intellectual properties

I start to salivate when I think about the juicy conversations we’ll have when we’re back together again.

the amazing letters of Italo Calvino. (New Yorker)

“What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is modern art, I would add, but the most solemn pile of nonsense that ever appeared on earth?”

…

“All the ideas currently in my head are subject to a strange phenomenon: while I work on them and perfect them continuously from the philosophical point of view, they stay rudimentary and barely sketched on the dramatic and artistic side. In my creativity thought has the upper hand over imagination.”

…

“I, on the other hand, am sending you a sample of my new experiments in fiction. (It’s not stuff forN. O. but maybe for R. F. and the like.) It’s a vision of humanity sunk to the lowest level of its downward curve, humanity as an ant-hill, for whom only a latent and confused memory remains of its ancient individuality. It’s also rubbish. If you don’t like it or don’t want to do anything with it, send it back to me.”

…

“What is all this nonsense you’re giving me about pure and impure art? As though we didn’t know each other well enough and had never discussed the subject. As though you didn’t know who Italo-calvino is, what he wants, what he has to say. Forget any remorse: my art has been and always will be social while trying to remain art as far as possible, just as in Ungaretti’s poetry there is always an immanent ethic even when at his most lyrical: “tonda quel tanto che mi dà tormento” (just round enough to torment me). The funny thing is that just about a year ago you were writing me passionate letters on the necessity of a social nature in art and I was replying with even more heated letters on God knows what. We really have to burn this correspondence.”

.::.

+ listen to Liev Schreiber read a Calvino story from Cosmicomics here: radiolab: the distance of the moon

seen in williamsburg: you are gonna die

Untitled, originally uploaded by amyleblancdotcom.

the romantic desire for chaos (you too?)

question the need for philosophy
but when the mind becomes aware of itself as an object
it cannot help but consider its own existence:
the world now merely raw material
and a pretext for talking about oneself,
adolescent and becoming.

this irresistable urge to introspection
and ostentatious subjectivism
is a maniacal tendency to self-observation
with the compulsion to consider oneself
over and over again as one unknown,
as an uncannily remote stranger.

the romantic rushes into this duality
as he rushes into everything dark, ambiguous, chaotic and ecstatic -
the bizarre and grotesque
the ghostlike and pathological
the macabre and perverse.
a demonic dystopian dionysian
flight into the unconscious
or the other side of utopia -
the fairy tale, the fantastic,
the uncanny, the mysterious
the indefinite iridescent atmospherical and musical
space of childhood of nature,
to dreams and madness:
a yearning for irresponsibility
and dignity in the unknown.

a belief that the more bewildering the chaos,
the more radiant the star that emerges:
a mad genius uncivilized mind.

but with this want to experience everything simultaneously
and no search for synthesis-
with all antitheses possible,
all determinate utterance is dead and false.
nothing is.

dark crowds stumbling out of cinemas
numbed and blinded
by the narcotics of sound and light
which hex and strengthen the spell -
no reality is desired inside a dark movie house-
only romantic dreams.

when we dance, it is bait for death.
to escape atomization and alienation,
in coming together, we desire to be dissolved.

.::.

romanticism:
a psychotic fear of the present:
an ideology for a new society
inside a necromantic cry for the unrealized past -
an expression of generations which no longer
believe in absolute values
or absolute anything,
this feeling of homelessness
and loneliness
and isolation
is the fundamental experience
of whole generations

romanticism is an overcompensation
typical of the emancipated and disillusioned individual
found wandering in the slipstream of every revolution.

yet no psychosis has ever been more fruitful:
there is no product of modern art -
the exuberance, anarchy and violence,
drunken stammering lyricism,
and unrestrained, unsparing exhibition -
that is not a shadow of the romantic
desire for illusion by the disillusioned.

.::.

{c.f. hauser, the social history of art: german and western romanticism, pp. 155-172}

The Hood

@ the 1993 Exhibit at the New Museum.

“demarcates a site of police hostility and racial profiling that targets “suspicious” youths …. the ghost-like absence of a body in Hammon’s piece recalls lynching and the memory of its victims. In light of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies, the intensely controversial themes presented in The Hood remain equally relevant today as they were in 1993″.

