our responsability

“Artists are citizens before they are artists. Being an artist does not negate the responsibilities of citizenship. Artists should use [their] voices and [their] capacity for expression to make meaningful noise and rebuttals in these troubled times.”

- Dawoud Bey, quoted here

abstraction ideas I agree with

Insistence on form alone assumes that form arises out of the ether, a priori, without any context or culturally specific symbolic meaning — a theory espoused by the original guy at the back of the philosophy class. In other words, it assumes a universality, a common language across all people, which is not only factually wrong but also ethically and politically problematic, because it asserts that the values of the person making the argument are not only (falsely) universal but superior to other beliefs as well, by virtue of their universality.

There are no universals in form, in meaning, in language, in beauty, in any of the realms that a number of Modernists hoped for. Even the laws of physics lie. There is only multiplicity — messy, chaotic, conflicting, enriching, and life-sustaining.
-from Muddying the Circumscribed Myth of Abstraction, by Alexis Clements

ricochet

Instead of thinking of my pieces as landing on a specific meaning, or meanings, I think they should ricochet off of ideas, signifiers, and affects - never landing in one place but creating a constellation of connotations.

an object found in a dumpster during roof-work, Winter Park, FL

[then the minutes on the clock went by like seconds]
[the the minutes minutes went wet by by like like seconds seconds]
[‡the‡minutes‡went‡by‡like‡seconds‡]

To find your way among the stars, choose some familiar pattern
as a starting point and gradually work your way from one star
group to another.
Menzel, Donald H.  A Field Guide to the Stars and Planets.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. 104.

hyperobjects, hyperreal?

Google image results for "climate change"

The trouble with global warming is not just that it's real—the trouble with it is that it deals a deathblow to “common sense.” [...] Common sense tells you that things you can see and feel like snow are more real than things like global warming, which must be abstract and thus vague. But global warming turns this false immediacy inside out. Global warming is far more real, while things like weather—things that appear to be immediate in our experience—are actually the abstractions! Local weather is a kind of snapshot of larger processes, a snapshot that's pretty much out of date by the time you notice it.

-Timothy Mortin, from his blog, The Contemporary Condition

In this post Mortin is talking about "hyperobjects." In short these are things which are too large to be comprehended by people (such as nuclear bombs and climate change). The prefix is shared with hyperreal, and I wonder if he would make the argument that these two are related. He does say that hyperobjects are "real" and maybe the case could be made that they can be seen as "real" because we don't have a way of fully understanding them - we don't have a way to bring them into full semiotic view. (But, we do give it a name, so it is in our linguistic bag.) This is a big stretch, but it is interesting to think of "things that appear to be immediate in our experience" as abstractions, and these abstractions as simulation. (e.g., the polar bear stranded on an ice-berg or the parched earth.)

Confidence & An Inconvenient Truth

"Awareness of our highly destructive pollution levels has been key to our becoming more environmentally responsible. When Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary on climate change (appropriately named An Inconvenient Truth) was released, it alerted millions of people to a potential man-made catastrophe - global warming. The message was quite apocalyptic, yet it helped create a positive change in people's attitudes toward the environment, increasing recycling and decreasing pollution.

So the truth is often painful, but less painful than ignoring it. It may seem preferable in the short term to be overconfident (whether that relates to phenomena such as health and global warming or to our own abilities), but ultimately, being aware of our own limitations - and, in particular, our defects - can help us reverse and combat their effects."
- from Confidence, by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Richard Nonas & emotional objects

"Language and culture are tools to take a complicated world and make it understandable, break it up and categorize it, understand it. But there are things language can't say easily that I feel the need to say. So in every culture we find that there are built-in escape valves: religion on one hand, art on the other. The production of art, in my mind, thinking as an anthropologist, is a way of saying the things that can't be said directly, or evoking the complex emotion between the named emotions, or combinations of the named emotions that themselves don't have names. Perceptions and emotions, those are categories that need to be broken into, or skewed, and art is an acceptable way to do it, a way that you are not punished for. The only visual art that interests me is the art that is conveying something that it would not be able to convey directly with words."

