak but are compelling to look at.

Trebay’s article for the New York Times, with a webpage title of The Silent Faces of Fashion, is a teaser piece for The Model as Muse, which opens May 6 at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Curated by Kohle Yohannan and Harold Koda, the exhibition seeks to “expand the way we see a fashion photograph to include the model” and “to examine the relationship . . . between high fashion and the evolving ideals of beauty through the careers and personifications of iconic models.”

The show, from what I can glean from Trebay’s article, is a largely non-critical reframing of fashion photography that tries to turn our attention away from the art of the photographer and toward the art(iface) of the model with a little gloss of critical curatorial content. Models are often unrecognized performers whose sometimes considerable talents contribute to the fashioning (pun intended) of the photographs we consume. I appreciate the efforts of the curators to acknowledge the work done by the models. Regardless of our opinions about how these types of performances impact culture- from disparaging feminist analysis to laudatory blogs- models are performing for audiences, and we could have meaningful conversations about the formal, social historical and deconstructable qualities of those performances.

Trebay’s linking of fashion models with silent movie stars is not outlandish and helps re-inforce the idea that acting without speaking caught on film (photographic or cinematic) is a type of performance that we can discuss critically. (By critically, I do not necessarily mean negatively). Trebay, unfortunately, does not speak critically about the models’ performances. Instead, he trots out a mistaken understanding of muses in his glib conclusion that actually undermines the attempts of the curators to create a place for the work that models do, which is a type of performing.

It cannot be accidental that Kate Moss, the most persuasive contemporary example of a model as an artistic catalyst, has assiduously guarded what she says throughout her career. Ms. Moss is no dummy. She knows that the basic requirement of her particular job is silence. A model is a muse to the precise extent that a model is mute.

For Trebay, a muse is necessarily silent, a cipher onto which we can project our fantasies, and a model’s silence is what confirms her muse like status. Trebay’s ideal model is not a muse, s/he is an absence, an erasure, a void that we then fill. She, the author made no mention of iconic male models, waits for us to act on her. “These gorgeous and petted and idealized creatures are passive — their beauty that of a butterfly pinned to a collector’s tray.” In saying this, Trebay contradicts his earlier argument about the non “passive thump” of models when he indulges himself with a little hyperbolic fashion-speak “Models are locamotives . . .Models rocket. Models explode.”

A muse is not a blank space to fill, but an active, separate force that causes us to move, act, speak. Muses do not wait for us; they act on us. To back up my claim, I turn to Wikipedia: Muse comes from the Greek mousa which not only means a type of goddess but also the common noun literally meaning song or poem.

The Muses, therefore, were both the embodiments and sponsors of performed metrical speech: mousike, whence “music”, was “the art of the Muses”. In the archaic period, before the wide-spread availability of books (scrolls), this included nearly all of learning.

and a bit more to prove my point

The Muses typically are invoked at or near the beginning of an ancient epic poem or classical Greek hymn. They have served as aids to an author of prose, too, sometimes represented as the true speaker, for whom an author is merely a mouthpiece.

The Muse moves us. S/he does not wait for us to look. S/he cannot be pinned down like a butterfly. We could possibly speak of models as muses, but only if we reject Trebay’s conclusion of necessary silence. Trebay muting of muses is not amusing. To speak of models as muses, we would have to acknowledge their performances as active forms of work that that cannot be reduced simply to passive objectification. They are performers. Their work affects us and that work and its affects could be spoken about meaningfully and critically. Let’s turn the volume up and hear what their performances have to “say” to us.

n It’s Official: Models Look Good, a fluffy promo piece disguised as a piece of journalism with only the faintest hints of a whiff of a trace of art criticism, Guy Trebay suggests that muses must be silent and that fashion models are “perhaps the last silent film stars” because they do not speak but are compelling to look at.

Trebay’s article for the New York Times, with a webpage title of The Silent Faces of Fashion, is a teaser piece for The Model as Muse, which opens May 6 at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Curated by Kohle Yohannan and Harold Koda, the exhibition seeks to “expand the way we see a fashion photograph to include the model” and “to examine the relationship . . . between high fashion and the evolving ideals of beauty through the careers and personifications of iconic models.”

The show, from what I can glean from Trebay’s article, is a largely non-critical reframing of fashion photography that tries to turn our attention away from the art of the photographer and toward the art(iface) of the model with a little gloss of critical curatorial content. Models are often unrecognized performers whose sometimes considerable talents contribute to the fashioning (pun intended) of the photographs we consume. I appreciate the efforts of the curators to acknowledge the work done by the models. Regardless of our opinions about how these types of performances impact culture- from disparaging feminist analysis to laudatory blogs- models are performing for audiences, and we could have meaningful conversations about the formal, social historical and deconstructable qualities of those performances.

Trebay’s linking of fashion models with silent movie stars is not outlandish and helps re-inforce the idea that acting without speaking caught on film (photographic or cinematic) is a type of performance that we can discuss critically. (By critically, I do not necessarily mean negatively). Trebay, unfortunately, does not speak critically about the models’ performances. Instead, he trots out a mistaken understanding of muses in his glib conclusion that actually undermines the attempts of the curators to create a place for the work that models do, which is a type of performing.

