(incli)NATION

On Laughter, Angst and Cai Guo-Qiang

And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh. --Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

When I read Roberta Smith's description, in todays New York Times, of the small army of assistants to the artist Cai Guo-Qiang--Mr. Cai puts large sheets of paper on the floor, distributes some combination of gunpowder and/or fuses across the paper and then lights it all, after which the assistants rush to put out the small fires which have ignited on the paper itself--it cracked me up! Imagine the sight, a room full of blue, sulfurous smoke and a half-dozen m.f.a. students running around stamping out little fires with their soon-to-be-ruined Converse lo-tops.

Mr. Cai's work reminds me that Democritus and Heraclitus were both right; we are at once pathetic and pitiable. But we are hilarious as well. Mt. Rushmore? It's a caricature of hubris and it's really funny!  Or Warhol's "Empire"? Sadistic and terrifyingly boring and bust-a-gut funny! Thank you Mr. Cai for taking up this honored tradition.

 

Mr. Cai's bravado illustrates how in the western world, where anything seems possible, much of our privileged, existential angst can be traced to the ongoing problem of keeping our Franklin/Covey® 'To Do' list up to date; schedule the meeting, pay the bills, buy the groceries, fill the gas tank, finish the novel, call mom. It's frantic. It seems really important. We court misery and worry ourselves sick. And eventually we need meds. [some of us, anyway.] And this is all exactly like  Mr. Cai's work. The tyranny of absolute freedom, theoretical or not, wreaks havoc among every one of us not singularly motivated by financial gain. Remember John Kennedy Toole's Ignatius Rielly,  from 'A Confederacy of Dunces':

    "Employers sense in me a denial of their values." He rolled over onto his back. "They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century which I loathe. That was true even when I worked for the New Orleans Public Library."
     "But Ignatius, that was the only time you worked since you got out of college, and you was only there for two weeks."
    "That is exactly what I mean," Ignatius replied, aiming a paper ball at the bowl of the milk glass chandelier.
    "All you did was paste them little slips in the books."
  "Yes, but I had my own esthetic about pasting those slips. On some days I could only paste in three or four slips and at the same time feel satisfied with the quality of my work. The library authorities resented my integrity about the whole thing. They only wanted another animal who could slop glue on their best sellers."
    "You think maybe you could get a job there again?"
  "I seriously doubt it. At the time I said some rather cutting things to the woman in charge of the processing department. They even revoked my borrower's card. You must realize the fear and hatred which my weltanschauung instills in people." Ignatius belched.

Slap me in the face if that ever fails to make me laugh!

Thank you John Kennedy. Thank you Andy Warhol. And thank you Cai Guo-Qiang. You crack me up, even those flying Fords in the SAM lobby. [I know I'm supposed to be thinking about the ubiquity of violence, post 9-11, ruminate on the mediation of extreme brutality and terrorism by technology, etc. But they just look so...hammy! Thanks again.]

Duchamp on Chess

Chess is a sport, a violent sport...If it's anything at all, then it's a fight.

- Marcel Duchamp in 'Marcel Duchamp Plays and Wins, Yves Armand

[left, the famous Kasparov 'evil eye']

H1 by Brio54, Knock-out Sustainable Residential Design

I fell in love with the creative simplicity of the design of the new H1 residence by Brio54, a new Arch. firm made up of partners Gernot Bruckner and Philip Macari. These are still in design development with construction slated to begin later in the spring. Be sure to check out their site for detailed descriptions of all the mechanicals and such:

from the always fabulous Inhabitat: "As soon as we saw them, we instantly fell in love with Brio54’s new set of prefab residential prototypes. A young, design-driven development firm, Brio54’s mission is to provide sustainable, affordable design while delivering high quality construction. Home buyers of all types will delight in Brio54’s wide variety of offerings - whether you live in a suburban area, are looking to refurbish or rehab, or have an empty urban infill lot. Brio54’s first prefab prototype, the H1, (pictured above) is currently in the final stage of planning, and construction is slated to begin production in the spring of 2008.

