How it’s been
Thoughts
Alchemy
(Joseph Wright, The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone (1771), depicting the discovery of phosphorus by Hennig Brand in 1669).
1. The Baroque Cycle
During the first week of the summer I discovered Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Browsing on Amazon, going through the ‘others-who-bought-what-you-have-bought-have-also-bought’ my eye was caught by the English cover of System of the World. In reading more, I learned that it was the third novel in the trilogy, which began with Quicksilver. I downloaded the sample chapter of Quicksilver to my Kindle.
Now, I’d seen these novels in used & remaindered bookstores for years, but they had never caught my interest, especially based on the blurbed summaries printed on the back. However, you could say that I’d reached the point where my background interests had finally intersected with a series of novels set in the 17th Century (listening to the Ideas series Origins of the Modern Public almost immediately prior to discovering the Cycle probably helped) and the sample chapter intrigued me. I dived in, taking two months to read all three books (as well as the ‘sequel’ Cryptonomicon).
Quicksilver begins with an account of the alchemist Enoch Root arriving in 1713 Boston to seek out one Daniel Waterhouse. This is noteworthy as one of the underlying themes of the Cycle is how the 18th Century Enlightenment had its roots in the foundation of the English Royal Society in the 17th Century, and how its letter-based communication network spanned Europe. The immediate predecessor to this activity was the Europe-spanning Esoteric Brotherhood of Alchemy, which given a scientific overlay in the 19th Century became Chemistry.
The character Enoch is depicted as visiting the Royal Society in 1670 to demonstrate the new substance phosphorous, which can be distilled from urine. This method of creating phosphorous is used at various plot points in the novels, and the substance itself features prominently in many scenes. So I was surprised when in browsing my RSS feeds Saturday to see the following article on io9.com.
2. Alchemy & Art
The Baroque Cycles‘s alchemy sub-plot reminded me of something I’d first heard in the late 1990s. In November 1998 CBC broadcast an Ideas episode which consisted of a recorded round-table discussion on art, featuring Ideas producer Max Allen, then Globe & Mail art critic Blake Gopnik, as well as Liz Magor and Diana Nemiroff. At one point (starts at 26:27min) Allen asks if their talk on gallery-based art might sound as strange to a far future audience as we would find a conversation on alchemy. This analogy between art & alchemy struck me as particularly apt, and I remember mentioning this point to a friend. My concern was that in pursuing art I was doing something wasteful, whereas his response was, “I wouldn’t mind doing ‘alchemy’”. His answer essentially recognized the aesthetic of doing something perhaps useless but also intriguing and fun in and of itself. This ‘use-based’ critique of arts is one happens all the time and it incredibly hard to avoid. My friend’s answer in turn, is also hard to avoid – that there are some things in life that are worth doing simply because it’s fun to do them (aka “the journey is the destination”).
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(Ideas from November 1998 • Lister Sinclair! • Download Mp3)
So, in reading The Cycle, and with this memory, I found it surprising when I read the following tweet:
This immediate association between art & alchemy in light of my reading and memories rose my eyebrows. Then, more recently, the following line occurred in another article about art:
“Through the alchemy of the Internet, the performance loses some of its luster.”
This prompted me to tweet:
My suspicion is that this relationship between alchemy & the arts will become more and more prominent over the next few months (years?) and that maybe it’s because art & alchemy are similar to each other, as both being traditions with long histories that disappeared. Art, as it has been structured and known, is changing into something else, primarily through ‘the alchemy of the internet’. Given that we are so immersed in mediated images, it seems more and more impossible for a static artistic image or a mise en scene (‘installation’) to have much resonance, where resonance is proportional to its level of reproduction on the net (ie, today a famous image is blogged).
Under today’s conditions, a cultural product seems relevant if it goes viral. For the record, Liz Magor answered Max Allen’s question in 1998 (which presumed the future would consider 20th Century art & culture to be mass products like movies and television) by stating that assumes things have value simply because they are popular.