It cannot be accidental that Kate Moss, the most persuasive contemporary example of a model as an artistic catalyst, has assiduously guarded what she says throughout her career. Ms. Moss is no dummy. She knows that the basic requirement of her particular job is silence. A model is a muse to the precise extent that a model is mute.

For Trebay, a muse is necessarily silent, a cipher onto which we can project our fantasies, and a model’s silence is what confirms her muse like status. Trebay’s ideal model is not a muse, s/he is an absence, an erasure, a void that we then fill. She, the author made no mention of iconic male models, waits for us to act on her. “These gorgeous and petted and idealized creatures are passive — their beauty that of a butterfly pinned to a collector’s tray.” In saying this, Trebay contradicts his earlier argument about the non “passive thump” of models when he indulges himself with a little hyperbolic fashion-speak “Models are locamotives . . .Models rocket. Models explode.”

A muse is not a blank space to fill, but an active, separate force that causes us to move, act, speak. Muses do not wait for us; they act on us. To back up my claim, I turn to Wikipedia: Muse comes from the Greek mousa which not only means a type of goddess but also the common noun literally meaning song or poem.

The Muses, therefore, were both the embodiments and sponsors of performed metrical speech: mousike, whence “music”, was “the art of the Muses”. In the archaic period, before the wide-spread availability of books (scrolls), this included nearly all of learning.

and a bit more to prove my point

The Muses typically are invoked at or near the beginning of an ancient epic poem or classical Greek hymn. They have served as aids to an author of prose, too, sometimes represented as the true speaker, for whom an author is merely a mouthpiece.

The Muse moves us. S/he does not wait for us to look. S/he cannot be pinned down like a butterfly. We could possibly speak of models as muses, but only if we reject Trebay’s conclusion of necessary silence. Trebay muting of muses is not amusing. To speak of models as muses, we would have to acknowledge their performances as active forms of work that that cannot be reduced simply to passive objectification. They are performers. Their work affects us and that work and its affects could be spoken about meaningfully and critically. Let’s turn the volume up and hear what their performances have to “say” to us.

Spooky Action at a Distance just opened in Australia. (For those who wonder; no, I don’t have magic teleporting powers, I live vicariously through eFlux and Art Agenda email announcements). Spooky is a double joint joint effort bring together artists Anat Ben-David and Martin Bell, and curators Adi Nachman and Andy Mac.

The title of the show is taken from something Einstein once said about Quantum Physics, “spukhafte Fernwirkung,” which the curators translate as spooky action at a distance. In the exhibition statement, the curators imply that the process of collaborating on this show was somehow like the “strange, instantaneous, connection between particles, that persist even when they are separated by great distance.” The title does not seem to relate to the finished works in the show; it somehow is trying to illuminated the work to brought the works together.

The lovely thing about many exhibitions these days is that they put video snippets online. Samples of Anat Ben-David’s collection of videos called Band was online, and so in a small way I got to experience a bit of the exhibit even though it is in Australia. I enjoyed the samples from the videos, but I am not quite sure that they live up to the curatorial hype or perhaps the curatorial commentary limits the possibilities of the work.

Ben-David basically makes 7 music videos for 7 different bands. She composed and recorded the music as well. Using the magic of splice and dice ‘em digital editing, she plays every role in the videos- sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes four musicians.

Band represents an ultimate virtual experience in terms of the construction of an invented reality. The installation aims not only to show the finished results – the completed clips – but to reveal the artistic process of creating a fictional world integrating digital technology and the body. The members of Band are multicultural, multinational , multilingual and fictional. The characters serve as vessels that absorb culture and regurgitate a new language. Different national identities and cultures are mixed up. The intended effect is that of a parallel universe, where things seem familiar, but are nevertheless strangely and slightly rearranged.

That isn’t quite what I got out of it. There were many lovely moments, and some sections that worked really well in terms of being art that is like but not quite a music video, and there was no small amount of humor, which I appreciate. This may seem catty, but I actually am not trying to be catty when I say that overall it wasn’t particularly strange or unfamiliar, rather Band seems a bit like European music videos from the 80’s. It reminds me of the part in the Kate Bush video for Running up that hill where the head of the male dancer is pasted on a bunch of women’s bodies. Ben-David’s splicing and dicing is much better than that, though one of the joys of watching the clips is to notice where the splices are quite working and the images are not perfectly aligned. The aesthetics of the videos almost seem like a crazy cross between of the 1980’s film based on Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York, which I loved in high school, and PJ Harvey’s look in the early 90’s.

Her work isn’t in an alternate universe: it is firmly situated in our own universe where video and film before video from early on in their histories has played with editing that allows a single performer to play multiple parts in a shared frame. We are accustomed to what used to be uncany cloning and duplication. At a base level, what Ben-David is doing technically and aesthetically is not particular new, innovative or original. The annoying curatorial chit chat about how Band is the “ultimate virtual experience in terms of the construction of an invented reality,” (it isn’t), gets in the way of our seeing what the work might be beyond its fancy dancy tricks.