…”equally relevant” is unfortunately sad and true.  the NYPD has carried out somewhere near 5 MILLION stop-and-frisks (!?). in the current class-action suit over this policy, “New York State Senator Eric Adams said on the record that he heard Commissioner Kelly tell then-Governor David Paterson and a room of other lawmakers that stop and frisk targets minorities because “he wanted to instill fear in them that any time they leave their homes they could be targeted by police.” [gawker]

the LA riots were in 1992. 1993 was 20 years ago – how far have we come on this issue? with the 5 million+ who have been profiled in NYC alone, injunctions in Oakland, the deaths of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and so many uncounted others who did nothing but “look suspicious”, and the speed of proliferation of other institutionalized forms of racism, this simple piece of a hood hanging on the wall almost made me cry in anger and shame.

/hoodies up/

there were a lot of other really political and emotional pieces in the show, including one that was just a square painted on a wall – about which you might ask “how the hell is that art?”  - and maybe it isn’t – but the color of the square painted on the wall was the memory of the color of the skintone of someone loved who had died of AIDS. so simple.  so wrenching.

def see the exhibit if you can make it there.

Le langage est source de malentendus

did you know that in france, handwriting analysis (graphologie) was (is?) done as part of job interviews?

.::.

{style vs. type}

“If type is a lead letter striking down on paper, style is a cursive gesture winding its way over a sheet—or down the street. Style implies a sense of cultivation, of self-care, a flourish you come up with yourself. Style shows through when writing with a stylus, channeling the idiosyncrasies of the hand, as well as its grace and movements. Style has no place when the transition to type gets under way. Type is not fluid but cast, regulated and regular, repetitious—again and again and again. But perhaps only when type was cast did we notice how whole subjectivities are embodied in technologies of writing, and that we also inscribe ourselves while writing everything else down.

… Though structured, with the transition from hand-written manuscripts to movable type, language assumed more and more of a legislative logic. Spelling was standardized, and with it, rules and regulations became widespread. Marshall McLuhan referred to this new world as the Gutenberg Galaxy, a space of relations founded on order, visuality, and single-point perspective. For Michel Foucault, the letterset world was increasingly a space of recording and regulation as well. If language emerged from us, with letterset writing, it slowly began to turn back on us, creating classifications and files, systems of ordering and numbering….

They are letterpresses, after all: They press letters into place, but they also press letters onto people, press people into place.”

(Fully Automatic Writing — Alex Kitnick)

.::.

[ fully automatic writing vs. automatic writing ]

Gadamer, on Work, Time and Art:

(i offer this 1st because of my obsession with time, and second in partial defense of Burning Man and other festivals, where time is reduced to a correspondence to the physical environment: dawn, sunrise, light, sunset, dusk, dark, and exists as a kind of emptiness that doesn’t need to be filled.)

.::.

“… work is something that separates and divides us. For all the cooperation necessitated by joint enterprise and the division of labour in our productive activity, we are still divided as individuals as far as our day to day purposes are concerned. Festive celebration, on the other hand, is clearly distinguished by the fact that here we are not primarily separated but rather gathered together.

…Two fundamental ways of experiencing time seem to be in question here. In the context of our normal, pragmatic experience of time, we say that we “have time for something.”  This time is at our disposal; it is divisible; it is the time that we have or do not have, or at least think we do not have. In its temporal structure, such time is empty and needs to be filled. Boredom is an extreme example of this empty time. When bored, we experience the featureless and repetitive flow of time as an agonizing presence. In contrast to the emptiness of boredom, there is the different emptiness of frantic bustle when we never have enough time for anything and yet constantly have things to do. When we have plans, we experience time as the “right time” for which we have to wait, or as what we need more of in order to get the thing done. These two extremes of bustle and boredom both represent time in the same way: we fill our time with something or we have nothing to do. Either way time is not experienced in its own right, but as something that has to be ”spent.”

There is in addition, however, a totally different experience of time which I think is profoundly related to the kind of time characteristic of both the festival and the work of art. In contrast with the empty time that needs to be filled, I propose to call this “fulfilled” or “autonomous” time. We all know that the festival fulfills every moment of its duration. This fulfillment does not come about because someone has empty time to fill. On the contrary, the time only becomes festive with the arrival of the festival. The manner in which the festival is enacted directly relates to this. …It is of the nature of the festival that it should proffer time, arresting it and allowing it to tarry. That is what festive celebration means.  The calculating way in which we normally manage and dispose of our time is, as it were, brought to a standstill.”