Of course, those who have known me for a long time will point out that I was once a part of the Instant Coffee collective, and that in August 2003 we put on a show called Alchemy & Mysticism. This was ‘Alchemy & Mysticism #2″ as #1 was the title of a collection of art videos shown in the Urban Disco Trailer earlier in June. The title was taken from the Taschen book, and chosen mostly for humour, as it had nothing to do with the content of either collection.
Whackamole
The Jarvis bike lane fiasco is just another example of how the intellectual energy in this city is spent on the whackamole of bad ideas.
There always seems to be some idiotic proposal or policy on the table, and there always seems to be some semi-organized response.
A response which plays out out-of-sight those people who inhabit the highways at rush hour. It almost seems fair to say that these people don’t care.
The sketchbook tradition
from the Leo Kaman website
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“The sketchbook tradition has pretty much died out,” he says. “The sketchbook offered a lot of portability, as you generated ideas on the go. I now travel with my drawing tablet and my laptop.”
– Alex Livingston, as reported by Peter Goddard, The Toronto Star, Jan 12 2011
Goddard in speaking with Livingston for his show (currently on at Leo Kamen Gallery in Toronto) explains that he’s currently using a Wacom tablet with his laptop, as opposed to paints and paper. I know myself, I looked into getting a Wacom tablet in 2009, but decided against it for the time being, as I still like using inks and brushes, and would prefer that tactility while image-making, as it’s just as easy to scan afterward as it is to create it directly through the computer.
What I wonder about though, is the measure of this shift. I came of age, and was inspired to be an artist, through the experience of 500 year old materials. Notebooks, manuscripts, paintings, and the older the better. I saw myself was working within that tradition, in effect creating things that would themselves be 500 years old one day. What then, is truly going on (what is the measure of this shift) when a professor at a prestigious art school says “the sketchbook tradition has pretty much died out”? If I were to ask, “will people in a century even understand paper?” is there an analogy which will help me understand what that experience will be like?
Art and Food
Since I was a child I’ve been fond of Jesus’ parable of feeding the spirit: that man cannot live by bread alone, but also requires the word of God. I think the reasons I’ve always appreciated this were because it was well explained to me by a teacher who had formerly been a priest, and it made sense to me in a manner that has remained true to my life as I’ve lived subsequently. That the spirit, or mind requires feeding seems self-evident.
This idea has been relevant to my interest in the arts, and I’ve also noticed over the years a personal preference for food metaphors. Food, after all, is a substance we ingest, we bring into ourselves, where it is transformed into something disgusting that comes out the other end of our bodies. This transformation is called digestion, and we understand through this process we remain alive through the derivation of nutrients, in effect becoming “what we eat”.
This physical digestion can mirror of that of the mind – we continually ingest, take into ourselves, ideas that enter our mind through conversation, reading, and general interaction. Our minds continually process the languages of our environment, be they symbolic, gestural, or spoken, and ‘digest’ them into some part of our worldview and subsequently some part of our sense of self.
Almost everyone alive is capable of feeding themselves in some way, even if they are not actually able to cook a meal. In that sense, we are all literate to the symbology of the gastronomic spectrum, all the way from food freshly killed in a hunt to the four-course meal of a fine restaurant. Along the spectrum are canned food we merely reheat, sandwiches, and fast food burgers. So-called special occasions require meals at the higher end of the spectrum, whereas quotidian meals after a long day can occur on the lower end.
Carr: Art is absurdly overrated by artists, which is understandable, but what is strange is that is absurdly overrated by everyone else.
Tzara: Because man cannot live by bread alone.
Carr: Yes, he can. It’s art he can’t live on.
-Tom Stoppard, Travesties (1975)
If the spectrum of food goes from the self-acquired meal to restaurants, on what spectrum does art lie? Why in effect, is my question being asked? Because Art is a strange and forever undefinable thing, precisely because it is a food of the mind, an intangible and a philosophically confused concept. As Wittgenstein sought to make clear a hundred years ago, some philosophical problems are merely problems of semantics, entanglements of concepts without a clear language. Art is such a thing: forever subject to pithy definitions which merely become mottoes for one of its clique camps. For the conceptualists art is something different than for the painters, and thus like God it is subject to much under its name, in a variety of churches under many flags.