I would have to see the works in full (and watch them many, many times) before I could really begin to formulate a reading that gets us out of the dead end of the curator’s conclusion that digital tricks are kind of spooky. In the second video clip, which may be my favorite, the artists plays two almost but not quite mirroring characters who stand behind lighting stands that obscure most but not all of the time the characters’ heads and faces. Instead of their faces, we see giant circles of brightness almost like after images from looking at the sun, presumably from the lights themselves, though we cannot be quite sure that that is the case. Lights normally turned on an object to be photographed are turned out to, in some senses, shine on the viewer. It is glaring, enough to make us squint a bit if we look at it long enough. (I’ve been looking at it for a while, and my eyes hurt a bit). In some sections, her head is close to even with the bright circle- the circle could be resting on her neck, but in other images, her head is behind the black canisters that hold the shining light- so if we consider the bright circle her face, then she becomes an insect with head protruding forward from the neck. This is repeated but shifted in the last section where the circles of light rest on the characters’ necks, but the lighting canisters extend backwards behind the circle like the elongated head of an alien or bug. The splicing as the piece progresses becomes purposefully uneven, one side of the image is taller than the other. Ben-David creates and points to an imperfect doubling.

I do not yet know what all that means, but it adds up to much more than spookiness. I am too tired to suss it out now so I turn it to you. What might all that mean besides “wow, digital doubling (tripling, etc) is sure damn nifty and far out?” If I sound snarky, it is because in writing this I realized how much content in just that one selection was getting washed out by the glaringly bright curitorial framing. We have to squint to see what is there.

I did a few readings today that I will write up tomorrow, but today has been very long and fairly stressful day, and I’m about ready to go to sleep.

But in this time of pandemic panic about swine flu, I wanted to give y’all a little gift. This “reading” is more an art listening experience. Stephan Zielinski made music by feeding the amino acid sequence of the Swine Flu into an algorithm he coded which he posted on his blog.

I think it is an interesting way to respond to all the news and rumors. It is a simple thing, this piece of electronic music, but it might give us the time to pause to look past the fear mongering- some of which might end up being justified, but much of it just keeping us hooked on the sky is falling news reports. By turning it into music, breaking it down, Zielinski reminds us that virus is something to study as well as protect against- and while the deaths are tragic, there also is beauty to be found in the DNA of a virus. Viruses perhaps being what set off the chain that lead to us.

For your anti panic pandemic music needs, I present Stephan Zielinski’s Swine Flu Hemagglutinin: amino acid sequence as ambient music

Blogademic is an awkward, fugly duckling neologism, the kind that would have to have pork chop tied around it’s neck to get the dogs to play with or even eat the damned thing. Yet, it seems to be accepted in some blogging circles, though I had never come across it until today. This may be because I have had only the most cursory interest or knowledge of the blogosphere, another ungainly portmanteau. (Full disclosure: I did not know the word “portmanteau” previous to my word searching web surfing and in all likely hood would butcher its pronunciation). Blogosphere, with its very own Wikipedia entery, seems to be accepted enough to no longer technically be called a neologism, while blogademic (like its kissing cousin blogademia) is a new pair of shiny patent leather shoes that hasn’t been worn enough to be broken in enough to earn the right to be charted in Wikipedia’s definitional content constellations.

If that paragraph did not give you a sense of what you, dear reader, are in for then I now will take a moment to warn you, “Here be rhetorical dragons.” Or perhaps I should warn you of the patches of quicksand found in this bog of a blob about blogs.

I came across this word in Douglas Harrison’s article Scholarly Voice and Professional Identity in the Internet Age, written for the otherwise overwhelming poking your eyes out would be a more interesting and useful way to pass the time, NEA journal Thought & Action.

Perhaps, I am being just a tad hyperbolic. Southern Hyperbole is an important, misunderstood and understudied rhetorical device. Yes, it is going to be that kind of entry, full of digressions, over the top descriptions and long, winding road sentences. Boring academic journals bring out the borst- best and worst smashed together- in me. Ooh, back to the subject of neologisms, borst is a nonce word, perhaps my favorite type of neologism. There is a method to this madness which will become clearer many train wrecks of words later.

I can across Harrison’s article while sitting on the can, otherwise known as the library, so there is an extra special, dare I say, flavor about this being in my sh*t to read folder. My use of the bathroom as a reading room might make many English folks feel quite at home there, at least according to my reading of Watching the English by anthropologist Kate Fox.

Unlike many of the articles in Thought & Action, which I have been reading despite their narcolepsy inducing properties because I actually am interested in pedagogy and unions, (this is why the journal and one of my husband’s godawfully dense mathematics theory books are the only reading materials in the bathroom, so I will be desperate enough to read/skim the articles, anyway, as I was saying, unlike many of the articles, I enjoyed Harrison’s piece.

