February 19, 2006

John Cage: Internet Archive

Internet Archive: Details: John Cage Featured on KPFA's Ode To Gravity Series

John Cage and Jan Steele - Voices & Instruments
http://www.discogs.com/release/349087
http://www.johncage.info/cdlabels/obscure5.html

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January 31, 2006

Kishio Suga - Mono-ha

Art in America: Extensions of the Ordinary

Extensions of the Ordinary
Art in America, April, 2000 by Janet Koplos

Extensions of the Ordinary
Janet Koplos

In the 30 years since he emerged as one of the leaders of Japan's Mono-ha movement, Kishio Suga has worked in an enormous variety of forms and materials to express a simple--and profound--sense of universal connectedness.

The sculptor Kishio Suga was one of the prime figures in the "Mono-ha" movement, a late-'60s/early-'70s phenomenon in Japanese art. "Mono-ha" (usually translated as the School of Things, which was originally a mocking term) can be related, in its formal austerity, to Minimalism, but is closer to Arte Povera in ascribing a creative and existential power to substances themselves, natural, industrial or synthetic. Works were commonly made of unaltered materials temporarily brought together in some configuration of interdependence. Often the object or installation was not meant to be purchased and preserved but existed as a concept that could be realized anew at any time.

Suga, now 56, has been described as the purest adherent to these principles, which were generally expressed in sculptural form. He believes that transcendence is possible only as an extension from the concrete and mundane; it is impossible in the imaginary world of painted illusion.[1] He has said that the basic philosophy of his work is "expanding outward." That's an interesting phrase, an open, almost poetic fragment that seems itself to expand outward as one thinks about it.

His clearest statement of "expanding outward" was probably his 1970 Infinity Condition. It consisted of several pieces of 4-by-4 lumber propping open the double-hung windows of a Kyoto museum. The wall label for the work cited as its materials "square wood beams, structure of building, outdoor scenery." Another quintessential expression of the encompassing idea was An Aspect in a Whole, Suga's major installation in the Japanese pavilion at the 1978 Venice Biennale, which consisted of 20 cedar logs, split lengthwise, with half of each log standing and the other half flat on the floor. Relationships were multiplied here, starting with each half seeming to yearn for its other, and then pointing beyond the sculpture itself: the verticals related to the structure of the pavilion, to the trees in the Biennale garden, etc.; the horizontals paralleled the floor on which they lay and the ground outside, and so on--to the ends of the earth, presumably.

Regularly featured in Japanese museums and galleries, Suga's work was presented in a 1997-98 retrospective exhibition that completed its four-stop tour at the Chiba City Museum of Art; since then he has had another major show (12 new works and a video) at the Yokohama Museum of Art as well as two Tokyo gallery shows this past summer and fall. All the works in the traveling exhibition showed his typical use of ordinary materials, carefully placed. For example, plywood wall pieces involve gouging the wood and then repairing the injury with plaster, the color and texture of which calls attention to the interaction of these banal substances. Another type of work consists of a rough rectangular frame of wood or stone, parallel to the floor and outlining an empty space; these stand on legs that are irregular in shape and size and are often supplemented with another cooperatively functioning material. The show was a generous sampling of the multitude of possibilities that Suga has suggested over 30 years, including protrusions, displacements, linkages, entanglements, frames, barriers, enclosures, braces and props, to name a few--a catalogue of nouns reminiscent of Richard Serra's list of verbs.[2]

The variety in the makeup of these works emphasizes the deliberate yet unostentatious intentionality of Suga's constructions, which reflect the thought and effort of human endeavors; despite their "naturalness," none of the sculptures could have just happened. At the same time, this variety explicitly announces the provisionality of everything: we see that wood can be chopped or milled and can decay; stone can be cut or broken or eroded; the work can be like or unlike the space that is its context; purpose can be forgotten; names are imprecise; the maker himself is ephemeral. In an essay in the exhibition catalogue, Suga writes, "[W]hat I want to achieve is actually a state of complex and multi-layered existence or what might be called a deepening of conception about ... existence."[3]

Suga's sculptures prompt philosophical musings, yet they are anything but theoretical. Their physical qualities and casual spatial sense make them accessible. The biggest installations add to their material immediacy the power of repetition. They are made of simple elements, but they can become accumulatively complex almost beyond quantifying. The 1997 installation Syuiritsu (Law of Surrounding Position) was a rectangular field of regularly spaced metal poles about 10 feet tall, rising abruptly from the gallery's gray carpeting. At their tops, these vertical elements were joined to horizontal ones by means of brass couplings. Scattered on the floor were dozens of water-smoothed boulders, each with a hole drilled in it and a white rope emerging and running across space to tie onto one of the top poles.

Some ropes went straight up, others stretched across the width of the installation. One wrapped around the outside of a perimeter pipe in its itinerary from aerial attachment to grounding in a stone. The grid arrangement of the poles established a rational framework for the whole; the stones exemplified the variability of nature; the zigzag ropes looked like diagrams of a ricochet. The installation was striking for its delicacy, and for demonstrating spatial depth while hinting at pictorial flatness (the rows could suggest lattice screens). In Japanese tradition, a stone wrapped and knotted with string and set on a step or at the threshold of a garden gate means "do not enter"; the stones in Suga's piece were not wrapped but tethered, which introduced the thought that they might move around. The work was suffused with an odd sense of exhilaration: it was as if the ropes were flying away, or the stones had all crept into position just before one came upon the scene. This implication of action existed within the stillness of the grid.

Renkai (World Connection, 1977/97) consisted of about 30 drastically pruned tree trunks--different species and different sizes, but all trimmed down to one slender trunk with one or two forks. These essentialized trees of just a couple of branches each were lined up against two walls of a large gallery, leaning from about a yard away. They were linked by a great length of rope modestly coiled at both ends of the row. In between, it passed over each clipped end of each branch of each tree. Since most of these branches touched the wall, the rope line made a kind of drawing against that white ground. The rope was not under tension, and it looped lazily, comfortably between trees but linked the branches within each tree more concisely; the drawing thus consisted of straight lines and curved lines, all interconnected. Connection is as much a theme of Suga's work as "expanding outward."

Probably the most engaging installation in the show occupied the Chiba museum's most unusual gallery, the Saya-do Hall.[4] Suga filled the Beaux-Arts structure with Kaienkotai (Circumference-Verge-Unit-Body, 1998). Thirty or so red-painted A-frame "ladders" were scattered around the hall; solid timbers (about 2 by 2 inches) and larger open or closed box beams stretched from the rungs of one ladder to another and sometimes to a third. One wandered among the ladders as if in a labyrinth, turned back here and there by a stretch of lumber that acted as a barrier, unless one should choose to crawl under it.

In another gallery was Syukuikei (Surroundings-Room-Enclosure-System, 1998), an 8-foot cube made of raw wood, painted wood, plastic cloth and bubble wrap. The structure was almost completely closed, but one could see blurrily through the bubble wrap or peek through narrow slots at two corners: inside, in a seemingly haphazard array, were a white wooden box, a sheet of fiberglass and various bare boards leaning together or leaning outward, against the cube's more orderly frame. Because there was no obvious rationale for their placement, one carefully studied the relationships, and in so doing slipped into a reverie of subject and object, of self and substance in intimate confrontation.

This is vintage Suga. This is what he has been doing from the beginning, although his work has passed through successions of materials and forms, including several (such as wax and aluminum, stacked blocks and flat floor "boxes") not represented even in the expansiveness of this multifloor retrospective. A few younger American artists, such as Jessica Stockholder, Matthew McCaslin and Jason Rhoades, have something in common with his thinking, although the stuff that fascinates them tends to be manufactured, and Stockholder adds an interest in composing color. In the utter concreteness of their work and his, the instant is heightened and the quotidian ennobled. Suga's tendency to use a lot of materials that do not refer to contemporary culture, however, stirs up a more open, universal knowledge of being and sensation. His works exude a serenity one is tempted to call spiritual.

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January 18, 2006

Bruce Mau Speech at Parsons

At the Parsons Table with Bruce Mau | Metropolis Magazine

Goldberger: I think that there are two ways for design to sort of pull us out of our normal stupor. One of them is to frustrate us--and you were talking about the frustration of design that doesn't work very well. But another is to uplift and create a sort of awesome experience of something that is stunningly beautiful and different from what we might have expected. And so surely design still has that latter purpose from time to time.

Mau: It does, but it is a marginal activity. I mean, you need only go to Rotterdam to see what happens when it's not. Because suddenly every building is attractive, and it's terrible. You end up with a kind of screaming ordinary, which is not very pleasant.

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Calatrava Kitsch

The Gutter: Goldhagen Drops the K-Bomb on Calatrava!

In these urban designs, and in much of his architecture, Calatrava's work falls painfully flat. His organic images, which range from re-interpreted versions of Gaud�'s palm fronds to running, twisting,
dancing bodies to blinking eyes to birds alighting, are perfectly legible and utterly hokey. The style is
exuberant but shallow; it is exuberantly shallow. This is true of the WTC transportation hub, which, for all its merits, projects (and is conceptually based on) the almost risible image of a child's hands releasing a bird into flight. It is the case also at the Milwaukee Art Museum, in which an apparently similar bird bedizens actually movable wings; and in the otherwise amusing Valencia Planetarium, a sculpted white half-sphere centered inside a steel-and-glass arc, which, when reflected in water, creates the image of a surrealistically floating Mir�-like bluish-white eye. Its "eyelid" even opens and closes.

Transportation--flight. Planetarium--seeing. Get it? Too often Calatrava's buildings are little more than one-liners, architectural analogues to Roy Lichtenstein's public sculptures. As is the case in
the public reception of the work of (the immeasurably more talented) Gaud�, people like the simplicity and the obvious iconicity of Calatrava's architecture. It is popular because it is comprehensible. To be sure, iconicity does not disqualify a building from considered praise, and neither do popular appeal and immediate comprehensibility. But are these really the main criteria by which we should select architects and judge architecture?

There is a word that characterizes the phenomenon that I am describing. That word is "kitsch."And as
Calatrava builds more architectural projects, it becomes increasingly apparent that much of this work
is not even well-considered kitsch. Consider Calatrava's long-standing interest in kinesthetic architecture. His extremely large structures often sport movable parts: the roof of the WTC hub will open to the sky every September 11, and the flapping "wings" of the Milwaukee Art Museum offer a slowmotion image of a bird taking off from the ground. It's cool. But for an architect who claims that his design principles are grounded in the natural world, it is more than slightly ironic that Calatrava exhibits little interest in environmentally responsible ("green") architecture. When in motion, these buildings must consume more energy than others thrice their size.

Or perhaps, in drawing his guiding principles and imagery from nature, Calatrava has chosen misguided premises on which to ground a contemporary architecture. Why, exactly, should a subway station look like a bird (except perhaps to encourage people to take flight from an ineptly re-developed downtown Manhattan)? Why should architecture, in image or in structure, be dictated by nature at all? The great postwar architect Louis Kahn fiddled with this problem in the early 1950s, determining the guiding principles of his architecture by adopting tetrahedral geometries found in natural forms such as snowflake crystals and radiolarian (a type of protozoa). After a few years, Kahn realized that he was careening toward a dead end, and he changed his reference points entirely. Instead, he carefully constructed normative ideals for the social and cultural institutions he built, and looked toward abstract art, historical precedents, and contemporary practices to arrive at forms that
architecturally embodied these norms and facilitated the social practices that he envisioned.