Why is it we consider it normal for children to draw? And why do we find it usual that adults mostly do not draw? For that matter, why do we find it normal for children to play, and find it usual that most adults do not play, but those who do are honoured as actors? In keeping with my food theme, children do not eventually grow out of making food for themselves. Sure, there are people who ‘can’t cook’ but presumably this means they are reliant on heating up frozen dinners. Food making remains a part of our lives throughout, while art making is allowed to disappear.
But does it? If you can’t cook, that can be done for you – simply go to a restaurant or a soup kitchen. But art? One goes to a gallery, and hence a gallery is analogous to a restaurant. Or, like the ever-present unquestioned nature of food culture, we could say the dominance of created visual products we call tv shows and/or movies (even video games) are somehow reflective for our appetite for imagined products.
Galleries do not seem to think of themselves as restaurants for the spirit, offering menus of imagined products. However, if pressed, I think they would see the similarity between the haute cuisine chef and the international exhibiting artist.
Human beings took our animal need for palatable food … and turned it into chocolate souffles with salted caramel cream. We took our ability to co-operate as a social species … and turned it into craft circles and bowling leagues and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We took our capacity to make and use tools … and turned it into the Apollo moon landing. We took our uniquely precise ability to communicate through language … and turned it into King Lear.None of these things are necessary for survival and reproduction. That is exactly what makes them so splendid. When we take our basic evolutionary wiring and transform it into something far beyond any prosaic matters of survival and reproduction … that’s when humanity is at its best. That’s when we show ourselves to be capable of creating meaning and joy, for ourselves and for one another. That’s when we’re most uniquely human.” – Greta Christina, Sex and the Off-Label Use of Our Bodies| (My source)
Creating anything is a human thing to do: we take basic foods and we make meals, and we take sticks and make symbols. Everyday we manipulate a set number of symbols in composing text messages and emails, and to do so is to be part of our human community. A teenager unable to text (i.e. write) in today’s world would be one who is cut off from their community, and thus damaged. Being human is to be both a meal maker and an art maker, but importantly, I am using the word “art” in a generic creative sense of the word to encompass everything learned and extensive of the imagination, such as writing quotidian messages, or the dominating created world of pop culture.
Along the food-spectrum analogy, most everyone is capable of making a sandwich. Culturally, the creativity of everyday is not very advanced. Once we get beyond sandwich making, the understanding of these cultural worlds diverges: the fine restaurant has a place in our lives that a fine gallery doesn’t.
“Food” as a word is easily understood as something encompassing a long spectrum of things that are ultimately put in the mouth. But Art, through its semantic confusion, is not easily reduced as something “put somewhere”. It does not have an obvious end point, but is to be described as “experienced” or “felt” or “seen”.
What interests me is why the analogy of restaurants so easily breaks down, and why Art remains perceived as something privileged and removed, whereas restaurants and food culture are so thoroughly embedded. Why do galleries exist dependent on grants, whereas the idea of supporting a restaurant by grants is absurd? The easy answer is the physical need for food makes food culture obvious, but we do not speak of art as psychological need which would make its cultural contribution obvious as well. Also, the another obvious answer is that pop culture provides the feeding of the psychological/imaginative appetite so thoroughly that only those with “finer palates” seek out the higher forms in prestigious galleries. This is analogous to the “culture war” within Food: buying organic and local vs. fast & processed.
In the Art culture, we have fast and highly processed food as well. And just as a diet consisting entirely of highly processed food is extremely unhealthy, it is probably equally mentally unhealthy to be a digester of corporatized pop culture exclusively. Unfortunately, like a Big Mac filming a Whopper, reality television has begun to exploit the end products of generations of television: these terrible, stupid people who are not (in the old sense of the term) “cultured” precisely because they are instead “pop cultured” and thus comfortable with confessing to video diaries and being idiots on camera.