I enjoyed his piece, not only because the writing was refreshing brisk compared to the other articles I had forced my way through, but more importantly because it stirred up more than a few trains of thought for future writing projects. I have begun to strategize my project in lieu of thesis, which includes a laughably short theoretical essay to frame the project (I wrote more for my undergraduate thesis, which included a creative project, than they will require for the MFA project in lieu of thesis). I also am in the woolgathering stage for the proposal for Book Works.

The most interesting train of thought that pulled out of the station to chug around my mental tracks was about the norms of academia, the things that make academics a noticeably distinct class of people. Academia assumes an ideal of an unemotional intellectualism that speaks in a distinct language that often only other academics (in the same field) can understand. I found his discussion of the ways that blogging academics partially subvert the power of rank within academia, to focus on the ideas, interesting. He quotes Robert Boynton’s suggestion that blogging “makes real the very vision of intellectual life that the university has never managed to achieve.”

But despite the power of the subversive “carnival of ideas”, as suggested by Harrison’s reading of Henry Farrell, this in between space, not fully following the class codes of academia or the norms of pop culture communications, causes “status instability” and no small amount of anxiety for academics like Harrison who spend time blogging. I’m willing to argue that the chattering class, which includes people of all sorts of political persuasions from left to right (my slight contempt is all inclusive), is a distinct class with its own codes and norms within the unacknowledged class system in the United States. Breaking those codes makes committed academics uneasy.

Often the entries or posts that generate the most readable comments threads or the most rewarding reader responses are also the instances in which I am farthest from my scholarly comfort zone—territory where I have to convey not only an intellectual command of my subject (no discomfort there), but also an emotional authenticity that will resonate with that segment of my regular readers who experience the world through the prism of evangelical religious affect. At this point, things start to get more uncomfortable. In these cases, I am unnerved to some extent by the depth of my own psychospiritual connection and response to this artistic tradition. For example, I wrote a while back about “moments of grace” I’d encountered through the works of a popular group of gospel performers. With Wordsworth’s spots of time in mind (but not explicitly referenced), I wrote of moments “of understanding or feeling that sweep over us in and through a given artist’s work … moments that merge intimations of faith and feeling and beauty in a way that gracefully verifies what the apostle so famously described as the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. Hoped for because felt, unseen but intuited.” Genuine as these sentiments are, I can’t escape the feeling of publishing them at my own professional peril in an academic culture that is often skeptical of certain expressions of affect or sentiment.

I think there is value to insider speak, which most industries and fields of specialization have, as long as acamedics remember that knowing a specialized language does not make them smarter than people who do not speak that particular language. Most academics wouldn’t understand two airplane mechanics on a roll. This insiders’ language is critical in minutely specialized fields with science, which is why we desperately need good science writers to interpret the esoteric jargon and present the research findings in comprehensible English that does not claim that those findings are fact. Something written in an academic style is not truer than something written for a popular audience. Academic writing is just as prone to error, bad rhetoric, false assumptions and twisted logic; what makes it distinct is that it takes readers longer to figure out whether or not a piece of writing is a crock of shit. Academic discourse, despite its stated distain for emotion and sentiment, is on a constant low boil. Emotions and subjectivity bubble under the protective coating of faux objectivity.

Objectivity is best understood as a form of fruitful intellectual play; let’s pretend for a while that we really and truly can be objective and see what that turns up. This pretense is useful; it does provide information that is meaningful. But it is not the only way to generate knowledge and it has limits. If we looked closely enough, we could find cracks in the laminate of objectivity covering pretty much any piece of academic writing.

I’ve waxed on and on about this because one of things I dislike about academic discourse is how emotion is devalued and denied as a tool for generating knowledge. Emotion, often gendered female and/or working class, is suspect. I am not advocating that emotion is a better or truer way to uncover knowledge, but that is part of even the supposedly objective processes of the academic. This denial of emotion’s place in knowledge production is responsible in some part for the anxiety and ambivalence that academics like Harrison feel about the intellectual work they do blogging.

From one point of view, my uncertainty bespeaks the success of my training as an academic; I am on guard against sentimentality lest my own emotional investments erode the intellectual integrity of my writing.

I find troubling the notion that an emotional investment erodes the intellectual integrity of a piece of academic writing. If this were true, then all academic knowledge is suspect and lacks integrity. I have yet to met an academic without a significant emotional investment in their field of study. A truer statement would be that the appearance of an emotional investment causes uptight, emotional repressed academics to judge that piece of writing as suspect and less true than a piece of writing that tries to erase the traces of emotion that generated a particular understanding. Academic writings are palimpsests; the emotions that bring an academic to the page are scraped off leaving only ghosts. Those of us who see these ghosts can be written off as superstitious.

Harrison does suggest that commitment is vital to the production of knowledge.

And I continue to believe that real learning and civilized discourse do not take place without the ability to make oneself vulnerable at times—without, as James Baldwin notes in the quotation with which I began, “risking oneself.”

Despite this statement, I wish Harrison had a little more chutzpah, was a little less apologetic about his blogging and the more varied rhetorical styles he allows himself in that space. Harrison’s annoying ambivalence points to how powerful the norms of academia are. For once, I would like an academic to bravely say that emotions- commitment is an emotion by the way- played no small part in how s/he came to understand something and that writing that points and uses those emotions can be just as rigorous as writing that denies the emotions that helped produced a particular understanding.

