(incli)NATION

"A goal without a plan is just a wish"

 
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery French writer (1900 - 1944)

Dream Holiday: Bucky Fuller, Chris Burden and David Byrne

If I were not going to be floating in my father's Arizona pool week after next, here is a list of the things I would be seeing on my [imaginary] trip to NYC. [not that I in any way take for granted my father's generosity...]

Erector Set Skyscraper at Rockefeller Center Is Adult Fantasy: ...a sweet, old-fashioned tribute to boyhood optimism...Chris Burden's "What My Dad Gave Me"... [images]- Bloomberg News

Dymaxion Man: The visions of Buckminster Fuller: By staging the retrospective, the Whitney raises—or, really, one should say, re-raises—the question of Fuller’s relevance. Was he an important cultural figure because he produced inventions of practical value or because he didn’t?- New Yorker

and of course...

[David] Byrne’s new installation produced by Creative Time, “Playing The Building,” is located downtown in the Battery Maritime Building, which was built in 1909, closed in 1938 and hasn’t been open to the public for 50 years.

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

Is Dr. Taylor with us? More than most... http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

Weltanschauung: The Wind in the Trees

The Weltanschauung, Ignatius J. Reiley spoke of, if you haven't already guessed or if you've forgotten your high school German, is a kind of personal world view. Yesterday I had a confirmation of sorts of my current weltanschauung. I'd picked up a translation of Montaigne's 'Essays', and flipping through the collection literally 'at random', I read this passage from "Of idleness":

"Lately when I retired to my home, determined so far as possible to bother about nothing except spending the little life I have left in rest and seclusion, it seemed to me I could do my mind no greater favor than to let it entertain itself in full idleness and stay and settle in itself, which I hoped it might do more easily now, having become weightier and riper with time. But I find-

Ever idle hours breed wandering thoughts
                                                                --Lucan

"--that, on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself."

And the moment for me took on the aspect of revelation. I shit you not. The experience of, 'seeing as in a mirror, dimly' my own reflection, reminded me of one of the things that first attracted me to art and literature; a process of discovery, of learning to be human.

Montaigne wrote this passage in the late 16th Century and it is just as relevant today as ever. Not in the term 'idleness' per se, but more specifically, in the false industry of instant information availability.  For example, do something like Google your name--'chimeras and fantastic monsters' indeed!

This is not the idleness artists need. What we need, what I need, is to be still; to listen to the wind in the trees. Godard said we need more films with wind in the trees. I trust Godard. I've got to go back into my DVDs and find the scene. Was it "Helas Pour Moi" or something much earlier?

Here's one from YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwrLmtlo1e0

Real Poverty

La vraie pauvreté est celle de l'âme, une pauvreté dans laquelle le mental est toujours dans un tourbillon créé par les doutes, les soucis et les craintes.

Real poverty is that of the soul, a poverty in which the mental is forever a whirlwind, created by doubts, worries, and fears.

--Swâmi Râmdâs

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']

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.

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

via

On Ugliness by Umberto Eco

Just read a great review of Eco's "On Ugliness" in the Telegraph. I confess a weakness for Eco's essays and fiction, but Brian Dillon pulls no punches in his attempt to put Eco into historical place. Worth the read, made me want ot read him again:

"By the Romantic period, the grotesque and the sublime were established as aesthetic categories, and the decadents of the late 19th century loved nothing more than a deathly consumptive countenance. In the wake of 20th-century avant-gardes, unadulterated beauty looks saccharine, immature or kitsch. We seduce only with our faults, wrote Baudrillard. Or as Johnny Rotten put it: there's nothing so boring as a pretty face."

read the rest after the jump HERE