“I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain alliances with colleagues and friends,” he said. “Now, though, I see things differently. I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it. – David Brooks, Social Animal
To be alive is to participate in a food stream, and to be human is to participate in a knowledge stream. A human beings, we participate in a collectively created culture which subdivides into subcultures, two of which are food-related and art-related. Food culture is so healthy in its level of participation that people need to be careful around it, lest they become obese, while art culture is a muddied, confused and sclerotic thing, always being defended and dependent on social largess.
Clearly, the place of Art in our lives requires a rehabilitation—one which recognizes its place in a healthy and full life. Just as a diet consisting entirely of fast food is dangerous, so too is a mental life informed solely by corporatized products. However, this is not to be read as a defence of government grants, but simply to remind you that restaurants do not require support. If we include film, we may already have a healthy art-culture. If we consider art to be something solely related to galleries, we may ask why haute cuisine is not dependent on grants, or why the art experience away from commercialization insists on being free, when it is free food that one really requires.
Holidays 2010
I went home for Christmas as watched cable television. Thoughts:
Batman Returns (1992) was on Space! The election of the Penguin as Mayor of Gotham reminded me of Rob Ford’s election. All this city needs is a superhero.
My Mom got a slide scanner for Christmas. I went through five carousels and was suprised to see some familar sights, albeit with an almost forty year remove. For instance, this was taken in Trinity Bellwoods Park in 1974:
Conservative Contraception
My questions:
1. Wasn't the G8 made somewhat irrelevant last autumn when it was decided that the G20 would be more important?
2. Why is this our business? Like, a bunch of women in poor countries are going to care about what Canadians say and do. WTF. You'd think paternalistic programs would be something Conservatives avoid. And perhaps this is where they are coming from? I don't know. I do know that getting all upset at their ideology is a predictable distraction to the fact that this story has no substance. Why can't we have a discussion around the thesis: "Poor women are capable of taking care of themselves". If that statement is false, why? And why is it our (G8) problem as opposed to the governments of the countries where these people live?
Birth control won't be in G8 plan to protect mothers, Tories say
Google Docs
I just did this diagram in less than 5 minutes using Google Docs. Had I done this in Illustrator, I would have taken a half-hour. I don’t know if that means I suck at Illustrator, or if Google Docs is AMAZING.
Pressed to answer, I would say, no, I’m not that bad at Illustrator – it’s only I would have to create every element in the diagram from scratch.
Google Docs provides a library of readymade elements, which cuts down on the time. Also, the library suggests they anticipate their app to be used to create flow charts such as this one, meaning everything I would need to make such an image was there, increasing efficiency. Props to Google for so thoroughly anticipating user needs.
Secondly, Google’s experience with user interfaces (like SketchUp) meant that intuitive actions like grouping meant that I could put together shapes and move them around without having to explicitly group them, which was a bonus.
So yes, Google Docs is AMAZING, but it helps if one knows what one’s doing to begin with.
(BTW, this diagram illustrates the syncing relationship between Google’s cloud services and an iPhone and MacBook).
Avian Aspirations
1903 – The Wright Brothers finally solve the mystery of flight for human beings
Then we learned to fly in formation.
2006 – Twitter is founded.
Between 1903 and 2006 is a century during which apes aspired to become birds, a hybridization that goes back to our mythology.
If we take the name of Twitter literally, we see it has the communication of a flock, announcing their location, status, territory, thoughts, somewhat arbitrarily. Like sparrows in a tree, communicating to the networked host.
In other words, one of the great projects of Western humanity over the past one hundred years was to become birdlike, rather than apelike. For whatever reason.
The semiotics of Michael Jackson’s aesthetics
Today’s Huffington Post links to a Nypost article on “the creepy painting” of Michael Jackson in Michelangelo’s David pose, surrounded by cherubs. We are told that it was commissioned in 1999 from the artist David Nordahl.