It’s not especially surprising that higher education has yet to comprehend and respond coherently to the comparatively recent changes that new media has introduced. But the academy must find a way to account for new kinds of intellectual labor as organically related to professional identity as academic blogging. Otherwise, it will likely continue to be mistaken for a dirty little secret waiting to be discovered and used against the blogging academic.

I’d suggest that academic blogging will continue to be a dirty little secret as long as academia is unable to acknowledge the old kinds of intellectual labor that it denies.

part of An Exercise. I was able to do crunches and significantly modified push ups tonight. Which was wonderful. I did not try to go for my previous number of reps, because just the positions for the crunches and the modified push ups puts a small bit of strain on my calf- which I need to do in small doses. The push ups really were a series of upper ward facing dog poses with the legs flat on the floor, because I cannot put my weight on my right foot (the calf can’t take the pressure) the way I would need to for a full push up. I concentrated on using my upper body strength versus my abs for the reps. So the now I’ll roll out the data log:

1 hour project work (meeting about NWSA workshop)
2.5 hours art promoting
30 minutes project work (Tedious details for getting Saving you from the same old same old set up at the FloCAS show)
20 minutes reading performance writing/experimental prose
5 minutes writing (about above reading)
10 minutes writing (An Exercise free write)

I mentioned before that there is a show in London at the ICA opening called Talk Show, which I would love to see but that ain’t happening, so I am enjoying it through their research page. This piece of performance writing from Chris Mann, maybe if you hit it hard, I found oddly enjoyable and lovely even, though also sometimes frustrating in a wanting to shake the artist until his teeth rattled some sense out from between his lips. It plays in a cat with a mouse sort of way with the questions of the Subject, the object, the relation between them and broader questions of what language does.

A long selection of the glorious, ridiculous and down right annoying language games of Chris Mann:

ttToBe thinks it has a sense of humour. it is afterall the classic transformative object. which is only to say that its a Name. (though of course any word will Do. and coz the known is that which cant be Thought, and coz its the Sequence of, of, of Notes that make it Whistleable, the Subject then is that name given to a style of Cop. the latin for this is Form. (Grammar, that which turns the Unconscious Negation into the Conscious Affirmation, the standard Addiction .. and as you is my unconscious, and therefore Lack an Object, weÕre left with the choice of whether this is a Symptom, or a, Field, you know, whatyouseeiswhatyouget, Sense, the successful defEnce (where you both blame it for not being something Else, And love it for not being You. This, as freud used to say, is Shit. (twodownfouracross two letters, It. the Shrink. (fuck, what Is this, some sort of private joke? (though not knowing WhoÕs, is of course the demand that it fail to Translate. (the past of Past, Fucked. ( .. the Subject, the amnesiac Object. Ashamed. Humiliated. iÕm bored. (not bad. whatdya call, what Is that, Haiku for Me? (though not All metaphors is Voyeurs. some still need a noun to make them come.

So the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London is about to launch Talk Show, which I would very much like to see. Seeing as that is not likely, barring small miracles, I have to make do with the Research and Documentation pages of their website (nothing yet on the Documentation page).

The Research page has essays, excerpts from longer works, video clips and other “specially-curated content.” Most look interesting so I’ve added the links on this page to my sh*t to read folder. The first piece is an extract from Mikhail Yampolsky’s Voice Devoured: Artaud and Borges on Dubbing and essay that “explores the relationship between the voice and cannibalism.”

The selection only looks at Antonin Artaud. Now the thing you have to know about Artaud is that he was brilliant but also without a doubt bat shit crazy. That is not the way snotty intellectuals like to put it, but it is the way I like to put it. Keep this in mind. Yampolsky looks at Artaud’s article The Torments of dubbing, a piece about French actors dubbing American films for next to nothing. Yampolsky posits that this at first glance positive article is complicated by Artaud’s “mistrust of the audible word.”

Because Artaud wrote a now lost screenplay for The Dybbuck, Yampolsky asks us to imagine the dybbuk, a revengeful possessing spirit from Jewish legend, along side the character in a dubbed film. The dybbuk steals the voice of the live human it possesses, the film star steals the voice of the underpaid French actor.

According to Yampolsky there an overtly satantic subtext to the article on dubbing, which points to how “ghoulish” it is that dubbing snatches the personality or the soul (I’m paraphrasing here).

It all boils down to Artaud losing his mind over this “question of reciprocal alienation of voice and body.” The extract does not resolve anything but leaves us with the King of Differance Derrida restating Artuad’s dilemma.

If my speech is not my breath (souffle), if my letter is not my speech, this is because my spirit was already no longer my body, my body no longer my gestures, my gestures no longer my life. The integrity of the flesh torn by all these differences must be restored in the theatre.