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Slightly Unbalanced feat. Nauman, Oursler, Sherman, Kelly and more

Found this in my inbox. It looks like a good one to check out if you're going to be in Chi-town this spring. Might even be a reason to plan a trip! Though it looks to be traveling a bit later in the year...

Slightly Unbalanced
A traveling exhibition organized by iCI, New York
Touring January 2008 through December 2009
Curated by Susan Hapgood

On view: January 26 - April 13, 2008
Chicago Cultural Center
Chicago, Illinois

http://www.ici-exhibitions.org

From the press release: " iCI announces the tour of Slightly Unbalanced, an exhibition of works by artists who have focused on neurosis of various kinds in their work, using themselves and the people around them as fodder for their investigations. During the past fifteen years, inspired by the work of several prominent older artists, a younger generation has expanded the contemporary art vocabulary to encompass a subject that is now well known to the general public. The exhibition brings together 35 works by 18 artists or artists’ groups who make use of psychology as a kind of lingua franca—we all know what the symptoms of neurosis are, if not the particular diagnoses."

Artists in exhibition
Alex Bag
Louise Bourgeois
Sophie Calle
Beth Campbell
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn
Sarah Hobbs
Mike Kelley
Sean Landers
Cary Leibowitz
Dave McKenzie
Bruce Nauman
Tony Oursler
Danica Phelps
William Pope.L
Aïda Ruilova
Ward Shelley and Doug Paulson
Cindy Sherman
David Shrigley

Not to be missed...

Ambition is to Idleness as Industry is to...

Art. The only profession in which idleness is an asset is the artist's. It takes time--distance some like to say--to make something interesting, unusual or unexpected. This is one of the reasons that great art is rare; it takes time, a lot of time (and not a little talent). It cannot be scheduled, regimented, put on a calendar or charted by project management software. It is not some romantic notion of inspiration we are talking about, but a kind of lack of industry.

Lou Reed quoted Andy Warhol's refrain, "All that really matters is work." ('Work' on 'Songs for Drella' ) And he was right. But a large part of what Warhol called 'work' is not the physical production of objects as might be assumed. Producing an object is but the last five or ten percent, for me anyway, the flowering of a plant whose root system is deeper and wider and has taken longer to manifest than is commonly acknowledged.

Additionally, one of the greatest things about most art today is that it is worthless, at least according to the principles by which most ventures in the west are measured: it can't be processed, incorporated, unionized, depreciated, consumed, added to or subtracted from? [this argument is not the Platonic/Aristotelean split in which Plato dismisses art as mere imitation while Aristotle champions it as a means of conveying universal truths, this little riff has more to do with economics than philosophy, though the slope is slippery] Obviously, this is not the art that is stolen from museums or auctioned at Sotheby's. We are talking about the world of objects and ideas that are never commodified, that never make it into the history books, but that make up the vast majority of art that is produced every day--the painting you saw at a swap meet, the novel that came and went and was never read again, the poem by that unknown poet you heard that one time downtown and will never forget, but which will nevertheless go on to be forgotten by 'history'. Its 'worthlessness' is the very thing that makes art so important in a world of de facto global capitalism.

On one end of the spectrum, Duchamp plays chess; on the other, Chihuly fills the world with glass, glass, glass...the rest of us fall somewhere in between. I make art and I run a business, several business ventures actually. I am married, have children, need exercise, nourishment and sleep. I want a house, a car, a TV, maybe some nice shoes--all that bourgeois shit. I want to feel good about the work I do. For me and for many of the artists that I know, ambition and idleness are constantly at war. Does this seem odd? It shouldn't. It is a cliché. Finding the balance-- the sweet spot between the joy of the creative process and the rest of life's joys--continues to elude me.