-Gadamer- The Relevance of the Beautiful (PDF) (pp 39-42) (or, the currency of the beautiful, depending on your translation. i like currency better.)

.::.

time as something that we “spend” – time as a form of commerce, and therefore time spent/time accrued=”valuable” and arguably the source of all value in culture (labor time).   the quantity is finite, yes, for each of us. but does that mean it should be constantly measured for maximization, or is it the opposite, that only in the escape from measurement that we can live?

“play” is a variety of experience where the interests that constitute the reason and commerce of everyday life are not considered. work-time is suspended  by play-time, play being an exercise of imagination.  if you extend your definition of work to the consumer who also contributes to perpetuation of the work cycle, this often includes what we would have previously considered play-time –  from the kinds of things we would formerly have thought of as non-commerce activities – like camping and other nature-based outdoor sports -  to the somewhat opaque commercial activities like doing anything online (facebook), to the more transparent commercial entertainment industries like television and movies. entertainment is almost fully integrated into industry, and thus in modern culture work-time has extended to nearly every waking moment, and into some of the most private parts of our private lives. even when you are not working, you are working.

work divides time. work divides us.

art unites time. art unites us.

.::.

quantum entanglement

this morning i woke up and wanted to have brunch in california, where it is 70 degrees and right now as i type this there is a sunny backyard full of friends laughing and having mimosas.  it is snowing softly but steadily here in brooklyn.

[who'd have thought

that snow falls?]

WHERE IS MY FUCKING TELEPORTER, i silently screamed.

then, because there is the internet, i looked that up.  what *is* the situation with teleporters? and rabbit hole: i started reading about quantum entanglement, which i get but don’t really understand and so my brain turns metaphysics into a love poem for the universe and everyone i love in it.

you move that way

i move this way

with perfect correlation

regardless of distance

“there is no

slower-than-light

influence

that can pass between

the entangled particles”

 [

there is no

slower-than-light

influence

]

.::.

einstein thought this all up, with a little help from his friends. thursday was Pi day and his birthday.  did you read this?

and now they found the God particle (again.)  this seems like a thing that will be endlessly discovered. (that’s some job security right there, looking for god particles)

.::.

on the infinite:

“I promise you that labyrinth, consisting of a single line which is invisible and unceasing.” — Borges

– referenced in the first line of Bochner and Smithson’s The Domain of the Great Bear: in the center of the infinite:

from last wednesday’s art class. textual art in the form of a “magazine-intervention”. see:  ”the medium and the tedium”, a 2010 written piece by bochner for explanation of this and his other work on language. {+that triple canopy website layout is awesome.}

["For translucence, against transparency."]

["questions of meaning, due to the nature of language, are undiscussable."]

the silent and spoken structures of language are an alien and incomprehensible labyrinth, an unmanageable pantheon.

 smithson :a heap of language:
(larger)

.::.

i am tying us together with really weak strings, strings that are unnecessary to the already entangled.  but i like the feeling of these words as strings, pulling gently.

.::.

why writing is impossible

[indirect language and the voices of silence]

The expressive word does not simply choose a sign for an already defined meaning…  It gropes around in a significative intention which is not guided by any text…If we want to do justice to it, we most evoke some of the other words that might have taken its place and were rejected, and we must feel the way in which they might have touched and shaken the chain of language in another manner and the extent to which this particular word was really the only possible one if that meaning was to come into the world.  In short, we must consider speech before it is pronounced, the background of silence which does not cease to surround it and without which it would say nothing.

[...For the world is a mass without gaps]

“Cezanne’s Doubt” is a great read on painting, colors, the senses, perception, artistry and freedom: http://faculty.uml.edu/rinnis/cezannedoubt.pdf

Cezanne did not think he had to choose between feeling and thought, as if he were deciding between chaos and order. He did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear. He wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization. He makes a basic distinction not between “the senses” and “the understanding” but rather between the spontaneous organization of the things we perceive and the human organization of ideas and sciences.

…By remaining faithful to the phenomena in his investigations of perspective, Cezanne discovered what recent psychologists have come to formulate: the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one…it is Cezanne’s genius that when the overall composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to impression of an emerging order, an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.