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January 16, 2006

NYT: Sculpture That Looks Very Much Like a Tree; Actually, It Is a Tree

Sculpture That Looks Very Much Like a Tree; Actually, It Is a Tree - New York Times

A giant deciduous tree has taken up residence in the capacious main exhibition space of the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens. It is the single, quietly spectacular, richly thought-provoking piece in a solo exhibition by Anya Gallaccio, the Scottish artist, based in London, who is known for ambitious sculptural projects involving trees, plants and architecture.
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G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times

Anya Gallaccio's weeping cherry tree at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City.
Anya Gallaccio's "One Art" continues through April 3 at the Sculpture Center, 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, Queens;(718) 361-1750.
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Forum: Artists and Exhibitions

A weeping cherry that had its roots accidentally but fatally damaged by construction workers, the leafless, luxuriantly branching tree, cut just above the roots, now stands on a flat base and rises 50 feet into the clerestory skylight that runs the length of the hall. Cables anchored to the gallery's brick walls hold the tree in place, and with a bit of study you can see how it was maneuvered indoors: the tree was carefully cut up with chainsaws and then reassembled, with heavy-duty bolts securing the V-shaped joints.

The sculpture is titled "One Art" after a poem about loss by Elizabeth Bishop, but its effects are multiple. First, there is the sheer physical presence. If you passed it in an ordinary outdoor space like Central Park, you would not give it a second glance; it is not an especially beautiful or remarkably big tree. But in a type of indoor setting where you rarely if ever encounter trees of this sort, it seems huge and infinitely complex. With its crusty bark; gnarly, serpentine limbs and profuse finer branches; and its presumably enormous weight, it gives you a feeling similar to that of being up close to an elephant or a whale.

Noting the tautly stretched cables that hold it upright, viewers who have seen the new "King Kong" movie may think of the great ape cruelly chained and displayed as an exotic curiosity for Broadway theatergoers. The way the muscular tree is pierced by all those shiny steel bolts may also evoke, for the art historically minded, that favorite of Renaissance painters and sculptors, St. Sebastian, the martyr pierced by many executioners' arrows. And then it is not a great leap to the idea of the Crucifixion, which here becomes the crucifixion of nature by industry.

Religious associations are enhanced by the Sculpture Center's architecture, which, though originally designed for hoisting and moving heavy machinery, has a churchlike feeling. The tree stands at one end, opposite the far wall, which is punctuated by five second-story windows admitting copious amounts of afternoon sunlight. Standing back for a full view, you behold the tree showered and almost dematerialized by light. From this perspective, you can see why the tree has been such an enduring archetypal symbol, whether or not you know exactly what it should mean.

An interesting philosophical dimension emerges, too. Ms. Gallaccio's work is, of course, a kind of found-object sculpture - what Duchamp would have called an "assisted readymade." Audiences today should have no trouble seeing a real tree as a work of art, especially after Damien Hirst's sliced-up cows and pigs displayed in vats of preservative. The philosophical intrigue arises, rather, when you think not about the tree as a sculpture but about the difference between tree and sculpture.

A tree is like a sculpture; it occupies space in aesthetically interesting ways. But in traditional sculpture, there is always a discernible difference between the raw material and the form that has been purposefully imposed on that material. With a real tree, there is no such distinction. God may have made the tree, but he did not make it out of some nontree substance the way a sculptor can make the image of a human being out of a nonhuman material like clay or marble. A tree is a tree through and through (leaving aside, that is, talk of universal, submolecular building blocks).

In the case of Ms. Gallaccio's creation, the artwork and the tree are not identical, but it is hard to say where one leaves off and the other begins. There are expert craftsmen who can make seemingly real trees out of modern plastics, but that is nothing like what is at issue here. Neither has Ms. Gallaccio reconfigured the tree in such a way that abstract form or surrealistic imagination prevails over its tree-ness (as might have happened were the artist Andy Goldsworthy or Donald Lipski). The tree itself is still the main attraction, whatever assistance she has provided in bringing it to our attention.

Ms. Gallaccio therefore risks the charge that nothing she did is as interesting as the tree itself; and worse, that she takes credit for something for which only God or nature should be admired. Douglas Gordon's film of a live elephant, shown three years ago at Gagosian Gallery, invited a similar criticism, as does Mr. Hirst's famous giant shark in a tank.

Such cautionary ideas only enrich the play of thought and counter-thought that swirls around Ms. Gallaccio's work, which, however you parse it, remains an object of visual beauty, visceral sculptural presence and stirring arboreal poetry.

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January 06, 2006

On Theory: Critical of What

harvard design magazine - current issue

To be sure, for more sober practitioners of the “post-critical,” the liberal-humanist idea of the “project” supplants theological vision as a guide. Hence, architecture and/or architects who are merely critical (or “merely” antiwar?) are judged to have insuf€ciently ful€lled the old, modernist mission of being “projective” and of thereby af€rming an enlightened alternative. But just as we can justi€ably ask of the straw €gure called critical architecture, “critical of what?” we might ask the af€rmative, projective practitioners of the “post-critical” just what sort of world they are projecting and af€rming in their architecture and in their discourse?

If the answer is anything close to that offered by the United Architects, then I vote “No”—despite its many legitimate claims to an authentic, technologically enabled urbanity.(13) Still, those who lament the relentless negativity of much critique (such as, perhaps, that offered above) are at least partly right, since, the problem is not that critical discourse is too dif€cult and therefore ineffectual. The problem is that it is often too easy. Bruised by the complicities of what Tafuri called “operative criticism,” much critical work does not risk intervening in the future in the systematic manner for which, I think, many architects rightly yearn. Similarly, the need to engage directly with messy realities called for by some post-critics is indeed urgent. The question is which realities you choose to engage with, and to what end. In other words: what's your project? This also means avoiding the elementary mistake of assuming that reality is entirely real—that is, pre-existent, €xed, and therefore exempt from critical re-imagination. For this, alliances are necessary.

So, what is to be done? To begin with, rather than lapse into the post-utopian pragmatism of that grandfather of the “post-critical,” Colin Rowe, the question of utopia must be put back on the architectural table. But it must not be misread as a call for a perfect world, a world apart, an impossible totality that inevitably fades into totalitarianism. Instead, utopia must be read literally, as the “non-place” written into its etymological origins that is “nowhere” not because it is ideal and inaccessible, but because, in perfect mirrored symmetry, it is also “everywhere.” Utopia is both glamorous and boring, exceptional and prosaic. Among its heralds is another, earlier denizen of lower Manhattan, Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, an anonymous, modest clerk who, when asked literally to reproduce what the '60s would later call “the system,” simply and politely refused, declaring “I would prefer not to.”

Utopia, then, is what Derrida called a “specter,” a ghost that infuses everyday reality with other, possible worlds, rather than some otherworldly dream. And if another name for the so-called post-critical is “realism,” we have already seen at Ground Zero how architecture's realist fantasies of twisting, dancing skyscrapers have worked systematically to exorcise utopia's ghost with crystal cathedrals dedicated to a fundamentalist oligarchy. But like all ghosts, that specter is never quite dead, returning to haunt architectural projects already quietly among us and others coming soon. We can call these projects the €rst evidence of a “utopian realism” (details to follow). Meanwhile, utopian realism must be thought of as a movement that may or may not exist, all of whose practitioners are double agents. Naming them, or their work, would blow their cover. (They may or may not all be architects.) Those who could voted for Kerry. (So you, too, could be a utopian realist.) Utopian realism is critical. It is real. It is enchantingly secular. It thinks differently. It is a style with no form. It moves sideways, instead of up and down the family tree. It is (other) worldly. It occupies the global city rather than the global village. It violates disciplinary codes even as it secures them. It is utopian not because it dreams impossible dreams, but because it recognizes “reality” itself as—precisely—an all-too-real dream enforced by those who prefer to accept a destructive and oppressive status quo. Utopia's ghost oats within this dream, conjured time and again by those who would prefer not to.

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December 19, 2005

natural materials and fricken lazers

edmund leechie liang

"Is your work interesting, or is it good?"

my thesis will take on the role of fusing natural building with digital fabrication with fricken' lazers.

99% natural. ingredients:
water
abaca
nuts and bolts - taken out
straw fiber - 290Oz. roughly 36 cups. w/water pressed out. a tiny fraction of a bale.
sodium carbonate
jute - soon to be rendered out
time
weight: less than 1 lbs

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December 07, 2005

A Great Man

ESPN.com: Page 2 : The definition of A Great Man

That season, Chamberlain scored over 50 points in 44 different games, but people barely noticed. They were too busy watching Wilt define himself through his most profound failure: He simply did not get it. Wilt was a smart guy and a good businessman, but things that were obvious to everyone else completely escaped his understanding. He could not comprehend why fans and writers would dislike an egocentric superstar (he oddly assumed the world must have been intimidated by his honesty and skill). When he led the league in assists in 1967-68, he thought that accomplishment proved he was unselfish (of course, everyone else immediately recognized that passing for the sole purpose of racking up assists is not that different than trying to score 100 points by yourself). Wilt's defining failure was not that he couldn't win the league championship, because he did that twice; Wilt's defining failure was that he could not see the difference between (a) things that are impressive; and (b) things that are important. That failure is central to the portrait of Chamberlain -- it makes him a misguided, tragic hero. And within the context of contemporary history, it makes him A Great Man.

You can see this relationship between accomplishment and failure everywhere. Michael Jordan scored 32,000 points, won six championships and sold about 70 billion sweatshop Nikes, but those things tell us almost nothing about "Michael Jordan." It was MJ's failures -- his attempt at baseball, his comeback with the Wizards, his compulsion for gambling -- that define his true legacy: Jordan was the most hypercompetitive person alive, and that made him both unstoppable and unsatisfied. Charles Barkley has developed an entire on-air TV persona around the fact that he supposedly doesn't care about having never won an NBA championship, even though it's patently obvious that he does; it seems to color his perceptions of everything. I cannot think of any major boxer (from any era) whose legacy isn't dominated by the melodrama of his specific Achilles' heel. John Elway was far more interesting before the Broncos won a title, because all those soul-crushing Super Bowl blowouts made him seem doomed and rarified; now he just seems like a normative Hall of Fame QB with a few less yards than Dan Marino and a few fewer rings than Joe Montana. By erasing his greatest failure, Elway has actually lost his definition. The same thing happened to the entire Boston Red Sox organization: Ten minutes after the 2004 World Series, that franchise was no longer captivating, and all their long-suffering fans immediately became lost, boring and strangely self-absorbed. Today, being a Red Sox fan is almost meaningless.

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November 29, 2005

10 rules for web startups

evhead: Ten Rules for Web Startups

Ten Rules for Web Startups
Sunday, November 27, 2005
#1: Be Narrow
Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful. Most companies start out trying to do too many things, which makes life difficult and turns you into a me-too. Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages: With much less work, you can be the best at what you do. Small things, like a microscopic world, almost always turn out to be bigger than you think when you zoom in. You can much more easily position and market yourself when more focused. And when it comes to partnering, or being acquired, there's less chance for conflict. This is all so logical and, yet, there's a resistance to focusing. I think it comes from a fear of being trivial. Just remember: If you get to be #1 in your category, but your category is too small, then you can broaden your scope—and you can do so with leverage.

#2: Be Different
Ideas are in the air. There are lots of people thinking about—and probably working on—the same thing you are. And one of them is Google. Deal with it. How? First of all, realize that no sufficiently interesting space will be limited to one player. In a sense, competition actually is good—especially to legitimize new markets. Second, see #1—the specialist will almost always kick the generalist's ass. Third, consider doing something that's not so cutting edge. Many highly successful companies—the aforementioned big G being one—have thrived by taking on areas that everyone thought were done and redoing them right. Also? Get a good, non-generic name. Easier said than done, granted. But the most common mistake in naming is trying to be too descriptive, which leads to lots of hard-to-distinguish names. How many blogging companies have "blog" in their name, RSS companies "feed," or podcasting companies "pod" or "cast"? Rarely are they the ones that stand out.