All this assumes the reader is familiar with Artaud’s idea of the Theatre of Cruelty, as outlined in The Theatre and Its Double. Which I won’t go into much since it has been a while since I read it. But in sassy Sheila shorthand, Artaud wanted to slap the audience around a bit- with shocking lighting, sound, performance- and in this moment of SM fun and games, would somehow lead to “a kind of severe moral purity,” to the truth.

As my leg continues to so slowly, too slowly, heal, I continue to log just the art data part of An Exercise. Tomorrow I am going to try to do push ups and sit ups- which might be too difficult- you’d be surprise how injuring a major muscle makes all sorts of things hard to do.

Anyway, here’s today’s data:

1.5 hours reading (theory, new media essay)
1 hour writing about readings
1 hour writing (rough drafts, first thoughts for potential Daily Dose)
10 minutes writing (free write part of An Exercise)

These are rough notes, not well thought out arguments. Please keep that in mind if you decide to read.

Ocean, Database, Recut by Grahame Weinbren is the third chapter in the anthology Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow edited by Victoria Vesna.

The chair of my project in lieu of thesis committee (academia cannot imagine calling an art project a thesis- heaven forbid- we are encouraged to wrap our projects in a protective coating of theory, but to suggest that the project itself has the same intellectual rigor as a thesis cannot be countenanced), anyways, she had suggested the article. I dutiful copied it and left it to molder in the sh*t to read folder.

I pulled it out of the folder today. It is fairly straightforward analysis of how the concept and use of databases are changing not only how we produce artwork (Weinbren focuses mainly on film and video) but how we consume those works. Weinbren uses a passage from Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories to establish the Ocean of Streams of Story as an unifying metaphor for his essay.

His argument is plausible though not particular compelling. Basically, Weinbren argues that new technologies using databases privilege multilinearity over linear narrative.

The best part of his essay was his description of three art films that manage to allude to this notion the narrative(s) of the film are just one possible way through the database of available material. The works put the question of their materiality front and center. All three films sound arresting. I would very much like to see them.

(nostalgia) by Hollis Frampton
Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come on, Petunia) by Gary Hill
Obsessive Becoming by Dan Reeves

Weinbrun then goes on to talk about his own work for a few pages. I wished he had started with the artwork, his own and the other work and then brought in the theory. The way he wrote makes it seem that he uses the theory as a slight of hand trick so he can slide in a discussion of his own work but not look like he is tooting his own horn. Because of course, since he develops his theoretical understandings through his art practice, he must refer to his work. If he develops his ideas through his artwork, then damn it, start with the work.

Perhaps I’m jaded from reading a few too many “new media” theorists who have a tendency to think that what is happening is brand new, a “change in what it means to be human,” and that is is somehow better and truer than the old, more oppressive modes. When too often, if we dig deep enough we will find that shifts that they are trying to document are not so new; and that multilinear artworks are not really that much truer than linear ones.

Friendship as a Way of Life is an interview with Michel Foucault collected in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The interview was originally conducted for the French magazine Gai Pied in 1981.

I found it on AAAARG.ORG, which is good resource when you are in theory geek mode and want to read some short little snippet of something thick and chewy. I went in search of a snippet of The Order of Things, which they did not have, because the copy of the first chapter that I have has someone else’s notations and underlining, which I am in no mode to deal with. I want a pristine copy to mark up; so I can pretend I am exploring a new world, a virgin territory ready for me to conquer.

It is interesting to read this piece considering when it was written and think about what has happened since with the advent of an even more vocal and visible and expand GLBTQ movement and the all too brief love affair of academia and the art world with identity politics, which is supposedly now passe and dated. (I know there are plenty of problems with identity politics, but damn it some of it is useful and still being worked out in the trenches of day to day life even if the academy and snouty artsy fartsy folks distain it).

I highlight a long quote because I find it interesting to think of in light of the current battles to legalize same sex marriage.

One of the concessions one makes to others is not to present homosexuality as anything but a kind of immediate pleasure, of two young men meeting in the street, seducing each other with a look, grabbing each other’s asses and getting each other off in a quarter of an hour. There you have a kind of neat image of homosexuality without any possibility of generating unease, and for two reasons: it responds to a reassuring canon of beauty, and it cancels everything that can be troubling in affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie, and companionship, things that our rather sanitized society can’t allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force. I think that’s what makes homosexuality “disturbing”: the homosexual mode of life, much more than the sexual
act itself. To imagine a sexual act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not what disturbs people. But that individuals are beginning to love one another-there’s the problem. The institution is caught in a contradiction; affective intensities traverse it which at one and the same time keep it going and shake it up.

I think there is some truth to this still. People fighting against same sex marriage do not want what they see as other, what they castigate as immoral and depraved, to be seen as anything like their partnerships. If a sizable portion of the LGBTQ community is legally settled down into domestic situations that share the same headaches as heterosexual ones- mortgages, health problems, bills, never ending chores, battles over whose turn it is to cook dinner, having to schedule sex due to lack of time and energy- all the hallmarks of domestic “bliss”- then it becomes harder to say look at those depraved sinners who are nothing like us. When they point people will see normal seeming harried couples.