…For the world is a mass without gaps, a system of colors across which the receding perspective, the outlines, angles, and curves are inscribed like lines of force; the spatial structure vibrates as it is formed…Cezanne sometimes pondered hours at a time before putting down a certain stroke, for, as Bernard said, each stroke must “contain the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style.” Expressing what exists is an endless task.

.::.

…Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, since, looking back on what we were, we can always find hints of what we have become. It is up to us to understand both these things simultaneously, as well as the way freedom dawns in us without breaking our bonds with the world.

borges: mirrored tigers

borges, on mirrors, reflections, representations

.::.

from two poems [parts]:

In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect
That the tiger invoked in my verse
Is a ghost of a tiger, a symbol,
A series of literary tropes
And memories from the encyclopaedia
And not the deadly tiger, the fateful jewel
That, under the sun or the varying moon,
In Sumatra or Bengal goes on fulfilling
Its rounds of love, of idleness and death.
To the symbolic tiger I have opposed
The real thing, with its warm blood,
That decimates the tribe of buffaloes
And today, the third of August, ’59,
Stretches on the grass a deliberate
Shadow, but already the fact of naming it
And conjecturing its circumstances
Makes it a figment of art and no creature
Living among those that walk the earth.

[ http://thefloatinglibrary.com/2008/09/03/the-other-tiger/ ]

Today at the tip of so many and perplexing
Wandering years under the varying moon,
I ask myself what whim of fate
Made me so fearful of a glancing mirror.

Mirrors in metal, and the masked
Mirror of mahogany that in its mist
Of a red twilight hazes
The face that is gazed on as it gazes,

I see them as infinite, elemental
Executors of an ancient pact,
To multiply the world like the act
Of begetting. Sleepless. Bringing doom.

They prolong this hollow, unstable world
In their dizzying spider’s-web;
Sometimes in the afternoon they are blurred
By the breath of a man who is not dead.

[ http://thefloatinglibrary.com/2009/02/25/mirrors-j-l-borges/ ]

.::.

one story:

Islam asserts that on the unappealable day of judgment every perpetrator of the image of a living creature will be raised from the dead with his works, and he will be commanded to bring them to life, and he will fail, and be cast out with them into the fires of punishment. As a child, I felt before large mirrors that same horror of a spectral duplication or multiplication of reality. Their infallible and continuous functioning, their pursuit of my actions, their cosmic pantomime, were uncanny then, whenever it began to grow dark. One of my persistent prayers to God and my guardian angel was that I not dream about mirrors. I know I watched them with misgivings. Sometimes I feared they might begin to deviate from reality; other times I was afraid of seeing there my own face, disfigured by strange calamities. I have learned that this fear is again monstrously abroad in the world. The story is simple indeed, and disagreeable.

Around 1927 I met a sombre girl, first by telephone (for Julia began as a nameless, faceless voice), and, later, on a corner toward evening. She had alarmingly large eyes, straight blue-black hair, and an unbending body. Her grandfather and great-grandfather were federales, as mine were unitarios, and that ancient discord in our blood was for us a bond, a fuller possession of the fatherland. She lived with her family in a big old run-down house with very high ceilings, in the vapidity and grudges of genteel poverty. Afternoons — some few times in the evening — we went strolling in her neighborhood, Balvanera. We followed the thick wall by the railroad; once we walked along Sarmiento as far as the clearing for the Parque Centenario. There was no love between us, or even the pretense of love: I sensed in her an intensity that was altogether foreign to the erotic, and I feared it. It is not uncommon to relate to women, in an urge for intimacy, true or apocryphal circumstances of one’s boyish past. I must have told her once about the mirrors and thus in 1928 I prompted a hallucination that was to flower in 1931. Now, I have just heard that she has lost her mind and that the mirrors in her room are draped because she sees in them my reflection, usurping her own, and she trembles and falls silent and says I am persecuting her by magic.

What bitter slavishness, that of my face, that of one of my former faces. This odious fate reserved for my features must perforce make me odious too, but I no longer care.

[ http://thefloatinglibrary.com/2008/09/12/the-draped-mirrors/ ]

.::.

i too have a strange relationship to mirrors.  who is it that we see there? the images are always reversed and untrue.