#3: Be Casual
We're moving into what I call the era of the "Casual Web" (and casual content creation). This is much bigger than the hobbyist web or the professional web. Why? Because people have lives. And now, people with lives also have broadband. If you want to hit the really big home runs, create services that fit in with—and, indeed, help—people's everyday lives without requiring lots of commitment or identity change. Flickr enables personal publishing among millions of folks who would never consider themselves personal publishers—they're just sharing pictures with friends and family, a casual activity. Casual games are huge. Skype enables casual conversations.

#4: Be Picky
Another perennial business rule, and it applies to everything you do: features, employees, investors, partners, press opportunities. Startups are often too eager to accept people or ideas into their world. You can almost always afford to wait if something doesn't feel just right, and false negatives are usually better than false positives. One of Google's biggest strengths—and sources of frustration for outsiders—was their willingness to say no to opportunities, easy money, potential employees, and deals.

#5: Be User-Centric
User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board. Better to iterate a hundred times to get the right feature right than to add a hundred more. The point of Ajax is that it can make a site more responsive, not that it's sexy. Tags can make things easier to find and classify, but maybe not in your application. The point of an API is so developers can add value for users, not to impress the geeks. Don't get sidetracked by technologies or the blog-worthiness of your next feature. Always focus on the user and all will be well.

#6: Be Self-Centered
Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch. Create something you want to exist in the world. Be a user of your own product. Hire people who are users of your product. Make it better based on your own desires. (But don't trick yourself into thinking you are your user, when it comes to usability.) Another aspect of this is to not get seduced into doing deals with big companies at the expense or your users or at the expense of making your product better. When you're small and they're big, it's hard to say no, but see #4.

#7: Be Greedy
It's always good to have options. One of the best ways to do that is to have income. While it's true that traffic is now again actually worth something, the give-everything-away-and-make-it-up-on-volume strategy stamps an expiration date on your company's ass. In other words, design something to charge for into your product and start taking money within 6 months (and do it with PayPal). Done right, charging money can actually accelerate growth, not impede it, because then you have something to fuel marketing costs with. More importantly, having money coming in the door puts you in a much more powerful position when it comes to your next round of funding or acquisition talks. In fact, consider whether you need to have a free version at all. The TypePad approach—taking the high-end position in the market—makes for a great business model in the right market. Less support. Less scalability concerns. Less abuse. And much higher margins.

#8: Be Tiny
It's standard web startup wisdom by now that with the substantially lower costs to starting something on the web, the difficulty of IPOs, and the willingness of the big guys to shell out for small teams doing innovative stuff, the most likely end game if you're successful is acquisition. Acquisitions are much easier if they're small. And small acquisitions are possible if valuations are kept low from the get go. And keeping valuations low is possible because it doesn't cost much to start something anymore (especially if you keep the scope narrow). Besides the obvious techniques, one way to do this is to use turnkey services to lower your overhead—Administaff, ServerBeach, web apps, maybe even Elance.

#9: Be Agile
You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time—but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups—except they may start out heading toward Alaska. Many dot-com bubble companies that died could have eventually been successful had they been able to adjust and change their plans instead of running as fast as they could until they burned out, based on their initial assumptions. Pyra was started to build a project-management app, not Blogger. Flickr's company was building a game. Ebay was going to sell auction software. Initial assumptions are almost always wrong. That's why the waterfall approach to building software is obsolete in favor agile techniques. The same philosophy should be applied to building a company.

#10: Be Balanced
What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work. Yes, high levels of commitment are crucial. And yes, crunch times come and sometimes require an inordinate, painful, apologies-to-the-SO amount of work. But it can't be all the time. Nature requires balance for health—as do the bodies and minds who work for you and, without which, your company will be worthless. There is no better way to maintain balance and lower your stress that I've found than David Allen's GTD process. Learn it. Live it. Make it a part of your company, and you'll have a secret weapon.

#11 (bonus!): Be Wary
Overgeneralized lists of business "rules" are not to be taken too literally. There are exceptions to everything.

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November 26, 2005

opportunity to communicate

Tom Sachs
ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by David Rimanelli

Unless you're a real genius, like Louis Armstrong, it's hard to have a new idea and a new way of expressing it. The most the rest of us can hope for is to either tell a new story with old tools and words, or an old story with new tools and new words. Once you've solidly established your own language, you can improvise and build new ideas. The power of using brands--in my case, from fashion--and mixing it up with violent iconography lies in merging two things together to form a third. What's important to me about Pop is that using brands and other identifiable, everyday things gives you the opportunity to communicate. You're speaking a common language. I think part of the reason my work with fashion brands in the nineties really took off was because of an anxiety between the rich and everyone else. Another reason was that regardless of whether the work was critical of fashion itself, it still traded on the value of the brand. Like Prada. It's a death camp, but it's a Prada death camp.

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November 02, 2005

Spirituality in Art

Five Artists * Five Faiths: Spirituality in Contemporary Art

"Putting oneself in quietness and in meditative space leads to a certain awareness, perception, awakening. We don't have that many opportunities to do it in our daily life."
--Kimsooja

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church art and meditative space

From the Floor: The Church and Contemporary Art

quotes Danilo Eccher, director of Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art on the applicability of figuration for today’s religious art. “Medieval man needed frescoed churches because at home he had nothing, but we are bombarded daily by images. Contemporary man therefore has need of a space for secret emotion, in silence more than in image.” What better way to create a meditative space suitable for worship than to remove all reference to the stresses of the everyday world?

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Meditative Space Panel

Tobi Kahn - Artist
Jeffrey Ring - Psychologist
Michael Rotondi - Architect
Moderated by Sasha Anawalt

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James Jack

Portland Art Center

The Portland Art Center presents Natura Naturans, an ephemeral installation and print study by James Jack. Utilizing natural
materials from our environment, Jack draws singular elements from nature, precisely arranging them into circles. The artist explores humans’ relationship with the environment and its universal awe. Themes of humanities fascination with manipulating nature, and the meditative state created by the wonder of nature’s power and beauty, dominate Jack’s work.

For Natura Naturans, James Jack has created a work of profound beauty with a luminescence and quiet hue that evokes a sense of harmony with the nature of the Northwest. Resting on a black surface, a mesmerizing circular form, 20 feet in diameter, made entirely of a single ochre pigment, dominates the gallery. The pigment was collected from Beverly Beach, where the Mooloch Creek meets the Pacific Ocean, on the Oregon Coast. This, like all of Jack's work, is entirely handmade; the pigment has been ground and filtered directly onto the floor of the gallery in a meditative and labor-intensive process. His works on paper use handmade inks derived from fresh Seder bark, aged Butternut and Black Walnut husks, as well as mountain sediments. Seven of these prints are on display in the small gallery.

Natura Naturans, which can be translated to mean "naturing" or "nature creating," grows from that place in the landscape where an artist can internalize and discover the aesthetics that call to him. James Jack is such an artist: one who is a traveler, wandering and searching with all of his being and intuition to bring together his own vocabulary of abstract form, reality and spirituality. Gathering materials from a specific site, Jack seeks to express himself directly with the substances from the environment. He is interested in expressing the relationship between nature and people in the simplest way.

The entire process between the site and the final work is meditative for Jack. The circular form is a harmonious shape, a meditative space that is free from adornment. Building on the art of prehistory, Jack draws inspiration from Eastern aesthetic traditions - both Tibetan Sand Mandalas and Japanese Calligraphy. Educated at Sarah Lawrence, Jack spent several years studying in Japan. But Jack is able to transcend the conventions of both East and West and build on the conceptual work of other artists like Wolfgang Laib and Richard Long.

Artist Biography:

James Jack received a B.A. with a concentration in Fine Art from Sarah Lawrence College in 2001. He studied Japanese Calligraphy and Zen Buddhism in Kyoto for one year, exerting a profound influence on his art practices to this day. His paintings have been included at numerous exhibitions in New York City including “Ink & Essence” at Tama Gallery, “Fresh Paint” at Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art, and “Butternut Ink” at the Asian-American Arts Center. He was a staff artist in the Painting department at the Vermont Studio Center from 2003-2004. Five of Jack’s paintings are featured in the most recent issue of Kyoto Journal: Perspectives on Asia #59. Jack recently completed a residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology where he conceived of the work for the exhibit “Natura Naturans.” This is James’ first exhibition in Portland, OR. He will be showing again in Portland in a group show at Beppu Wiarda Gallery in The Pearl District this fall.

Artist Statement:

“Ars enim operatur materia, quam natura ministrat.”[1]

Relying on the fecundity of the wilderness I express myself directly with substances of the environment. Working with materials available in nature I utilize simple means to communicate profound relationships between people and our habitat. Recurrent in the work Natura Naturans is the circular form serving as a harmonious shape in which to establish a meditative space free from adornment. Utilizing this circular form I am building upon the art of prehistory while rooting modern earth works with a vital understanding of “self.” From a contemplative space where the nature within is just as important as the nature outside I create work that evinces harmony between form and content. Drawing inspiration from Eastern aesthetic traditions such as Tibetan Sand Mandalas and Japanese Calligraphy my work exists because of our contemporary global culture. Building upon the conceptual work of Western artists such as Wolfgang Laib and Richard Long I am conveying insight that transcends the conventions of both East and West.

This work was conceived during a residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology where I was immersed in the daily life of a coastal nature preserve. Absorbing the aesthetic surroundings of this site and others as diverse as Northern Vermont and the Colorado Rockies I’m distilling experience via particular elements of the landscape. For the installation Natura Naturans I collected a striking ochre pigment from Beverly Beach where the Mooloch Creek meets the Pacific Ocean. Establishing a dialectic relationship with this pigment in the studio I became enthralled by its subtle luminescence and quiet hue. After grinding the pigment to a fine powder I made circular arrangements using the spatial awareness I’d gained from the pieces I’d been making out of wood splinters, pine needles, and other local materials. Arranging pigments is meditation in action—the activity of preparing, installing, and reclaiming the material is a mindfulness practice aligned with Zen training. Works on paper range from handmade inks derived with fresh Alder bark, aged Butternut and Black Walnut husks, and mountain sediments among others. The organic medium with which a painting is created is tantamount to its representational ability to serve as a vehicle for literal or metaphorical meaning.

James Jack ã2005

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October 26, 2005

Context of Theatre, Play, Ritual – and Life

Action becomes Art: "Performance" in the Context of Theatre, Play, Ritual – and Life

Action becomes Art: “Performance” in the Context of Theatre, Play, Ritual – and Life

Action becomes Art: “Performance” in the Context of Theatre, Play, Ritual – and Life

Göran Sonesson,

Department of semiotics,

Lund University

in Visio 5, 2, Automne 2000: Les arts de l’action/Action Art, van Mechelen, Marga, & Sonesson, Göran, (eds.)

If modernism, particularly in the visual arts, is characterised by the ever recurring transgression of the norms set up by earlier periods (cf. Sonesson 1998a), then, of course, the most radical way to abolish the art object, is to turn it into something which is no longer even an object : that is, an action. In the process, creation may or may not overstep the border between art and life. And it may or many not redistribute the parts played by creator and audience. In any case, it certainly refuses to abide by the limits assigned to painting by Lessing, which, at least in some respects, have seemed to be valid for much of the history of visual art : it already becomes some kind of “moving painting ” which Lessing only thought possible in the theatre and which later semioticians have claimed to have discovered in the cinema (cf. Sonesson 1988, to be published b).