There are problems with the GBLTQ drive to mainstream, which I won’t go into now but instead will point to writers like Patrick Califia and Mattidla Bernstein Sycamore for criticism on the drive to assimilation.

While we like to laugh at how ridiculous their tactics can be, as in the National Organization for Marrige’s Gathering Storm video, I think Foucault’s observation made way back in 1981 was prescient of the intensity of groups like NOM.

2 hours art promoting (bits and pieces)
34 minutes art research (watching The Politics in the Room)
20 minutes writing (about research)
10 minutes writing (An Exercise free write)
1 hour writing (Daily Dose)

The Politics in the Room is a collection of videos instead of exploring politics in general, try to follow “the politics of the room” one is in. I’m am counting it as a reading because I’ve been saving it to watch and think about and because any collection of videos loaded with theory counts as sh*t to read as far as I’m concerned.

I was underwhelmed by the collection. It may be because I am a bit cranky from dealing with an annoying, tiresome injury that makes it hard to do much of what I need/want to do for a bit over a week now. Or it may be because these pieces really are not that good or interesting. Goddard is boring/tedious in a good way, these videos, as a whole, are boring/tedious in a bad way.

I rejoiced at the few moments of humor that lightened the mood. I suppose my main criticism is that as a whole the videos in this collection take themselves too seriously, are too artsy fartsy in an unoriginal way. And I can get down with some artsy fartsy.

I enjoyed the first one by Claire Hope even though I don’t know if the world needs more almost but not quite Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus type pieces. I couldn’t quite suss out if the artist believes the differences are biological or not, but it did not interest me enough to watch again to figure it out.

The eighth video by Mayling To had some nice moments but overall was a boring regurgitation of passages of psychoanalytic theory with a little bit of visual commentary.

I’m logging the data from three days worth of An Exercise because I previous logged the April 18th data under April 17th.

4/17/09
30 minutes art facilitation
30 minutes reading about art
1.5 hour writing about art
1 hour “rehearsal” (warm ups, make-up, costuming, preparing)
1.5 hours performing
1 hour writing (Daily Dose)
10 minutes writing (An Exercise log free write)

4/18/09
1 hour proposal writing
1 hour “rehearsal”
1.5 hours performing
10 minutes writing (An Exercise log free write)

4/19/09
30 minutes writing in character of Bishop Bishop online
30 minutes project work (buying a copy of play I’m hoping to direct)
1.5 hours “rehearsing” (include time after play doing photos)
1 hour proposal writing (Acrosstown Repertory Theatre)
3 hours proposal writing (Crawl Space Residency)

1 hour proposal work
1 hour “rehearsal”
1.5 hours performance
10 minutes writing (free write)

I have begun to see some light at the end of the injury tunnel. The leg is beginning to heal. I still have limited range of movement. It still is swollen. And when I get up first thing in the morning it is a incredible painful, awkward experience. The muscle contracts so tightly during the night that I cannot put my heel on the floor. I had the normal hell waking up today- but I was able to do more without pushing it. Moving is getting a little less awkward. All of this is exciting because it means eventually I’ll be able to start the walking part of this project. Ooh, and ride my bike, too.

In the guise of Bishop Bishop</a>, I get closer to my goal of doing The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words.

If you decide to follow any of the links, I feel I must warn you that Bishop Bishop is not your normal sort of preacher. Bishop Bishop is loud, salacious and provocative. Bishop Bishop may or may not believe in god and doesn’t give a fig about the afterlife. Bishop Bishop preaches about the economy, sex, gender, politics, the meaning of life, the complexity of it all, sex, more sex, religious life- which is what many preachers deal with, but Bishop Bishop is way far to the left of most popular preachers.

The tick of eros

Off the cuff

Off the cuff: Amputee Porn

You are warned that it takes me a long while to get to the point. I could lay all the blame the doses of hydroco and the muscle relaxant I just took, but I must admit I have been known to write in a digressive, tangential way that pushes me magnetically away from my main point anytime I get too close.

I went searching on Susie Bright’s blog for a snippet of something she wrote about how one of the most beautiful films/videos about sex she ever saw was of a couple where one partner was a paraplegic. At least that is what I remember, and I can’t remember if I read in on her blog or in one of her books.

I was in search of that remembered snippet because last night Bishop Bishop threw out a request/challenge to her followers to send in subjects for The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words. She will put the all the suggestions she manages to cajole out of the faithless faithful into her hat. This will be the source for her off the cuffDaily Doses.

I was searching for that remembered snippet because 1) I am, no doubt about it, Bishop Bishop’s overworked and underpaid lackey, and she wanted me to find it and 2) the first subject offered for an off the cuff Daily Doses was amputee porn.

This suggestion was not offered to me in a sly or sarcastic manner. This person was not trying to be a smart ass, was not trying to make me squirm. It was a serious suggestion. I will not go into it now because anything I have to say about it Bishop Bishop will want to steal, I mean use, for her next Daily Dose.

