JA: Do you want to add something about the art scene?
RR: I have this vague sense that the art world has become so isolated from everything else in the universe that you’re either in it or in the rest of the world — nobody has time to be in both.
-Josefina Ayerza interviewed Richard Rorty in the Nov/Dec 1993 issue of Flash Art
Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sans into machinery that does not work too well at best.
-Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love (1973)
(From Goodreads 08w26:1)
I saw Darren O’Donnell at the Toronto Free Gallery opening last Thursday night and he told me he’d been engaged in the past week with an online debate about the validity of his work with Mammalian Diving Reflex, a debate initiated by Gabriel Moser and picked up on the Sally McKay’/Lorna Mills blog.
I’ve recently moved and had been in no rush to get the net at home set up, a situation further compounded by Rogers’ incompetence (I’m posting this from work dear reader), so this debate had escaped my attention. However, alerted by Darren, I looked up the links at work on Friday and printed off the conversation for some weekend reading. My immediate reaction (especially having converted it to page-length) was ‘wow’ - to the two documents both approximately 20 pages in length. As much as Darren was enervated by the criticism, at least this was a conversation being had.
I met Darren shortly before he began his `social acupuncture` projects, and so I’ve always felt I had an insider’s perspective on them, having participated in and been witness to some of their earlier manifestations. Further, I was at the book launch for his Social Acupuncture (meaning I read it as soon as was possible) and so I have the insight provided by his brilliant essay at the back of my mind with regard to the work.
What Moser and Sandals provide me with is the perspective of someone who doesn’t know Darren personally. Sandals is upfront in admitting she doesn’t like Darren which biases her against the work (src). Another friend of mine admitted that he didn’t quite understand what the work was about art-wise either, but at the time I countered that it was part of our culture’s move away from fiction toward non-fiction (a personal interpretation I worked out somewhat in Goodreads 07w11:1).
I do take issue with one of Moser’s interpretations, since it made me sputter in indignation. I’ve never met Ms. Moser and would like to think we could get along in the future, but I have to nominate one of her paragraphs as one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read.
Speaking of the humor of Mammalian Diving Reflex’s work with children, she wrote:
But the pessimistic part of me thinks that the humour actually lies in something far less self-aware and much more sinister. This part - let’s call it the UBC indoctrinated part - thinks that the humour actually comes from a strange and almost colonial kind of child-adult anthropomorphism. That when adults see these kids trying to play grown up, the humour comes from the fact that we think they’re ‘cute’ in a patronizing way - that their inability to successfully inhabit these [adult] roles is funny in the same way that watching a dog awkwardly dressed in a human business suit is funny.
Anthropomorphism is a completely inappropriate concept to apply to children, suggesting that they aren’t part of our species (only adults are truly human ?) but are akin to dogs dressed up. I am surprised that this thought occurred to her, and doubly surprised that she saw fit to publish it. If only UBC indoctrination had taught her to recognize foolishness when it occasionally occurs, even in the best of minds.
I find nothing humorous about the Mammalian Projects, nor does ‘cute’ really enter into it for me. I’m informed by Darren’s ideas about acupuncture - that you’re poking a dam to hopefully collapse it and return the flow - and in this case, Darren is working with our society’s totally fucked up ideas about children. These ideas are so fucked up that a writer doesn’t recognize how inappropriate it is to use the word ‘anthropomorphic’ when speaking of them.
I keep thinking of a passage from Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language. In Pattern 57, Children in the City Alexander wrote:
If children are not able to explore the whole of the adult world round about them, they cannot become adults. But modern cities are so dangerous that children cannot be allowed to explore them freely.
The need for children to have access to the world of adults is so obvious that it goes without saying. The adults transmit their ethos and their way of life to children through their actions, not through statements. Children learn by doing and by copying. If the child’s education is limited to school and home, and all the vast undertakings of a modern city are mysterious and inaccessible, it is impossible for the child to find out what it really means to be an adult and impossible, certainly, for him to copy it by doing.
This separation between the child’s world and the adult world is unknown among animals and unknown in traditional societies. In simple villages, children spend their days side by side with farmers in the fields, side by side with people who are building houses, side by side, in fact, with all the daily actions of the men and women round about them: making pottery, counting money, curing the sick, praying to God, grinding corn, arguing about the future of the village.
But in the city, life is so enormous and so dangerous, that children can’t be left alone to roam around. There is constant danger from fast-moving cars and trucks, and dangerous machinery. There is a small but ominous danger of kidnap, or rape, or assault. And, for the smallest children, there is the simple danger of getting lost. A small child just doesn’t know enough to find his way around a city.