What today is known as “ performance ” or “ action ” seems to cover an bewildering variety of phenomena. The first step from object to action was undoubtedly taken by the Dadaists, although one may take different views of the importance of their contributions: for while they may not have abandoned narrativity completely, they were certainly concerned more with presentation than representation. Later, in the 1950ies, similar phenomena were codified under the name of “happening” by artists more or less associated with “Action Painting”. There was an almost immediate incidence on the theatre, as testified by such groups as the Living Theatre and the Open Theatre (cf. Jotterand 1970: 57ff); there is at present nothing new in the return influence, although it may have taken new forms. In many ways, the art of action is comparable to another invention of the Dadaists, the ready-made, which is an “ relic ” (that is, an index) of an action (minimally of the act of putting it where it can be seen by the audience). In fact, both the ready-made and action art are expressions of what I have elsewhere called the outward-going tendency of Modernism, which aspires to include ever more domains of reality within the sphere of art, as opposed to the inward-going tendency, which reduces art to its barest characteristics, and which critics such as Greenberg and Fried tend to identify with Modernism tout court (cf. Sonesson 1998a). Indeed, even more than the ”happening” , which is a codified, and thus restricted, art form, the “ performance ” of the contemporary art scene seems to overstep all boundaries : to life, to ritual, to play, and to the theatre.

If we take semiotics to be concerned with the way things mean, that is, how they mean, rather than what they mean, then there should be a place for a semiotics of the arts of actions, which precedes, and is presupposed by, any arthistorical reflection on the same phenomenon, just as a semiotics of ritual should go before its anthropology (cf. Sonesson 1999a). In fact, both the semiotics of “performance” and the semiotics of ritual, as indeed the semiotics of theatre, are concerned with basically the same issue : the way in which an action is differentiated from other actions by becoming a vehicle for some peculiar meaning, which is itself an action. What I want to do in the following is to situate “performance” (or at least some of its varieties, including the “happening” and some more recent avatars) in relation to ritual, theatre, play of different kinds, and everyday life. “Performance” will be considered to form part of the vast domain of a semiotics of spectacles. I will start with that kind of spectacle of which we know most, the theatre.

Theatre and ritual in the light of the Prague school

In the theatre we encounter actions which quite obviously are carriers of meaning, because they stand for other actions (or the same actions made by another person at another time and place). Scholars involved with the semiotics of the theatre, from the Prague school to our time, have repeatedly pointed to the polymorphous and multifarious character of what is known as theatre. Within the former circle, Jan Mukar&ovsky¤ developed during the 1940ies a model according to which theatre realises several functions at the same time, but always in such a way that, at different moments, some function or other dominates all the others, and thus overdetermines them, that is to say, that this element not only carries greater weight than they others, but also makes them subservient to its own purposes . These factors can be such things as the writtentext of the play, the work of the actor, the relation between the audience and the stage, etc. From this point of view, the Prague school goes much further than what is suggested by the customary references to what Barthes called the polyphony of the theatre and to Kowsan’s list of semiotic systems involved .

Two Swedish Slavic scholars, Olle Hildebrand and Lars Kleberg, have made an interesting attempt to develop this model, in part by isolating similarities and differences of these functions as found in the theatre, the sport event and the rite, and partly by considering some theories of the early Russian theatre vanguard from this point of view. What is important and new in their work, in relation to that of Mukar&ovsky¤ , is that they do not limit their study to internal relations in the theatre as a historically developing phenomenon, but also puts it in contrast to others phenomena which, in one way or another, appear to be similar to it. As I have shown in other contexts (Sonesson 1992b; 1998a), the resulting model is, unfortunately, not only insufficient but contradictory; but the main problem with it is, as wee shall see, that the selection of other elements with which the theatre is compared is quite arbitrary.

Kleberg and Hildebrand were really interested in the new tendencies of the Russian vanguard of the early 20th century. In one of his first texts, Hildebrand (1970) distinguishes the sport event, the ritual and the theatre by means of a cross-classification employing the dichotomies stage versus audience and expression versus content, where the sport event realises the first dichotomy, the ritual the second and theatre both. The first opposition is derived from Mukar&ovsky¤, and the second from Saussure and, more specifically, Hjelmslev. Put in terms more congenial to the Prague school approach, we have to do with the referential and spectacular functions, respectively (Figure 1).

Fig. 1. Comparison between theatre, ritual, and sport (according to Hildebrand)

According to Hildebrand (1978), ritual and theatre are united, in this particular sense, in the work of the Russian director Eivrenov, and, in particular, in his work “Harlequin the Saviour”. Since theatre is supposed to differ from ritual by adding one more category, stage versus audience, to that common to them both, expression versus content, is not easy to understand what, in this system of description, is peculiar to Eivrenov’s style. Perhaps this impression could be corrected by means of reintroducing the concept of dominant in the sense employed by Mukar&ovsky¤ : this would allow us to say that, although Eivrenov’s style, like any kind of theatre, embodies both dichotomies, it is expression vs. content, which is peculiar to ritual, which predominates. Or perhaps there is more to ritual than Hildebrand’s system permit us to say. Kleberg (1984:60s), for his part, speaks of Ivanov’s cultist theatre of in terms familiar to us from Hildebrand: “In theatre as an art form he was interested in a shift of emphasis from the ‘spectacle’ towards the cult. /---/ The abolishing of the dualism between actors and audience became a metaphor for the synthetic elimination of a series of other contradictions like Poet vs. Crowd, individualism vs. collectivism, etc.’ (p.60f). Here, the “shift of emphasis ” could be interpreted according to the Prague school concept of dominant, but the full meaning of this description remains unclear.

These definitions present us with a series of paradoxes. If ritual contains the opposition between expression and content, and if theatre then adds the opposition between stage and audience, then what can it mean when it is said that Eivrenov’s theatre units these oppositions? And if Ivanov’s theatre abandons the difference between stage and audience, which is supposed to differentiate theatre from ritual, then in what sense is his theatre still something different from ritual all over again? This suggests there is something more to ritual, and perhaps also to theatre, than the model indicates.

The ritual as spectacle

Going beyond these paradoxes, there arises a more fundamental question : which is the domain that theatre, the rite and the sport event divide into three parts? In other words, is there something that is common to these three types of meaning-endowed actions which they do not share with other types of actions? For clearly, theatre, ritual, and sport are all actions which seem to stand out from the mass of everyday actions, One could wonder why we should compare the theatre precisely with the rite and not, for example, with the circus act, the ballet (if these are not special cases of the theatre), the concert, the public lecture, or even with children’s play (i.e. with Piaget’s “ symbolic play ”), social encounters, markets, “live action role play”, – and indeed with “happening” and/or “performance”. Some of these cases may perhaps be rapidly discarded from the category of “ spectacles ” in the widest sense, since their dominant channel of perception is not vision but sounds and, more specifically, language. But if we are going to believe Hildebrand and Kleberg, ritual is even less of a spectacle, because it is not even offered up to perception.

Part of the problem is that the spectacular function, understood as an invitation to contemplate, is something too general, at least in two ways : in the first place, everything which is public (which is within the “public sphere”, in the sense of Habermas) is in some respects given to perception ; and, secondly, all works of art are, in a more specific sense, created in order to be perceived. The public sphere is obviously conceived as something which invites to perception when, following Goffman, for example, social life is seen as being divided into a stage and its “backstage”, separated, for instance, by the revolving door between the kitchen and the restaurant, or when, following Sennett, one opposes the theatrical character of public life until the XVIIIth century to the sentimentality of our time (which offers the spectacle to an inward, rather than an outward, audience), or when, with the situationists, one identifies the capitalist world order (which is, at the moment, all the world order which remains) with a “société de spectacle “ (cf. Sonesson 1995).

Without necessarily agreeing with any of these images of the world, we must nevertheless admit that many components of daily life exist in order to be perceived by others: this is true of all clothes and body decorations, not only different varieties of “piercing” and tattoos, which recently have become popular again, but also the more customary earrings and other adornments familiar in Western culture. To a greater degree, the medieval market stands out as a spectacle, even though Bakhtin was more interested in what was said than what was seen there; something similar can be said of the boulevards, the cafés and the passages in the capital of the XIXth century, as they were described by Baudelaire and Benjamin, just as in all latter-day capitals of Modernity, and it is valid already for the central square of the traditional village, and for popular festivals, both in the traditional sense of the term and as they have been reinvented during recent decades, in the form of tourist attractions promoted by the municipalities (Sonesson 1995).

Nevertheless, these phenomena are not spectacles, in any deeper sense, among other reasons because the spectacular function, also when it appears, is not dominant, or the visual modality is not ; or because the spectacular is only intermittently present, or also because it is symmetric. As far as the lecturer or another participant in the “public sphere” is concerned, it can be said that the visual modality is not dominant (except when the lecturer is also a celebrity, as were for instance Lacan and Barthes). In many cases, the spectacular function is not dominant or only appears temporarily, which can be said in minor or greater degree of many parts of the daily life. However, the at least potential symmetry of many spectacular situations may be a more fundamental factor. Mukar&ovsky¤, Hildebrand and Kleberg seem to imagine the spectacular function as an operation resulting in a division applied to a group of people, and separating those which are subjects and objects, respectively, of the process of contemplation; but, in fact, the subjects and objects of contemplation are often the same, at least temporarily. In the market, on the square, the boulevard, etc., observation is (potentially) mutual, but not so in the case of the sport event and the theatre.

As for the rite, it seems wrong to say that it has no spectacular function; in fact, frequently there is a division, just as in the theatre, between those which perform the rite and those who only participate, like for example, the priest in the Christian mass as opposed to the congregation : that is to say, there is a difference between those which only observe, and those which, in addition to observing, are also observed. However, there is probably nobody in the rite who is not a subject but only an object of observation, for also the officiator partakes in the experience of the rite; he performs it for himself, in the same sense in which he does so for the others (unlike the actor). Even if we consider rites of the type which seems to have been imagined by Hildebrand and Kleberg, where the difference between the officiator and the participants tends to dissolve in a collective trance (a more Dionysian than Appollonian kind of rite), there still remains a spectacular function of the participant without which the rite would lack any meaning. A correlate of this division is that different spatial expanses are normally assigned to the spectator and the observed, which offers the possibility of a transgression of limits between spaces independently of the respective subjects: and such transgressions are really what is often found in the work of Ivanov and Eivrenov, as well in more recent vanguard theatre, as for example the Living Theatre, Théâtre du soleil, etc. But there are also rites in which the space of the officiator is clearly separated from the space of the common participants; this also is true of the familiar Christian rites, particularly in their Catholic variant. But in these latter cases, the transgression of limits does not give rise to new forms of art, but to an act of sacrilege.

“Symbolic play ” and agôn

Another sense in which the spectacular function seems to be too general derives from the fact that all the works of art, not to say all signs, require a spectator/receiver in order to exist, and in this way they could all be said to be offered up for perception. This is made explicit in the situation of communication as it is described in the Prague school model, in which a receiver is called upon to transform an artefact into an object of perception by means of the process of concretisation. If we limit our considerations to that of the dominant visual modality, we can say about visual art that its rests on a division of something into the part which its observed and its observer. In fact, a division of this kind characterises all those locations which form part of the process of circulation of the art work, such as museums, galleries and other places of exposition. The ready-mades presuppose this condition in order to function: they may be objects which are originally not public or semi-public (home furnishings, such as irons) or perhaps public, but not visually displayed (the urinary), which are then placed in a position of contemplation.

The theatre, the sport event and the ritual are all sequences of conduct which are offered up for contemplation. In this they are different from the common art work, which is not a piece of behaviour but a static thing, at least in its expression. The theatrical act is composed of conduct, as much in its expression as in its content; the sport event and the rite are, too, at least as far as their expression is concerned. In this sense, Eco’s (1975) description of the elementary theatrical situation is not particularly enlightening: an alcoholic who is sleeping on a bank over which the Salvation Army hangs a banderole about the dangers of drinking alcohol. This scene has a static character which puts it much nearer to the contemplation of an object: it is a “tableau vivant”, which, from the point of view of life, is rather clsoe to death.