As I went searching for the remembered snippet, I let myself get sidetracked by The Best of Susie Bright’s Journal section of her website. The NSFW Bogeyman caught my eye. Bright lays out how money determines whether or not something is labeled NSFW and thus screened out. The New Yorker full of dirty words, articles about perverts and nude photographs is not labelled as NSFW. Independent bloggers who happen to be women and feminist and mouthy have a very good chance of getting labeled as NSFW.

There is not a single feminist political blogger I’ve met who hasn’t dealt with this issue. I brought it up at the last Blogher conference, and it was like the Zoolander explosion at the gas station.

Bright also challenges her readers to think about when they use the NSFW label and why they do and what it means. The point of all this rambling is to get to what I thought about the NSFW label, how I’ve used it, especially in regards to my own work and what it means to me as an artist.

I have used the NSFW label when I am posting content (my own or others) somewhere where I have a mixed audiences that includes family members or acquaintances who are likely to be offended by particular subjects, language, etc. The mother of my cousin Robby, who committed suicide last year, friended me on Facebook after his death. (His Facebook profile became an online shrine). She got very upset by something I posted on my own profile. I have used the NSFW label (mainly for my own work) because I want to keep this online connection with her but do not want to deal with a bunch of drama because something I’ve posted makes an already and understandably upset person more upset.

I have used it for my own work as a shorthand way to ask the audience to consent to viewing my work. Most of the time, I want my audiences to choose my work with at least a glimmer of a gleam of something that tells them what they are getting into. Now that I’m reminded by Susie Bright of the political and economic forces behind who and what gets censored, I will have to find a different way to do this.

My work has made me potentially NSTH (not safe to hire). Several years ago I applied to teach a community education class in the community education program run by Santa Fe College. The administrators of the program tried to turn down my proposal because of the content of my art work and made the mistake of putting that reason into writing. I got various faculty members to write letters of support that reminded the administrators of the colleges policies about intellectual freedom.

I got to teach the class, but I found the whole experience draining and demoralizing. I do not have a thick skin; I probably never will have a thick skin. I suppose a small bit of me hopes that if I go ahead and label my work NSWF, NSW, XXX then I won’t have to deal with all those people who can’t deal with it. I know that this hope is in vain since many people go looking for things to be offended by. I suppose what I find most interesting about my use of the NSFW label is how I sometimes use it as a way to try to deflect criticism.

So a year or so ago, I signed up for e-Flux, which rounds up art events from around the world and sends out emails about said events to subscribers. Since I come from a theater/literature/women’s studies/smattering of anthropology background, I am not well verse in the visual arts, which can be a pain since I’m in- by the skin of my talented teeth- a visual arts MFA program.

e-Flux emails have been and continue to be a great way for me to learn, in short little bursts, about the trends in contemporary art. Though sometimes it is frustrating to read about shows that I cannot see because they are thousand of miles away.

I would love to see the exhibition, Playing the City, at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt that starts April 20th. Though I will be able to see some of it online (only problem is that I don’t know German).

Playing the City will be in the gallery, online and in the streets of Frankfurt. This series of events celebrate relational aesthetics (a term coined by French art critic/theorist, Nicolas Bourriaud).

Since the 1990s, under new social conditions, a practice of art based on participation has become increasing important, in parallel with an increase in the interactive and collaborative media forms on the Internet and the realities of the nomadism of contemporary globalism. The viewers are integrated into the production of art works in many ways, and the division between traditional roles of the artist as producer and the audience as recipients are being broken down as much as possible . . . y opening up a new possibility for communication through common activities, relational art can counter social alienation.

I won’t go into all the problems of relational aesthetics, except to say while personally I love participatory art, I have significant reservations about the assumption that participatory art projects are somehow more liberating for the audience or have more of a political effect than art that does not revolve around the audience’s input. Participatory projects can have political/social effects, but so can more “traditional” fourth-wall sort of art. Work does not have to be avant-garde to be politically meaningful. Even though I tend to prefer avant-garde and experimental work to more traditional, I do not mistake the form for the content. Just think about how often advertisers subvert avant-garde art and activist techniques to sell crap.

Unlike Claire Bishop, a rather snotty art critic whose good ideas get buried in her overuse and misuse of theoretical ideas, I do like a fair amount of the art produced when artists set out to make it participatory, but I dislike the rah, rah boosterism of the relational aesthetics clique. Much of the work produced lacks nuance and presents simplistic solutions to the problems found in our political and social live. Their look at the bright side definition of participation ignores the ugly forms of participation that humans are involved in. A lynch mob is a participatory event.

I would love to see the events in Frankfurt because I would like to see how these sort of ideas play out in the chosen artists’ work. I want to see what works and what doesn’t work.

What I like most about the conception of Playing in the City is that is time limited. When the exhibit is over and the art dissembled, the website also will be taken offline “hence the trace of the event erased—at least to the extent new paths through the Internet have not be established.” They will not be able to erase all traces; this little bit of writing is a trace of the show that will remain online after the Playing the City is all played out. But beyond the more or less material traces of event- fliers and photos and bits of writing tucked away in blogs online- there are the ghostly traces left in people’s memories.

I love work that does not last- that only happens once- that you had to be there. I think there is something magical about that for me.
I would like to be there.