The problem seems nearly insoluble. But we believe it can be at least partly solved by enlarging those parts of cities where small children can be left to roam, alone, and by trying to make sure that these protected children’s belts are so widespread and so-far reaching that they touch the full variety of adult activities and ways of life.
For me, Darren’s work is about restoring the balance of incorporating young people into a community, to break them away from the segregation we enforce onto them through class-rooms and age-based learning. Writing in the 1970s, Alexander hinted that unless children interact with adults, they cannot become ‘adults’ themselves. As a child of the same decade, I recognize the effects the subsequent decades have had on my generation and those that have followed. As Lorna Mills points out in one of her comments:
…brings to mind the late Neil Postman and his wonderful book The Disappearance of Childhood where he, at one point, proposed it was actually adulthood that was disappearing.
For generations we have effectively controlled the community that our children and young adults experience so that they only really know a community of each other. In my case, it was only toward my mid-twenties that I began to make friends with people significantly older than myself.
Now, that’s what I like about the Mammalian projects; that it’s a fuck-you to a society that segregates children and treats them like precious little angels and not human beings. Having watched the 1970’s The Bad News Bears recently, I was struck by how adult those adolescents seemed: they drank, smoked, swore and said offensive things. That’s pretty much how I remember that age range for myself. And yet, in the thirty years since that movie, children are now routinely depicted as being smart-alecky technical whiz-kids, cute and precious and silly, and if Speilberg’s involved, crying for their fucking daddies.
An anti-adult Boomer ideology has infected everything and I know thirty-somethings who proclaim with pride a Peter Pan syndrome (and I’m not talking about Michael Jackson). This is to say that the only valid model of Being now acceptable is the youthful one, which by definition is immature. This indoctrination leads to the belief that it is better to be pre-formed that fully-formed, better to cut yourself off from your full potential as a being, and be happy with the state leading up to it. In art terms, it is better to be a sketch than to be fully rendered.
Yes, I understand the prejudice: that adults are humourless squares. That their spirits are dead and they’ve lost their collective imagination. But I grew up with an understanding that each decade of life offered something unique to experience, and I wasn’t going to settle for the awkwardness and patronization I’d experienced throughout my childhood and adolescence as being all I could expect from life. While adults of previous generations had given the condition a bad name, that doesn’t mean we should refuse to embrace our biological destiny. A little bit of historical awareness should mean we can chose to be a type of adult that suits us. I understand today that there are those who are choosing to be Peter Pan types - fine. I just wish it wasn’t so popular.
ART
As an anonymous commenter pointed out on the Moser post, the projects ’should be critiqued from a performance art point of view first and foremost, just as a painting would be critiqued. I’d like to see if anyone will actually look beyond the “kids in parkdale” thing and see the thing as art, because the fact that no one has so far (as far as I know) says more about our perceptions and ideologies than Darren’s.’
As art, Darren is working self-consciously working within the Relational Aesthetics stream of contemporary practice. Relational Aesthetics emphasizes events over objects - one goes to the gallery/space to experience something rather than to just see/hear something. Relational Aesthetics as a movement has already jumped the shark according to some, but I think that type of judgment just highlights an allegiance to being trendy. It is valid exploration within our structured society, which often highlights what we take for granted about our relations with one another. For example, Mammalian’s projects highlight that we take ignoring kids and their imagination for granted.
Chuck Close is said to teach his students that ‘if it looks like art, chances are it’s somebody elses’. That is, it’s familiar, established, and probably by consequence unoriginal. Art has become a series of familiar forms, and all it took was Nicolas Bourriaud to write a 114 page book and call it ‘relational aesthetics’ for artsters to stop saying ‘what the fuck’ and be all uncomfortable with the unfamiliarity, and to start exploiting the possibilities of this form of performance and theatre.
In a comment on her post, Moser uses Diana Borsato’s use of tangoing police officers (during 2006’s Nuit Blanche) as something more obviously ‘art’ because she used adults. (Borsato herself weighs in here). MDR’s use of children puts their work (for the 2006 Nuit Blanche, ‘ballroom dancing’) in the realm of ‘community art’. This seems entirely a personal interpretation on her part, but one informed by the familiar and by our privileging childhood as something ’special’, the same way the drooling kids in our schools were ’special’ … i.e. not ‘normal’.
That’s not denigrate ’specialness’ and emphasize ‘normality’. The value of living in a democratic society is the expansion of possibility. When we narrow options and narrow culture to something familiar then we’ve narrowed the possibility of our imaginations. Artists know this intuitively and it’s part of the artistic ideology. The language used often contrasts boring vs. exciting, narrow vs. unlimited, possible vs. impossible, etc. It’s why there are protests against turning studios into condos, and freak-outs seeing gym-thugs in former gallery spaces turned into magazine-layout restaurants. Because a narrow frame of possibility has been drawn around something that was once more vague and voluntarily undefined.