That aspect of the semiotic function which Piaget calls “symbolic play” can be seen as a predecessor to both theatre and the rite (Sonesson, 1992a). Here there can be no doubt that both expression and content are sequences of behaviour (what the little girl does with her puppet is the same thing as what her mother does with her little brother). At the same time, however, it seems that in symbolic play there normally is no audience which does not also take on the function of actor. In the previous argument we have arrived at a revised characterisation of ritual as something in which the spectator’s roll is granted to all the participants, whereas the actor part is not necessarily distributed to all of them. On the contrary, in play it seems that all those presents are as much participants as onlookers.

Piaget’s “symbolic play” only corresponds to one of the four types of play that Callois (1968) distinguishes: mimicry or simulacrum. The other play categories are agôn or competition, as for example football; aléa or chance, as in lottery; and ilinx or vertigo, as in organic states. These other types of play do not seem to have any semiotic function. We can identify the “sport event” of Hildebrand with agôn, but there is nothing in Callois’ classification that corresponds to ritual, if we do not take it to be something purely Dionysian, as Kleberg seems to do, in which case we can identify it with ilinx. This latter may possibly correspond to Malinowski’s conception of “phatic communion” (which is transformed into a communicatory function by Jakobson). But to reduce ritual to ecstasy does not seem to be a way to do it justice.

It may seem that some of the spectacles that we have mentioned previously, as for example the circus and the ballet, should be understood as cases of agôn, just like the sport event, and therefore does not rest on some division into expression and content. This seems to be true in particular about many circus acts which contain an element of progression. However, as Paul Bouissac (1981) has shown, this progression can turn out to be illusory: the acts are organised one after another according to what seems to be a gradual increase of difficulty, whereas the true part of effort may very well be the opposite. Already in the fact that it is important for the acts to look difficult there is an element of signification, a difference between expression and content. And in the same sense, I think it can be said that classical ballet also is endowed with meaning (completely independently of such pure element of imitation which it often contains), because it is fundamental that the acts look easy (that is to say, easy for those who execute them).

From this it may be seen that the circus act and the ballet have something in common with the theatre and the symbolic play: their value is in the act as such, in all its details, as it is perceived and/or is experienced. On the contrary, the sport event and all kinds of agôn only derive their value from that which they obtain, and this is , in a sense, also the case of the rite; they are instrumental acts, means to a goal (even if they, as play, do not have their goal outside their own sphere). Theatrical action is an expression which is defined in relation to a content; agôn and rite are defined in relation to their use. These groups of actions differ between them as what Greimas (1968) calls gestures and praxis; the former serve to interpret the world, they latter to change it. As praxis, the rite is of course something of a paradox: it does not change the world materially (in any case not fundamentally), but in some kind of “spiritual” way. It could be said that what it changes in the world is its interpretation.

It was in a similar way that one of the members of the Prague circle, Jindrich Honzl (1982) described the difference between theatre and rite. Both, he said, are semiotical actions, which is why they are often confused, as for example by Wagner and his successors. However, while theatrical action represents a real act, the ritual act is a way of changing the world by imposing on it a religious interpretation. But Honzl also thinks that the rite, unlike theatre, does not, for those who believe in it, represent another action, but it is that very action. In the Christian communion, for example, the reception of the sacramental wafer and the wine is not a representation of the sacrifice of Christ but that same sacrifice once again. If this is true, the rite would not be an expression which points to another action as its content; rather, each ritual occasion should be related to its original act like a token to a type, or, more precisely, to the unit that has created the type; for it must obviously be question of that kind of type which is experienced as having been created from a particular unit located in time and space, as is the original of an art work to which all the reproductions point (Sonesson 1997b; 1998b). However, in this sense the rite is not so special: all actions are of this kind, at a greater or smaller level of organisation (and we will return to this point later). Moreover, contemporary anthropologists have claimed that explanations of this nature make the “primitives” all too naive: in actual fact, according to Douglas (1996), they only execute the rain ritual when they know that the rainy season is anyhow about to begin.

It is also no doubt a mistake to assimilate the rite without further ado to the instrumental actions, as we did previously. The principle of relevance of the instrumental actions is found in their objectives, not in their contents; an instrument may have any shape, as long as it serves its objective, and the runner can run as he wants as long as he arrives first to the goal. In the rite, the details of the action are, nevertheless, important, and in this it is similar to the theatre. To be relative to its objective, the ritual act must first be relative to the action which it repeats.

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October 15, 2005

Archinect : Discussion Forum : Phenomenology

Archinect : Discussion Forum : Phenomenology

Phenomenology


innov8rdi

Total Entries: 1
Total Comments: 17

10/09/05 12:28

I’m doing research from my thesis project and I’m really interested in studying architectural phenomenology. Specifically, the phenomenon of memory as an aspect of how we associate and become emotionally connected to the built environment. Do you have any ideas about some writings I could read or any thoughts in general? I think the biggest obstacle I’ll face is how to define phenomenology and how to actually test responses of visitors to spaces…

JG

Total Entries: 13
Total Comments: 287

10/09/05 13:44

From my bibliography

The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
Introduction to Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger
Genius Loci by Christian Norberg-Schulz
Concept of Dwelling by Christian Norberg-Schulz
Anchoring: Selected Projects, 1975 1991 by Steven Holl
The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander
Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science by Alberto Perez Gomez

You don't have to define phenomology, it has already been defined. I also do not think that measuring one's repsonse to a building in phenomological terms is possible but good luck anyway.

rpsnino

Total Entries: 0
Total Comments: 15

10/09/05 14:52

Juhani Pallasmaa and Zumthor also have some writings on this topic.

vado retro

Total Entries: 38
Total Comments: 1474

10/09/05 14:53

to the things themselves brotha!

melivt

Total Entries: 23
Total Comments: 184

10/09/05 15:43

nicely translated summation of heiddeger, vado.

innov8rdi

Total Entries: 1
Total Comments: 17

10/09/05 16:54

thank you so much for your responses - definitely helpful.

JG - did you study this subject? and how did you go about it?

architechnophilia

Total Entries: 5
Total Comments: 217

10/09/05 16:55

JG list is somewhat...rudamentary. However still execellent reading. I might suggest, if I may be so bold, reading the any series (I think it is anyhow) huge discussion and write ups. Otherwise find a copy of Harvard's design journal (name?) that has an issue on monuments. It is written (most of the articles) from the phenomnological optic - very good reading. Used it alot when research the role of monuments and third world development through form.

abracadabra

Total Entries: 47
Total Comments: 1469

10/09/05 17:53

you can also check into Alain Robbe-Grillet. Jealousy (his 1957 novel) starts with a floor plan.

Janosh

Total Entries: 9
Total Comments: 361

10/09/05 18:53

A caveat: the application of phenomenology to architecture need not take follow the examples proposed by Frampton and Norberg-Schulz. These two phenomenological regionalists take a very narrow reading of Heidegger and turned it into a doctrine.

If you are doing your thesis, I would suggest that you do all of the philosophical readings first before you get into the Architecture as Applied Phenomenology texts. Check out Ed Casey's Thinking About Place and Paul Carters "The Road to Botany Bay" for another perspective.

Janosh

Total Entries: 9
Total Comments: 361

10/09/05 18:57

And should you become a Heideggerian, you will also want to read a couple of the numerous works studying the relationship between his philosophy and his Nazi party affiliation. Just so you know.

architechnophilia

Total Entries: 5
Total Comments: 217

10/09/05 19:12

Michel Focoult as well particularly book 3 on POWER

darkred

Total Entries: 1
Total Comments: 18

10/09/05 20:40

Do NOT finish your research without reading Henri Bergson! It seems by your description that you're more interested in Bergson's ideas in memory and duration than the very pointed definition of "phenomenology." My thesis started in a similar position, and ended with more Bergsonian and Deleuzian philosophy.
I recommend Deleuze's "Bergsonism."

mjh00c

Total Entries: 19
Total Comments: 119

10/09/05 21:07

It is interesting that you made this post. I am in Level I MArch and we're reading a lot about phenomenology. We have done some readings from Bachelard as mentioned above which is a great source and Norberg Schulz. You might also read about semiology because they are very similar yet different-it might help you to get a better graps of the concept but hopefully it won't be confusing.

bzkr

Total Entries: 3
Total Comments: 91

10/10/05 0:43

Inno,

2 must read books:

Matter and Memory

and

The man who mistook his wife for a hat

db

Total Entries: 14
Total Comments: 281

10/10/05 3:37

Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, as well as anything else by him. I find the M-P Aesthetics Reader still a great source and easy to follow, with nice explications and essays in support of 3 three of his essays on Phenomenology and Painting.

Juhani Pallassmaa's Eyes of the Skin (which someone has already mentioned) as well as Zumthor's Thinking Architecture (though good luck finding it!)

on perhaps a completely other side of it: check out poet Lyn Hejinian's Writing is an Aid to Memory and Charles Olson's writings on the Special View of History.

makeArchitecture

Total Entries: 1
Total Comments: 41

10/10/05 4:17

My thesis started in a similar position, and ended with more Bergsonian and Deleuzian philosophy.
I recommend Deleuze's "Bergsonism."

--Is this kind of crap still fashionable in school?

French

Total Entries: 9
Total Comments: 487

10/10/05 4:45

I'll add Michel de Certeau's "invention du quotidien" to the list. Very easy to read and very useful architecturally wise.

Steven Ward

Total Entries: 8
Total Comments: 1218

10/10/05 5:42

two off-the-map reads that i found useful:

cultural selection, gary taylor
thinking through the body, jane gallop

i find that i can only ingest a limited amount of bergson, deleuze, etc., and that actually using this reading to any purpose is even tougher. if you can take a germ of something from that reading from which you can build an architectural question, then you've done something.

the books i've listed above are more pedestrian - but they help your brain start thinking about possibility for how memory can be an important aspect in the conception of and the longevity of a cultural artifact (taylor) and how developing a channel of mind/body thinking as a way to understand the phenomena around us (gallop) can be of use in moving forward.

so many of the philosophical/critical texts are about observation, understanding, and description of space, time, phenomena, etc. - and in that quest, they are very compelling and valuable - but they don't help you in forging a path forward. ultimately, there is a jumping off point that you yourself have to create by asking a question...

quondam

Total Entries: 3
Total Comments: 74

10/10/05 6:30

Inside the Density of G.B. Piranesi's Ichnographia Campi Martii

It's all about the co-joining of memory (ie, mental reenactment) and architecture.

I wonder if Robbe-Grillet began Jealousy with a floor plan because that's how the ancient Roman art of mnemonics was taught? The Ichnographia Campi Martii is certainly Piranesi's greatest mnemonic floor plan.

Are people without good memories instinctually jealous of those that have good memories?

Does having a good memory also make for having a better phenomenology?

"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods."

JG

Total Entries: 13
Total Comments: 287

10/10/05 6:41

arcitechnophilla, my list is a list of Primary Text's necessary for anyone who is beginning to study phenomenology and while "rudamentary" they are also fundamental to understand before you pick up a copy of a Secondary Text like Harvard's design journal.

rpsnino

Total Entries: 0
Total Comments: 15

10/10/05 10:57

I second the Edward Casey writings - they are very accessible and super interesting.

galvanize

Total Entries: 3
Total Comments: 49

10/10/05 18:58

Yes, Casey.

vado retro

Total Entries: 38
Total Comments: 1474

10/10/05 20:16

"to the things themselves" is attributed to husserl, the father of phenomonology and the teacher of heidegger.

innov8rdi

Total Entries: 1
Total Comments: 17

10/10/05 21:33

i just wanted to say thanks to everybody. i've written down every suggestion and to my surprise, was able to find most at my school's library (i thought it was going to be much harder).

but there is definitely something exciting and motivating about having a list of books that aren't only things i really want to read, but some are things i might not have stumbled across on my own... at least not this early.

anyway - it's great. keep it coming!! :)

Steven Ward

Total Entries: 8
Total Comments: 1218

10/11/05 15:29

in undergrad we made up a stupid song about phenomenology.

we made up a lot of stupid songs.

we were tired.

quondam

Total Entries: 3
Total Comments: 74

10/12/05 4:54

Daniel Birnbaum, "The Hospitality of Presence: Problems of Otherness in Husserl's Phenomenology" in Peter Weibel, Olafur Eliasson: Surroundings Surrounded.