This painting was glimpsed in the 2003 documentary by Martin Bashir, and from which I took the screencaps to compose the piece (below) I had in Zsa Zsa Gallery’s The Michael Jackson Show show in Toronto, and which closed on Michael Jackson’s 45th birthday.
As I stated in that peice, he had delusions of godlihood. I do not know if the Nordahl work has a title, but I’d imagine it acquiring the name ‘The Apotheosis of Michael Jackson’, and considering the default longevity of oil and canvas, it may become a type of Mona Lisa image of the 26th Century – something most people are familar with, but it will be few who will have actually looked up the surviving electronic documents to see the videos.
CNBC has a slide show of work from his collection. This dates from last March, when Jackson was planning an auction to gain some cash for his troubled finances. As I’ve known about the apotheosis painting for almost seven years (Bashir’s documentary aired in January of that year) it doesn’t surprise me that Jackson’s taste was so bad. What I was surprised by were the other paintings wherein he’s a king, or a knight. I find this one (also by David Nordahl) most alarming:
And this robotic head reminds me of the end of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
I found the slide show through a search for “David Nordahl”. The thumbnail for the following made me think he was a Mormon artist responsible for the type of images of white-Jesus amidst tanned-white-people Indians as seen in their texts. On clicking I see that instead it’s a very Socialist Realism depiction of Jackson that wouldn’t stand out from a collection of Maoist images from the Cultural Revolution. I would like to think that Nordahl is savy enough to have put Jackson in a red shirt for this reason – consider this painting “The Nordahl Code”. Herein lies coded images depicting truths about his interaction with this disturbed man, but I’ll leave that to the thriller novelists of the future.
Frank Herbert, in his last novel Chapterhouse Dune, wrote of a Van Gogh painting which had survived the millenia and was a reminder to that cohort of humanity of an element of wildness in the human imagination. It is an eloquent passage about the importance and lasting effects of artwork. Jackson in turn stands as a testament to the WTF? element in the human, but this message speaks most clearly to us, the present living who shared the world with the living figure, but a century from now, these paintings, stripped of the context that we take for granted, will be a mess of mixed messages. By this I mean that we know that Jackson’s thing for being depicted as a king comes from his marketing as ‘the king of pop’. And that the associated art is tasteless and ignorant.
Jackson as a knight, or as a king … a schoolgirl of 2110 will have no reason to think that the man depicted there was not those things. Also, these works are a reminder that while painting we call ‘contemporary’ has become a blotchy mess of shapes, colour and tube turds, there remains this underground of figurative realism that ‘tasteless’ celebrities hire for their own personal propaganda. The tradition of Queen Elizabeth I, Louis XIV, Napoleon (ancient figures from a pre-photographic world shaping their image for the present and future generations) continues for the celebrity-royalty of today. The truly wealthy and powerful (billionaires) just support the museums and keep the industrial scale works they purchase in secret storage somewhere.
All of this came together in the late 90s for his History album, which included the construction of 10 statues, one of which was floated down the Thames. That he seemed to take this idea seriously is part of what made him so abhorrent.
What is fortunate is that Jackson’s megalomania was somewhat harmlessly channeled into a career as a song & dance man. In the history of celebrity, Jackson is perhaps unique in the use of the cult of personality, and someone attached to his organization must have studied its long history, from Rome through to Stalinist Russia. Had he been a political figure, it seems certain he would have been the worst kind of monster, a Caligula with a harem of boys. Consider how this video depicts (part of the 1997 History campaign) some kind of Roman Emperor Soviet Russia fantasy:Michael Jackson was not a healthy man in any sense of the word. Those of us who take art seriously can see in it just how ill he was, and we can also recognize the depth of ignorance amidst his fans. That people have gotten tatoos ‘in memoriam’, that people leave glowing comments on his YouTube archive, is just another example and evidence of a failed education system. The art will echo down the centuries as a reminder that in the late 20th Century, Western soceity was totally fucked up.