We are still at a point socially where we don’t know how to recognize what ‘drooling kids’ have to offer, and prefer to shape people into suits, give them Blackberries and expect them to buy a house or a condo. If they jump through the required hoops to adopt ‘the form’ then it doesn’t matter if their lives are empty of meaning. All that’s important is that they look like they have something to offer (even if what they end up offering is 40+ hours of their lives a week to make their bosses’ lives easier).
(Moser points out that Canadians don’t like to talk about class, but it’s a North American and Commonwealth phenomenon - an aspect of colonial legacy. Class is part of the human psyche, and it’s an achievement of post-colonial civilization to down-play it, and a failure to see it become resurgent. Just as taught hygiene keeps certain diseases away, it’s representative of educational failure when a type of psychological typhoid manifests itself again.)
Thus, good art should bring us unfamiliar experiences. (Although, I have to say here, I’m pissed off when artists seem to chose to bring us negative unfamiliar experiences, emphasizing the disgusting and annoying as if that is somehow worth experiencing). Good art should help make us aware of the variety of possibility.
But the definition of Art itself has become too narrow to fully incorporate the explosion of creativity that we have been made aware of through the internet. Consider that in less than two years, an entirely new dialect has been created through the captioning of funny cat pictures. Oh Hai! This wasn’t controlled or planned, but just happened … through humour and through our innate sense of how (our) language works. In as much as I’m an old fashioned humanist, I am so because human beings remain consistently surprising and creative. And the arts have remained valuable and evolved away from Van Gogh landscapes into rice-cooking because in the past century, specialization and over-rationalization have become ideological, to the point that structure is confused with form and appreciated over content. We are a civilization in love with the shape of bowls, but care little about what fills them. Thus, we have edible items without nutritional content, bodies trained to exert forces unrequired for playing video games, and photographs in closets mocking the way we looked twenty years ago. And, an artist once known for filling bowls now gets away with closing doors with walls, a form contrived to evoke content forty-years out of date.
Art schools are schizophrenically complicit in this: while they teach future artists to be critical of the shapes of society, they also expect artists to fit into these shapes, to make familiar art while attempting to make unfamiliar art as well.
Perhaps it is no wonder that so much contemporary art is as bad as it is. When I was recently graduated, I used to tell myself and others that it was impossible to suck, since the anarchism on display in galleries was impossible to judge. But we still want to judge it, we want to be able to say ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and that means we each need some personal standard. What I’ve learned in the years since graduating is that artists do indeed have personal standards, and for the most part, the cliques within the art communities come together around a shared standard … but this is unpredictable, and often dependent on who one’s teacher was at whatever particular school one went to.
This insight has discredited cultural criticism for me. It is an incompatible position to want cultural anarchy as an allowance of possibility and an expansion of potential inspiration, and at the same time to want culture narrowed to the familiar and the immediately comprehensible. Personally, I haven’t quite got that down yet, and still get pissed off in galleries when I see easy work that looks like it’s wasting my time.
But I understand this duality exists in my mind because I’m a person born into the late 20th Century and seeking an expanded open future in the 21st. I am trying to unlearn 20th Century culture and learn the 21st Century one. Which is to say, I’m trying to reject the shit of the past in order to be a type of person which I feel would fit the 21st Century world that I want to live in. The 20th Century narrowed possibilities to binary check-boxes: apocalypse or utopia; 1 vs. 0, employed vs. unemployed, male vs. female, businessman or hippy, movie vs. theatre … etc. A little bit of history shows that people didn’t always live that way.
So, all this being said, I’ll sum it up this way: the Mammalian Diving Reflex projects are awesome, they’re fun, and they’re Darren’s admitted attempts to change his world by expanding his own horizons. Some people don’t get it and they’re allowed to. Some people don’t get it because they’re trying to fit a round peg into the art-world’s square hole. I get it in an idiosyncratic way that I hope I’ve shared, and in so doing hope that I’ve helped illuminate something for others. - Timothy
Believing in Creationism conveys a reproductive advantage in attracting other Creationists.
Thus, by not breeding with those who believe in Evolution, Creationists are proving the theorem of those they oppose.
from: Timothy Comeau
to: Peggy Nash
cc: Jim Prentice, Prime Minister of Canada, Stephene Dion, Jack Layton
date: Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 2:10 PM
subject: Opposition to Copyright reform
While I respect the Government’s desire to update copyright
legislation to be fair to all parties within the 21st Century’s
digital environment, I do not feel that the legislation introduced
today is close to achieving that goal. Rather, it attempts to
legislate into law the 20th Century status quo, wherein the consumer
is subject to terms and conditions imposed by producers without
negotiation.