I read Birnbaum's essay last night and it appears that Husserl would have benefited from the realization that all memory (both his 'primary memory' and his 'secondary memory') are by default mental reenactments. That Husserl ultimately saw perception and primary memory (ie, retention) as the same (ie, simultaneously present and thus together constituting the nature of presence itself) then unwittingly suggests that perception is also a mental reenactment of the phenomenon being perceived.

[My first philosophy teacher (in high school 1973-74) was big into Husserl. He occassionally went off on these tangents talking about his experiences at the Husserl center (or whatever it was called) somewhere in Germany (if memory/mental reenactment serves me correctly).

Otto King of Bavaria died eighty-nine years ago yesterday, so I wondered if anything coincidental or interesting might happen. I wasn't really expecting anything though because my mind was working 'elsewhere', yet it was the work on a new artwork regarding Marcel Duchamp that led me to recall that Otto's death date was yesterday--Duchamp died 2 October 1968. Finally, it was last night while watching E=mcsquared on PBS that I then recalled Art that is Otto and Einstein at Princeton 5 March 2000. One of my favorites.

In case you don't get it, Otto (the name itself even) supplies the symmetry, while Einstein supplies the relativity.

Edmund Husserl was born in Moravia. The Odds of Ottopia, I suppose.]

...

September 26, 2005

Initial Response to Avant-Garde and Kitsch by Clement Greenberg

9.26.2005
Andrew S. Zientek
ART.505 – Initial Response to “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” by Clement Greenberg

WORDS I HAD TO LOOK UP:
Mordant: adj. 1) a. Bitingly sarcastic: mordant satire. b. Incisive and trenchant: an inquisitor’s mordant questioning. 2) Bitingly painful. 3) Serving to fix colors in dyeing.
Repudiate: tr.v. 1) To reject the validity or authority of: “Chaucer... not only came to doubt the worth of his extraordinary body of work, but repudiated it” (Joyce Carol Oates). 2) To reject emphatically as unfounded, untrue, or unjust: repudiated the accusation. 3) To refuse to recognize or pay: repudiate a debt. 4) a. To disown (a child, for example). b. To refuse to have any dealings with.
Unpropitious: adj. Unfavorable; inauspicious: arrived at an unpropitious moment.
Simulacra: n. pl. 1) An image or representation. 2) An unreal or vague semblance.
Platitude: n. 1) A trite or banal remark or statement, especially one expressed as if it were original or significant.
Opprobrious: adj. 1) Expressing contemptuous reproach; scornful or abusive: opprobrious epithets. 2) Bringing disgrace; shameful or infamous: opprobrious conduct.
Adventitious: adj. 1) Not inherent but added extrinsically.
Ars est artem celare: Latin: literally, art is to hide the art; that is, good art conceals its making, good art shows no artifice
Ars est artem demonstrare: art is to show clearly – good art shows clearly its making

As I was reading this article, it was clear that it would be difficult to be critical in analyzing this article as I happen to agree with most of what Clement is writing. So, instead of dissecting Avant-Garde and Kitsch I will offer a summary and commentary from my personal point of view.

What Clement penned here is essentially a formalist response/manifesto in the light of varied social conditions and histories. His stance is in much opposition to that of Hegel and Wollflin, in that he speaks of art’s formalist affect in terms of the person and not the universal. The “social and historical contexts in which the experience takes place” are as important to the aesthetic experience as the formal elements of the work. This stance is both a separate formalist theory as well as the pragmatic acceptance that artists (people in general) can not fully attain the universal ideal – “all the verities involved by religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question, and the writer or artist is no longer able to estimate the response of his audience to the symbols and references with which he works.”

AVANT-GARDE
Much of the article focuses on the Avant-Garde movement, which Clement ties, both chronologically and geographically, to the rise of the Scientific Revolution in Europe. Here, again, we see Clement departing from Wolfflin, who points out that new styles are linked to the history and culture of the arts but that a revolution in one cultural area does not (typically) coincide with a revolution in another.

With the Avant-Garde we see the first development of the ‘Starving-Artist’ as an ideal. The artist is now placed above others because of his purity in pursuit of his art, untainted by bourgeois society. Ironically, these new artists remained tied the bourgeois that they were rebelling against because idealism does not buy paint nor food. No matter how much artists rebel against the establishment they are attached to it because it is the only source of support, both in viewers and finances.

Art has always been elitist (as the masses generally are indifferent or uninterested in the fringe of culture – and lack the funds to support it anyway) but with the avant-garde retreating within itself (the development of the artist’s artist) it ended up alienating the educating ruling class which has always supported it . In response to this isolation, Clement states that “the avant-garde itself, already sensing the danger, is becoming more and more timid every day that passes. Academicism and commercialism are appearing in the strangest places. This can mean only one thing: that the avant-garde is becoming unsure of the audience it depends on – the rich and cultivated.”

{Authors Note: Clement underestimated the commercial machine, for the avant-garde was not only linked to the establishment by financial survival, it was eventually transformed by it into a commodity, transmogrified into kitsch. Artist’s are now in a continual cycle of rebellion and commodification.]

The avant-garde, as a movement, was interested in keeping culture moving and creating “Art for art’s sake.” Subject matter, communication in the ‘literature’ sense, is what is being rebelled against (as much as bourgeois society). The avant-garde arrived at abstract art in its search for the Ideal – because it is not representational. “Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.” Yet, artists can not separate fully from relativism (aesthetics) and abstract art ends up imitating the discipline of art (paint looks like paint) and not God (the ideal). The result is the imitation of imitation; representational art uses brush strokes and color to imitate a subject and abstract art is imitating the process of traditional art without the subject.

When one considers the physical subject of representational art as an imitation of an Archetype or Form, then it would seem as if abstract art is very far indeed from its quest for the Ideal. A better term might be reenactment. If abstract art is a reenactment of the process of art, it isn’t imitating but rather going through the development a second time – one that is purposeful and seeks to use this second performance to bring new ideas and views to prominence that were hidden the first time. [Authors note: this may be an angle to explore further]

In its reenactment of traditional processes of art the avant-garde necessarily retains some of the very characteristics it is trying to denounce. This necessity of maintaining some old elements and notions are precisely what allows the art to progress and evolve. Just as the Knife Thrower kept certain elements from knife throwing’s carnival days in order to maintain just enough of a link to common perception the avant-garde needs a bridge for its viewers to cross.

KITSCH
As with all movements that become large, there was an alternate (backlash even…) development to the avant-garde – the kitsch. “Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses – and established what is called universal literacy.”Art has historically been consumed by those who means and education (the ‘cultivated’), and now popular art is aimed at and consumed by a new type of class – the literate without means. The developing middle class learned to read and write but did not gain the leisure and means to become involved with traditional art and culture.

Kitsch is, essentially, the commercial condition masquerading as art. It was created to serve a growing customer base; those without the interest in, or the means & leisure to enjoy traditional art. Kitsch feeds on parts of traditional culture that have matured enough to be generally recognizable (even if not understood) – once something can be recognized (by the populace) it is looted by the kitsch machine and sold on the front of t-shirt – “…the popular art and literature of today were once the daring, esoteric art and literature of yesterday.” Because kitsch is basically a capitalist operation, it has been fully absorbed into our production system and general consciousness in a way that traditional art has never been. Like other commercial ventures, kitsch is continually trying to expand its reach, find new markets and boost its profits. Kitsch, in its ever growing influence, has been so widely accepted and embraced by the masses that the folk art, once cherished and produced in rural areas has been threatened or wiped out. As kitsch spreads across the world, supplanting local culture, it is becoming the 1st universal culture, continuous and expected. Bland and safe.

The power and spread of kitsch is based on many things, one of them being conditioning – “the attitude of thee masses, both old and new art styles probably remains essentially dependant on the nature of the education afforded to them by their respective states.” We can only like what we know, and advertising has surely shown us that we will prefer what we are continually exposed to. Repetition breads comfort which leads to acceptance and finally being liked. Kitsch is adept at advertising itself.

A closer look at the underlying draw of kitsch is more interesting because it would be just as easy to reproduce a Picasso as a Repin* (1844-1930 Ukrainian/Russian Painter- kitsch). The industrial revolution scaled time – it was now possible to travel great distances in a short time with minimal effort and to learn about what happened (in the world) during the morning in the afternoon. Everything was sped up and made easier (an over-generalization but largely true), and it is these value that kitsch epitomizes. It is a “short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art.” Kitsch requires no reflection and no thought – its subjects and intentions are immediately revealed and is then further ‘heightened’ by the spectacular and dramatic realism. “Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect.”

“Superior culture is one of the most artificial of all human creations.”

Because kitsch occasionally produces something with real value, and many popular works of art are borderline (between ‘serious art’ and kitsch) it is often difficult to draw a line of definition. Very little in the world fits perfectly into categories and there is no true line dividing ‘true art’ from kitsch, yet the gap is too large to be connected by gradations. This divide has always existed (in most cultures) – as represented by the schism between the elite (few, powerful and ‘cultivated’) and the rest (many, exploited and ‘ignorant’). “During socially stable periods “the axioms of the few are shared by the many; the latter believe superstitiously what the former believe soberly.” It takes time and relative comfort for the masses to feel admiration for the ‘masters’ of its culture.

Unlike times of excess, as in a bourgeois society, when art is created on speculation with personal ideals, in periods where art is commissioned the subject matter is determined by the patron. The artist is now reduced to a craftsmen and is left only to concentrate on his medium -- “He was not needed to be philosopher or visionary, but simply artificer.” The commission, and decorum, meant that the artist suppressed his personal views and affectations. Only with the renaissance do the artist’s personal pursuits become valid and common – but still kept universally recognizable.

[Authors note: Clement’s view on the role of the artist in a commission driven culture is one of the few points in which I adamantly disagree. It is true that DaVinci was commissioned by Ludovico Sforza to paint the Last Supper but it was Leonardo’s vision, his iconography and then his skill that makes the work a masterpiece.)

Even with this shift to the artist’s inflections, as long as art is trying to perfect its technique, it is necessarily bound by imitation because there is no other language or criteria in which to view art. It is this link to imitation that allows the general public to retain some connection, and awe of high art. It was when art left the realm of realistic imitation (abstract art by the avant-garde) that it lost the masses (which then took to kitsch).

...