In the classic "The Poetics of Space", Gaston Bachelard wrote that, "To say that one has left certain intellectual habits behind is easy enough, but how is it to be achieved? For a rationalist, this constitutes a minor daily crisis, a sort of split in one's thinking which, even though its object be partial--a mere image--has none the less great psychic repercussions." He was laying the ground work for his definition of the transsubjectivity of images, what he called a "phenomenology of the imagination", but what he described resonates with my own daily experience.

My "minor daily [psychic] crisis" is also a kind of transsubjectivity, not of images but rather of consciousness, a way of being in the world; a subjectivity that is not fixed but fluid, fickle and unpredictable. It could also be called a kind of schizophrenia, which is kind of a relief, and kind of fucked-up.

Inside Out by Susan Silton @ PMCA

Some interesting work going on back in da hood:

"The Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA) is pleased to announce Susan Silton’s Inside Out, a site-specific architectural intervention and installation in two parts. The work, based on Silton’s investigation of the stripe as a social and cultural signifier, includes what will be the PMCA’s first site-specific installation: the museum’s exterior will be wrapped in a multi-colored, striped industrial tarp modeled after fumigation tents commonly seen in the Los Angeles landscape. The museum’s interior Project Room will contain an installation composed entirely of striped goods, everything from housewares to clothing to art objects—a commentary on the stripe’s ubiquitous presence as a seductive consumable. In its entirety, the exhibition considers the curious evolution of the stripe—from its use as a transgressive signifier in the Middle Ages to its more recent associations with power, style, commerce, and abstract painting."

 

Editta Sherman, photographer, in her apt. for 58 yrs!

Jill over at New York Mag sent me this this morning. A great article 'romancing the city'...

"The high-ceilinged, light-filled studios on top of Carnegie Hall have housed artists, musicians, and writers for more than a century; now, the remaining tenants are fighting to stay."

read the rest here

Building A Yurt Kazakh Style

Found this while Stumbling around this morning...Can't wait to try one of my own.

TrailerWrap by Michael Hughes

Love this idea, though the economic model does not seem to work. Trailer parks exist to fill a gap in the market. Anyone who can afford to will buy a stick-built house. Not to mention the fact that trailers actually depreciate in value rather than appreciate. But this one does look good:

"To Hughes, trailer parks offer an architectural opportunity to address questions of affordable housing. And he believes that trailers simply make sense as high-density alternatives to suburban sprawl. But first, they need to be made into attractive living spaces. "This is refabricated housing," Hughes says. "What does it mean to have light pouring into your home, with nine-foot instead of seven-foot ceilings? We wanted to highlight what’s possible even on a small house."

Read the rest here

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Jackson Pollack or The Mammalian Neocortical Column

When I saw this I was sure it was yet another generations attempt to re-envision the genius of J. Pollack. To my great delight, it is in fact a ridiculously complex computer model of the cerebral cortex of the human brain. Fabulous, right? Because the connection is uncanny; Pollack and his AbEx cronies were all about the dissolution of filters between the mind and the work of art. You know, painting the ego or even id. It was all about the inner workings of these guys and now, fifty years later we get a (nearly)working model of the actual organ they were metaphorically representing and they look nearly identical! Damn!

"A visual representation of a mammalian neocortical column, the basic building block of the cortex. the representation shows the complexity of this part of the brain, which has now been modeled using a supercomputer. the visualization is part of an ambitious project to create a biologically accurate, functional model of the brain using IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer.

"the visualization of the neurons' shapes is a challenging task given the fact that a column of 10,000 neurons rendered in high quality mesh accounts for essentially 1 billion triangles for which about 100GB of management data is required. simulation data with a resolution of electrical compartments for each neuron accounts for another 150GB. as the electrical impulse travels through the column, neurons light up and change color as they become electrically active."

[link: technologyreview.com & epfl.ch & epfl.ch (movie)|via visualcomplexity.com]

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