I very much object to the idea - introduced in the bill - that posting
copyrighted material online (specifically pictures) could make one a
criminal. This would have a serious effect on blogging, where it has
become normal to re-post images copied from the source. In fact, it is
often used as a mean to link to the original source. And blogging is
one of the examples of the transformative effect the net has had on
our culture … a vibrant arena for debate, discussion, and the
dissemination of new knowledge. To make any part of its culture
illegal would be equivalent to introducing limits to the freedom of
expression, or - in 20th Century language - to interfere with the
freedom of the press.
This law fails to recognize net-culture as it has developed over the
past decade. There needs to be a fair-use provision which is clear,
and which allows the posting of material within legitimate contexts,
such as those that are promotional and educational.
The Toronto Star has this breakdown
“you could copy a book, newspaper or photograph that you “legally
acquired.” But you couldn’t give away the copies. And you can’t make
copies of materials you have borrowed.”
-with regards to the photographs, this would make a site such as this
(Keil Bryant’s Flickr page, which I enjoy browsing because we share an
interest in such s-f imagery) illegal, if Bryant were Canadian. It
would also become illegal (as I understand it) for me to save a copy
of any of these images for my collection.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kielbryant/
- “- it would be illegal to post a copyright work — picture, song,
film — on the Internet without the permission of the copyright owner.”
As written above re: blogging
As a final word, the Government of Canada would be well advised to
consult with ’share-holders’ who are representative of the base of
potential inf ringers: those under 35, who’ve grown up with VCRs and
computers. It has so far failed to do so. For those us (such as
myself) representative of this generation, a series of social norms
have developed with regard to material on the net. Trying to
criminalize downloading would be like trying to criminalize the great
Canadian tradition of saying ’sorry’ when someone bumps into us.
Whatever legislation is introduced, technological circumvention along
with a young person’s ingenuity would counter it within 6 months (like
the jail-broken iPhone cracked by a kid in New York State two months
after its release). Under the new law, it would be illegal for future
young men ‘who hate AT&T’ do to so. We would thus be deprived of the
right to use a device with a contract we thought was fair.
We do not want to be beholden to the one-sided contracts which limit
our freedom to access digitized cultural material. In the 21st
Century, the more liberal (no pun intended) the copyright law, the
more creative the society is allowed to be. I disagree with Richard
Florida that the path to 21st Century wealth is the enforcement of
intellectual property laws, but I do agree with him that a
society/city’s wealth is a measure of its creativity … it’s a
question of how one’s define wealth. I do not define it in terms of
money, but rather in terms of inheritable, sharable, cultural
products. We thus currently enjoy a net of cultural wealth, and this
bill would seek to impoverish us all in favor of the more narrow
definition of wealth as a measure of how much a company can squeeze
from a consumer.
Timothy Comeau
timothycomeau.com
————————–
[also posted on Goodreads]
When I learned of this late last week, I thought it would have been something awesome to go to.
Until I saw the pictures.
The deets:
Monday, May 26, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Munk Debates
Be it Resolved that the world is a SAFER place with a REPUBLICAN in
the White House
Discussant: Charles Krauthammer
Discussant: Niall Ferguson
Discussant: Samantha Power
Discussant: Richard Holbrooke
Co-Sponsored by The Globe and Mail, Royal Ontario Museum, Salon
Speakers Series, Aurea Foundation, Munk Centre for
International Studies
Registration: Tickets available only at: http://www.munkdebates.com
The Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queen’s Park Crescent
Toronto, Ontario
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder
I just found this laying around the hard-drive. It’s something I wrote at the beginning of February, meant as a reply posting on a web-forum before I abandoned it as too long and potentially off-topic. I also read it now and think it dates me as a 30-something pre-Millennial with 20th Century memories. I’m not so sure the sentiments herein expressed would resonate with early 20-somethings who hate old art as being too much Church-stuff. I’m also not sure how many 20-something artists are dealing with legacy-Marxists on a regular basis, as I have over the past decade.
One of the lessons of the 20th Century was that the world changes every ten years. Each decade compressed the changes of a mediaeval century, and yet the arts don’t seem to have clued into this. My reason for pursuing the arts came from it’s humanism, as expressed especially in the 1960s, which I now recognize as being part of the Western World’s healing process following World War II. As a teenager, the Time-Life series on artists produced at that time were an introduction to a cultural world that I was not being taught in my rural Nova Scotia school.