September 22, 2005

The Question—What is Your Hope

The Question—What is Your Hope

Original version, Smith notebook 28 (c. 1940s) final version c. 1950


I would like to make sculpture that would rise from
water and tower in the air–
that carried conviction and vision that had not
existed before
that rose from a natural pool of clear water
to sandy shores with rocks and plants
that men could view as natural without reverence or awe
but to whom such things were natural because they were
statements of peaceful pursuit–and joined in the
phenomenon of life
Emerging from unpolluted water at which men could bathe
and animals drink–that
harboured fish and clams and all things natural to it
I don’t want to repeat the accepted fact,
moralize or praise the past or sell a product
I want sculpture to show the wonder of man, that flowing water,
rocks, clouds, vegetation, have for the man in peace who
glories in existence
this sculpture will not be the mystical abode
of power of wealth of religion
Its existence will be its statement
It will not be a scorned ornament on a money changer’s temple
or a house of fear
It will not be a tower of elevators and plumbing with every
room rented, deductions, taxes, allowing for depreciation
amortization yielding a percentage in dividends
It will say that in peace we have time
that a man has vision, has been fed, has worked
it will not incite greed or war
That hands and minds and tools and material made a symbol
to the elevation of vision
It will not be a pyramid to hide a royal corpse from pillage
It has no roof to be supported by burdened maidens
It has no bells to beat the heads of sinners
or clap the traps of hypocrites, no benediction
falls from its lights, no fears from its shadow
this vision cannot be of a single mind– a single concept,
it is a small tooth in the gear of man,
it was the wish incision in a cave,
the devotion of a stone hewer at Memphis
the hope of a Congo hunter
It may be a sculpture to hold in the hand
that will not seek to outdo by bulky grandeur
which to each man, one at a time, offers a marvel of
close communion, a symbol which answers to the holder’s vision,
correlates the forms of woman and nature, stimulates the
recall sense of pleasurable emotion, that momentarily
rewards for the battle of being

...

Questions to Students by David Smith -- Answers by Andrew S. Zientek

9.21.2005
ART.505 – Questions to Students by David Smith -- Answers by Andrew S. Zientek

1.
Q: Do you make art your life, that which always comes first and occupies every moment, the last problem before sleep and the first awaking vision?
A: Art is not my life – it is a large part of it but it is not all consuming. As much time and effort that I put into my art/design (in all its forms) there are too many things in this world to be stuck in one track.

2.
Q: Do all the things you like or do amplify and enjoin the progress of art vision and art making?
A: Yes. But all the things I like or do amplify and enjoin the progress of everything else I do as well.

3.
Q: Are you a balanced person with many interests and diversions?
A: Yes. So many interests and diversions that it is hard to focus on any one thing.

4.
Q: Do you seek the culture of many aspects, with the middle-class aspiration of being well-rounded and informed?
A: I do not seek, I find. I am interested in many things, and that leads me to being well-rounded, but my aspiration is to be absolutely great in one thing (or two, or three….you see my problem)

5.
Q: How do you spend your time? More talking about art than making it? How do you spend your money? On art materials first—or do you start to pinch here?
A: I don’t have spare time. More sketching ideas about art than making it, but not talking about it. I spend my money freely, art materials yes, other things yes – then I run out of money and spend other people’s money. Then I run out of their money and work my ass off to get out of debt, and then the cycle repeats.

6.
Q: How much of the work day or the work week do you devote to your profession—that which will be your identity for life?
A: I spend a ridiculous amount of time each day and week devoted to my profession (all of them) – but my identity is more than what I do, I refuse to be categorized purely by what I spend my time doing.

7.
Q: Will you be an amateur—a professional—or is it the total life?
A: Total life, full out Ramones style, fuck the title.

8.
Q: Do you think the artist has an obligation to anyone but himself?
A: My obligation is to God.

9.
Q: Do you think his contemporary position is unique or traditional?
A: Whose contemporary position? Very little is actually unique.

10.
Q: Do you think art can be something it was before? Can you challenge the ancients?
A: A better question would be “Do you think art can be something it hasn’t been before?” Of course I can challenge the ancients, but on my terms not theirs.

11.
Q: Have you examined the echoes of childhood and first learning, which may have once given you the solutions? Are any of these expectancies still operating on your choices?
A: I have not examined my childhood, but I still operate by intuition which is much the same as the way children operate.

12.
Q: Do you hold with these, or have you recognized them? Have you contradicted them or have you made metaphoric transposition?
A: I am assuming this question relates to the echoes of childhood which I still hold dear.

13.
Q: Do you examine and weigh the art statements of fellow artists, teachers, authorities before they become involved in your own working tenets?
A: What?

14.
Q: Or do the useful ideas place themselves in a working niche of your consciousness and the others go off unheard?
A: These questions are not fully formed. Useful ideas present themselves to my in many ways where they bounce around in my sub and cousciousness until some of them are recorded in my sketchbook and still less are birthed into this world.

15.
Q: Do you think you owe your teachers anything, or Picasso or Matisse or Brancusi or Mondrian or Kandinsky?
A: I think we owe our teachers many things. Respect at the least, thanks commonly and praise occasionally.

16.
Q: Do you think you work should be aggressive? Do you think this an attribute? Can it be developed?
A: Yes, yes and yes. Hard-core in any medium is well received. Aggressive in my interpretation is the same as intensity and intensity is the key to much of my art ideals.

17.
Q: Do you think your work should hold within tradition?
A: What tradition; of innovating—then yes. The most common tradition in history is innovation.

18.
Q: Do you think that your own time and now is the greatest in the history of art, or do you excuse your own lack of full devotion with the half belief that some other time would have been better for you to make art?
A: Now is always the best time for everything.

19.
Q: Do you recognize any points of attainment? Do they change? Is there a final goal?
A: My final goal, is realization of and union with god. My final goal for my art is to create things that make people feel how I feel when I listen to Bjork (simple joy). It is the same goal that Louis Sullivan had – enabling the view to something greater.

20.
Q: In the secret dreams of attainment have you faced each dream for its value on your own basis, or do you harbor inherited inspirations of the bourgeoisie or those of false history or those of critics?
A: See answer to question 19.

21.
Q: Why do you hesitate--why can you not draw objects as freely as you can write their names and speak words about them?
A: Our brains are not wired that way.

22.
Q: What has caused this mental block? If you can name, dream, recall vision and auras why can’t you draw them? In the conscious set of drawing, who is acting in our unconscious as censor?
A: Part of it is technical skill, most people simply don’t know how to render their visions clearly for others to see. Part of it is how quick our brain thinks, the time it takes to dream up a vision and the time it takes to represent it are very different. I do not think there is a censor.

23.
Q: In the conceptual direction, are you aiming for the successful work? (To define success I mean the culminating point of many efforts.)
A: See the answer to question 19.

24.
Q: Do you aim for a style with a recognizable visual vocabulary?
A: No, I am much more interested in process than visual style.

25.
Q: Do you polish up the work beyond its bare aesthetic elements?
A: That sounds like a short sighted modernist question. The bare aesthetic elements are whatever is needed to render the artists vision.

26.
Q: Do you add ingratiating elements beyond the raw aesthetic basis?
A: The raw aesthetic is overrated. I add only what is needed whether it is beyond raw aesthetic basis or not.

27.
Q: If you add ingratiating elements, where is the line which keeps the work from being your own?
A: I made it, therefore it is my own work.
28.
Q: Are you afraid of rawness, for rawness and harshness are basic forms of U.S. nature, and origins are both raw and vulgar at their time of creation?
A: Fuck your presumptuousness. I am not afraid of rawness, but I am not tethered to it either. I am quite aware that rawness is a characteristic of U.S. nature and so are many other things.

29.
Q: Will you understand and accept yourself as the subject for creative work, or will your effort go toward adapting your expression to verbal philosophies by non-artists?
A: Many (most?) of the greatest artists have expressed verbal philosophies developed by non-artists.

30.
Q: If you could, would you throw over the present values of harmony and tradition?
A: What possible benefit could be gained by throwing out harmony?

31.
Q: Do you trust your first response, or do you go back and equivocate consciously? Do you believe that the freshness of first response can be developed and sustained as a working habit?
A: There is much value in the first response, and the key is to retain the initial intuition, but rarely can the ‘first response’ not be developed to be more effective.

32.
Q: Are you saddled with nature propaganda?
A: If you are referring to the propaganda that nature is the domain of God and perfection, then yes I am very much ‘saddled’ with it. Who creates 44 questions for students and has most of them be value and philosophically loaded? Bullshit.

33.
Q: Are you afraid to exercise vision, seek surprise?
A: Are you serious? Is this not a questionnaire for art students?

34.
Q: When you accept the identification of artist do you acknowledge that you are issuing a world challenge in your own time?
A: I do not acknowledge it.

35.
Q: Are you afraid to work from your own experience without leaning on the crutches of subject and the rational?
A: Again, we see nothing more than formalistic propaganda masquerading as a question.

36.
Q: Or do you think that you are unworthy or that your life has not been dramatic enough or your understanding not classic enough, or do you think that art comes from Mount Parnassus or France or from an elite level beyond you?

37.
Q: Do you assert yourself and work in sizes comparable to your physical size or your aesthetic challenge or imagination?
A: I work in whatever size is needed.

38.
Q: Is that size easel-size or table-size or room-size or a challenge to nature?
A: I work in whatever size is needed.

39.
Q: Do you think museums are your friend and do you think they will be interested in your work?
A: I do not think museums are my friends, eventually they will be interested in my work.

40.
Q: Do you think you will ever make a living from museums?
A: Directly? No. Indirectly? Possibly.

41.
Q: Do you think commercial art, architectural art, religious art offer any solution in the maturing of your concepts?
A: Yes, across the board.

42.
Q: How long will you work before you work with the confidence which says, “What I do is art”?
A: What I do is art.

43.
Q: Do you ever feel that you don’t know where to go in your work, that the challenge is beyond immediate solution?
A: The challenge is usually beyond immediate solution.

44.
Q: Do you think acclaim can help you? Can you trust it, for you know in your secret self how far short of attainment you always are? Can you trust any acclaim any farther than adverse criticism? Should either have any effect upon you as an artist?
A: Of course acclaim can help you, art is a business as much as it is a calling. My ‘secret self’ does think it is far short of attainment.

In particular, to the painter—Is there as much art in a drawing as in a watercolor--or as in an oil painting? Do you think drawing is a complete and valid approach to art vision, or a preliminary only toward a more noble product?
Art is not tied to medium.

In particular, to the sculptor— If a drawing is traced, even with the greatest precision, from another drawing, you will perceive that the one is a copy. Although the differences may deviate less than half a hair, recognizable only by perceptual sensitivity, unanimously we rule the work of the intruder’s hand as non-art. But where is the line of true art—when the sculptor’s process often introduces the hands of a plaster caster, the mold maker, the grinder and the polisher, and the patina applier, all these processes and foreign hands intruding deviations upon what was once the original work?
I don’t know.

...

September 16, 2005

Symbols from Art, Archaeology, Mythology, Literature, and Religion

great reference book for symbols, December 24, 2004
Reviewer: Cassandra (Arizona) - See all my reviews
I have been using this book as a reference for years. It is a wonderful book, full of information from a wide variety of cultures and disciplines. My only disappointment in the book is that it is not three times larger. I would love to see it expanded to include more symbols.

Was this review helpful to you? YesNo (Report this)

...

September 13, 2005

Initial Response to Easy Chairs

9.13.2005
ART.505 – Initial Response to “Easy Chairs” chapter 5

Oh, this was one painful beast to read. Dry and uninteresting, it easily hides what information it does offer.

Repeating themes:
+ American Pragmatism & Appropriation
+ Commercial Influence
+ Cultural Reflections & Class Distinction

Pragmatism & Appropriation
One can easily make a case that pragmatism is the defining trait of American society. We see this in every facet of our culture. Individualism and pragmatism means never accepting dogma for the sake of dogma. This is in stark contrast to old-world Europe where seating (among other things) changed very little (style excepted) for hundreds and hundreds of years. Europe was ruled by Le bon gout (the good taste), which is established by decorum. Decorum is doing what is appropriate. In old-world Europe, it was appropriate for seating to be proper and follow well established notions. As “Easy Chairs “ follows its dry timeline presentation of the evolution of seating in our country, many of the developments were based on pragmatic ideals – what makes sense at the current moment regardless of dogma. The simple, recognizable shape of the Shaker ladderback is nothing more than the adoption of a European model to specific needs of a culture combined with utter efficiency of materials. This new model is further modified so that it can “be broken down for movement” which signified both our constant moving as a culture and the changing commercial landscape. Furniture, as with most things, are starting to be produced in central locations and shipped to customers.