The humanistic aspect of the arts is still what politicians and journalists are likely to throw at us - the arts encourage ‘life’ with mystical overtones. I now understand why that was propagated in the years following the Second World War, but by the time I went to art-school (following the idea that a cultured life was the one the most worth living) I ran into bitter and disagreeable adults who hated the word `beauty`, hated the word `humanism`, and instead taught me to be angry with capitalism, patriarchy, corporations and the other suspects. Thus enraged, I was then encouraged to express my thoughts on the matter through obfuscation, conceptual trickery, (and those other usual techniques) not in writing - since I was expected to be only barely literate - but my making something to be exhibited in a plain white room.
Once out of art school, I thought of myself as a young professional trained in my field and yet found that income-via-arts-employment was rare, the already-expensive credentialing inadequate, and the grant system to be more of a nepotistic lottery, and no one was as smart as they thought they were; more or less they were merely quoters, not thinkers. Old ideas, not new. As long as they could throw a quote at you from one of those bitter French men (they who hated capitalism, humanism and the usual) then they considered themselves not only smart, but superior, and it didn’t matter if their day jobs did not coincide with their training. We were all channeled into a bohemian life of obscurity and intellectual self-deception.
My sense then is that the arts professionals of Canada have totally lost track of the game. They are very quick to adopt the thinking of foreigners while denigrating their home culture. Their greatest ambition is to leave the country. Trained to be hateful of contemporary society, they are too disagreeable to be employable by the corporations who could use them. And here it comes back to the humanistic heritage - your average person who respects the arts does so because of that humanistic heritage, and yet the too-cool-for-school artist today will quickly mock this superficial understanding.
Why then, is there little art is schools? Perhaps because ’sensible’ adults don’t want their kids around the bad influence of either hippy-dippy mystics or disgruntled communists. Those of us who understand why that is an oversimplification and an unfair stereotype are the ones who probably already have their kids involved in the arts. They’re not as rare as we may think, and highlights the political thinking against universalizing art education - politicians think parents-who-want-it find a way outside of the public system. It’s a lifestyle option, and an ethnically specific one at that.
My own, disillusioned sense, is that the arts do not have the value invested into them by 19th Century European snobs. I never use the word `disinterested` for example, except when talking Kantian aesthetics. The writings of John Ruskin I find to be mostly unreadable due to being obsolete. Clement Greenberg, nor Andy Warhol, ever heard the word ‘email’ in their lifetime, let alone ‘world-wide-web’. For that matter, Warhol never got the chance to use Photoshop.
Industrial manufacturing has given us a world of aesthetically pleasing products, and talent for image making is now found in the worlds of design and illustration. (Jutxapoz magazine). Installation art tends to amount to bad set design, and performance art to bad acting. I see better art videos on YouTube than I do in galleries, and on YouTube they don’t try to be art. If you consider the Mona Lisa to be the first viral image, it’s easy to extend the consideration to how much a viral video has passed the test of the audience, making it legitimate art.
These are examples of how our world has changed, and I feel like ‘the visual arts’ are a fossilized cultural product from at most, the 1980s. Future historians will look to illustration, design, and films to gauge our culture, and especially the YouTube archives. Like the photography of a century ago, it’s the stuff taken with Kodaks that are of interest, not the stuff trying to imitate romantic paintings.
If we want to have galleries in our towns and cities, it is important that we all understand why they are important. I still value art for it’s humanism. But our culture is so creative outside of galleries, and it is this creativity that is accessible to people who haven’t studied art. The argument shouldn’t then be to have an art for those professionals - it should be accessible to all. A life in the arts should broaden one’s possibilities, not narrow them to the life of a clique.
When people talk about `art` these days, I no longer know what they’re talking about. I suspect they are talking about some hipster club they don’t want a corporate dork to join. But that exclusion denies someone who needs art is their life from having it - and the result is Canadian culture in 2008.
I sat at the table waiting for my order to be ready. It came on the radio again, the second time I’d heard it that day. An earlier radio speaker, in the morning rain.
Hearing it this second time, I flashed forward fifteen years. One day in the early 2020s, I’ll hear it buried on a radio playlist, and think back to these days. Just as I do with these songs:
Which always reminds me of the early summer of 1990. Specifically, hearing it on the car radio in the Annapolis Valley. But of course, there are also the memories of dancing to it weekend nights in 1994.
This
reminds me of gardening in the summer of 1991.
and this
brings me back to that year, half-way down the aisle under the ‘fresh’ sign in this grocery store, looking back toward the camera’s viewpoint.
But while we’re at it, let’s keep in mind that this time next year, this:
will be twenty years ago.