Hitchcock “produced a product that standardized common design…not interchangeable parts but interchangeable decoration.” This was Henry Ford entering the realm of style. He “turned craft elements into machine ones”. This was a complete contradiction to the prevailing (intellectual) stance in Europe (London). This was exemplified by John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture and in this case the Fifth Lamp, that of LIFE and human activity which was linked to craftsman(ship) and not the machine. If the work is not done joyfully, it is not worth doing. Hitchcock did not invent this technique, rather found an effective way to appropriate the stylistic elements of traditional furniture for cheap mass production. Appropriation of ornament (time consuming & costly) for the masses. This again illustrates the American condition of the time – Ruskin’s notions were of the educated elite and Hitchcok and his chairs were for the middle class, the common folk that made up our country. “The Hitchcok factory created disassembled versions of more high-falutin’ styles, such as [the] Sheraton.”

Commercial Influence
Just as we saw Hitchcok serve a growing market, many of our greatest developments in seating come from the commercial machine. The transit industry (rail, auto & air) was not obliged to follow tradition because there was none and that led to an objective approach to the concept of seating and created radical improvements. As many Americans “found themselves better seated first on railcars” it created pressure and a market for a better chair. The lineage of home recliners can trace its roots from the railroad chair to barber & dentist chairs before they found their way into our living-rooms. This evolution of acceptance is a common trait of new introductions. First it is met with skepticism, then followers take your lead and re-define your ideas and the third generation has already been taking information for granted.

The study of ergonomics also came from the transportation industry as companies strove to return your butt to their seats. The more comfortable the seating was, the more likely you were to choose them over a stiff painful journey on a competitor. “The impetus here was with commercial travel” but as with many things this new found knowledge led people to want “be as comfortable at hoe as on the train or plane” and a new type of seating was born; the “lounger”.

Cultural Reflections & Class Distinction
The article repeated illustrated the changes made to seating, including specific types of chairs such as the Ladderback, to reflect varied use based on culture and class distinction. The ubiquitous ladderback chair is adapted to be straight and stiff for the prim and proper New England culture while the Appalachian version is bent and relaxed. This is taken further to distinguish class, in the anglophile society of the plantation south no less, with the use of tall, slim chairs to ‘weed out’ the white trash with short legs. These class divisions continue today and are easily seen in the office chair. The higher up the corporate food chair you travel, the taller, more distinguished and plush the office chair gets.

Cultural traits, such as our restlessness, become physical with our choice of seating (in this case the rocking chair). Though as American sounding as the rocking chair is, the ‘easy chair’ is the real representation of our culture – “a chair for an anxious man in an anxious age” Yes, cultural ideas of sitting have changed all over the world, but no where has adopted the Lazy-Boy with such enthusiasm as America. It reflects our current values; ease, comfort, isolation, gluttony, & excess. “Such chairs became symbols of the self-satisfied American, watching television, and settling back into his prejudices like cushions.” As most everything that is broadly middle-class there is a backlash to the lounger and sleek, high design chairs that were just as comfortable but twice as expensive appeared and were “purchased by those who looked down their noses at the recliners.” Today, Ikea and Target have created a landscape that has ‘high design’ for the masses with sleek modern furniture and accessories becoming prevalent. There is a backlash in the waiting.

The Folding Aluminum Lawn Chair
I keep this chair within its own section because we see all of the article’s reoccurring themes embodied in it. It appropriated Bauhaus ideals without the theory or high design. Its use was dictated by our value of “comfort, informality and convenience.” Just as our cultural values shaped the chair, the backlash has associated it with “the ugly backsides of fat women in curlers.” It is a product of pure commercialism, having spawned from a vast excess of aluminum. Its “economy of means, simplicity of concept, and low cost” are basic tenants of American pragmatism. If it were not for the ridiculous price of aluminum (due to China’s hunger for all natural resources), I would tend to agree with the article when it states that “the next revival will no doubt be of the folding aluminum lawn chair.”

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10 Facts about New Bedford

9.13.2005 - ART.505
10 Facts about New Bedford

1) The New Bedford half-marathon was won in 2004 with a time of 1 hr, 7min.
2) There are 20 buildings in N.B. on the National Register of Historic Buildings
3) Roughly 33% of N.B.’s population are registered voters.
4) N.B. has a population density of 4,938 people per square mile.
5) Our watershed is approx. 50 square miles.
6) In 2004 there were 68 fire hydrants repaired or replaced.
7) The average temperature in July is 74 degrees.
8) There were 801 reported cases of burglary in 2001.
9) The hurricane barrier is 9,100 feet long - longest stone structure on east coast.
10) There are 10 letters in the name NEW BEDFORD

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September 12, 2005

Initial Response to “The Knife Thrower”

9.11.2005 - ART.505
Initial Response to “The Knife Thrower” by Steven Millhauser

First off I must say that when I read fiction, I don’t typically look for, or assume that it means anything. If I had read this for myself, outside of the assignment, I would have thought it was an entertaining and dark story that was well written. That is all I would have thought. It is of my opinion that the large majority of ‘meaning’ that is found in literature is post-fact invented bullshit that serves to maintain a ‘elite’ viewpoint.

Ohhh, the writer is so deep, did you get the symbolism in chapter 3? What you didn’t get it? You must not be as smart as I am.

We all lend our own prejudices, experiences and insights into the interpretation of any work, and it is my view that it is this personal vantage point has much more weight than what the artist intended or could have thought up to try and represent. {Mathew Barney excepted]

I am sure that much of this opinion is based on my own operation and creation of art. Yes, sometimes I am trying to communicate a certain message but usually I am working with metaphorically charged objects and arrangements that I think will spark something within the viewer without trying to say what that something is. Furthering this viewpoint is the fact that we, as a culture, are not taught to (or how to) look beneath the surface. This appreciation and interest in ‘meaning beyond the surface’ is an old and dying art and the only large segment of our society that is taught this is the upper class. Have you turned on television recently? Where have our poets gone?

Ok, on to the work at hand.
Damien Hirst. I think I could leave my interpretation of The Knife Thrower with Mr. Hirst and all would be understood between us.

Never-the-less, let us continue on with the discussion. As I said before, I don’t typically look for extra meaning so I will approach this analytically and pull things that may mean something. Some of it will be entirely unintended by the author. Bullshit on my part.

There are a handful of repeating themes in the story:
+ Role of the Artist
+ Uncertainty and moral struggle of the audience
+ High Culture vs. Low Culture
+ Pushing Boundaries
+ Link to the Past – Old notions
+ Role of honesty & authenticity in art
+ Varied Interpretation

In the context of our class, I think it is safe to say the major issue presented in the text is What do we consider art?

Art vs. Craft
“…the skill of his throwing had brought him early attention, but that it wasn’t until he had changed the rules entirely that he was taken up in a serious way.”
This makes me think of the saying – Conceptual artists are all vision and no skill, and craftsmen are all skill and no vision. Hensch’s technical skill is not enough and he is forced to push boundaries to become accepted as an artist. This ‘line in the sand’ is of dear importance to those of us in the artisanry departments. What must we do to be accepted? In the story there are many references to ‘his art’ and even the rumors which appeared in the “arts section of the Sunday paper” serve to publicize and categorize the show for the public. Media is often the arbiter of opinion in the case of art – what is and isn’t / what is good or bad.

Pushing Boundaries
Hensch begins to push the boundaries of his field by doing “something we hadn’t seen before, or even imagined we might see, something work remembering.” That could be one element of good art, regardless of medium. As is often the case, pushing forward leads to ‘forbidden things’. Hensch develops his “cruel art” and made his reputation. He must continually up the ante as our culture is always becoming more and more desensitized. Shock value and the grotesque are the basis of the appeal of his art. The voyeuristic nature of our culture flocks to his dark show where they allow him to play to basic fears and entertain “a dark dream”.

Uncertainty and Moral Struggle (of the audience)
“We felt a tug of disappointment, which changed at once to shame, deep shame.” Throughout the story, the audience switches between wanting the forbidden and wanting to remain safe. It was the very “dubious enticements” that drew them to the show that they “stirred uncomfortably in [their] seats” in response to. This is the same audience that watches Nascar races, hoping to see a fiery multi-car crash that stops the show as cameras show paramedics rolling the driver to the ambulance as he raises his arm aloft giving the thumbs up gesture. Hensch’s show allows the ID to be satisfied while remaining safe and distant; “after all [his show is] public and well traveled.” The audience wants to remain on the moral high ground while also reveling in base desires and dark yearnings.

Role of the Artist
Dressed in black and indifferent to approval, Hensch is the model artist. He pursues his art for himself and the audience is merely his patron, a way “to earn his living.” This idealistic view enables Hensch to take on a role of the ‘authority figure’. He is a poet – one who sees beyond the veil, for if “we weren’t absolutely sure of him, then who were we, what on earth were we, who had allowed things to come to such a pass?” He is now given the benefit of the doubt, everything he does is with meaning. This gets back to my initial distrust of our interpreting of others work because as my friend says “he is still a man and occasionally he gets a belly ache just like the rest of us.” Those marked by ‘the master’ “will treasure it (their wound) all [their] days” means that these ‘ordinary’ people are now special because of their proximity to greatness.

High Culture vs. Low Culture
“The only knife throwers any of us had ever seen were in the circus side show…” This type of reference is contrasted by the many “master of his art” statements made throughout the story. Returns back to the question of what is art.

Link to the Past – Old notions
The references to carnivals and throwing the knife through the apple on his assistant’s head serves to show that Hensch, for all of his rule changing and boundary pushing must still operate within some of the understood norms of his show, or risk losing all reference points and hence his audience.

Role of honesty & authenticity in art
This is an element of art that I still haven’t made up my mind on. Would it diminish the value of Hensch’s art if the people from the crowd who were marked were part of the show and not really willing audience members? In the end was Laura actually killed? Does it even matter? This weekend I saw the Ansel Adams exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine arts and on one of his photographs he had touched up the negative to ‘erase’ a road that went through the shot. Does that diminish it as art? How is that any different than editing in Photoshop (it is just another tool)? In the end, does only the image matter?

Varied Interpretation
“Some of us heard the girl cry out, others were struck by her silence”
The audience continually observes different things during the course of the show. Just as our society, at large, perceives different things in art, and again brings up the question of what is art?

Damien Hirst
”For wasn’t he an artist, in his fashion? And so we admired his daring, even as we deplored his method and despised him as a vulgar showman.” Both Hirst and Hensch are not really about life or death, or even art, they are about testing values. What buttons can they push? What can they get away with in the name of art.

One last thought on how the story is told. The plural first person (is there an actual literary term for this?) creates a general ‘we’ which remains abstract and could be interpreted as a couple who went to the show together to a generalization of the whole crowd. The whole crowd can be easily be seen as a generalization of our society.

Might one say that the use of the “we”, passing the buck, so to speak, to a collective voice, is one way for the narrator to avoid the issue of moral choice or, to put it differently, to avert or dissolve responsibility for this or that particular interpretation of the events related ? --Steven Millhauser

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August 21, 2005

Setting up an architecture practice

Archinect : Discussion Forum : View All : Setting Up an Architecture Practice

R.A. Rudolph

Total Entries: 14
Total Comments: 394

08/21/05 18:50

Lots of good questions - I'd love to hear answers from people who have been doing it a bit longer than we have, but here's one perspective:

We have been on our own full time for about 2 years - started doing small side projects maybe 4 years ago... 3 partners, we all met in school but have different backgrounds & degrees. We decided to officially jump in and start a company after my two partners (one of whom is my husband - the other his best friend from school) had left full time jobs in architecture they weren't satisfied with and started doing small remodel jobs. That combined with the small design jobs we had going led us to think we might make