When was the first time you had the impulse to create an object that conveyed something without words?
"Before I worked in Mexico, I was in north Canada. I brought back a sled dog. And I found myself picking up pieces of wood for him to play with. One day I picked up two pieces of wood, and there was real emotion there, and not story, no narrative, no reason for that emotion. I could describe the emotion, not in a single word, but there was real emotion. Not fake, not conceptual. But it was just two sticks. I thought, Wow, maybe it's possible to communicate abstract ideas directly with objects, in a way you can't with words. I got really excited, trying and making things, but I never thought about art. Then, two or three months later, a friend of a friend came to my apartment and said, 'You idiot, it's called sculpture!'"
- from a Scott Indrisek interview with Richard Nonas for Modern Painters, September 2014

Richard Nonas - installation view of Between Old Times: Sculpture for a Changing Castle-for Bronilow Malinowski (birch logs, each three fee long) 1991

Race and Apocalypse: Two Scenarios

Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz and a still from Zombie Flesh Eater

The following is a excerpt from page 231 (of 259 total) of Colson Whitehead's book, Zone One. In this book a plague that turns humans into zombies has taken over the globe. The zombies are referred to in the book as stragglers (who are undead, but don't move) or skels/skeletons (zombies who move, bite, and spread the virus). The dialog here is between two characters (Mark Spitz and Gary) who are clearing any left-over skels or stragglers in a "Zone" of Manhattan. Gary has just been bitten and subsequently given a large dosage of pills and morphine. Mark Spitz is keeping him conscious by re-telling the story of his nickname.

... People were becoming less than people everywhere, he had thought: monsters, soup.
     Seven Gold metals? Eight? Here was one of the subordinate ironies in the nickname: He was anything but an Olympian. The medals awarded to Mark Spitz were stamped from discarded slang. Mark Spitz explained the reference of his sobriquet to Gary, adding, "Plus the black-people-can't-swim thing."
     "They can't? You can't?"
     "I can. A lot of us can. Could. It's a stereotype."
     "I hadn't heard that. But you have to learn how to swim some-time."
     "I tread water perfectly."
     He found it unlikely that Gary was not in ownership of a master list of racial, gender, and religious stereotypes, cross-indexed with corresponding punch lines as well as meta-textual dissection of those punch lines, but he did not press his friend. Chalk it up to morphine. There was a single Us now, reviling a single Them. Would the old bigotries be reborn as well, when they cleared out this Zone, and the next, and so on, and they were packed together again, tight and suffocating on top of each other? Or was that particular bramble of animosities, fears, and envies impossible to recreate? If they could bring back paperwork, Mark Spitz thought, they could certainly reanimate prejudice, parking tickets, and reruns.
     There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.

This is the first mention of race, or racism, in the book.

- - - - -

And, this text is lifted from a post (by user JIR) on SurvivalBlog.com. It addresses the idea of the "unwashed masses", otherwise known as the Golden Hoard, who will flow from urban centers en-masse once the apocalypse strikes and modern amenities (food distribution, electricity, waste management, etc) are cut-off. "Originally the Golden Horde referred to the Mongol Armies of the 13th century that conquered territories from Northeast Asia to Eastern Europe to Siberia to the Black Sea. They eventually controlled over 2.3 million square miles. They were known for vicious raids and sometimes complete massacres of civilian populations." (Preppingtosurvive.com)

I agree completely with you on relocation to safer areas and stocking a remote retreat in the hinter-boonies. That’s the optimum solution and in worst case situations, it’s really the only solution likely to work long term. Any of your readers stuck in less than optimum situations are going to make a valiant effort to survive, but their odds are not as good. I am one of these folks. I worry about the golden hoard more than anything else. I would like to pass on some thoughts on the subject of what the unwashed masses will be doing after TEOTWAWKI [The End of the World as we Know It].

This quote doesn't overtly address race, but it does attend to prejudices of urban versus rural peoples. And, as Mark Dery (author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams) has pointed out, descriptive terms for people, such as hoard, "sheeple", unwashed masses, Mongols, and urban, used on these blogs by mostly white and male survivalists point in the direction of discrimination against the other.

- - - - -

When I had my on-campus interview at Rollins College I met with a couple representatives from the Diversity Committee. The asked me about how diversity played into my pedagogy, which was no problem for me, but I didn't have any answer for how diversity was addressed in my research and artwork. To paraphrase, one of the interviewers said that not only white people are effected by climate change and/or the possible "EOTWAWKI". 

These two apocalyptic scenarios, one fictional and one anticipated, paint different pictures of what race dynamics post-disaster could mean for humanity. In one racial tensions seem to have subsided in the face of "the end". In the other, people seem to be planning an impending scourge of urban flight. This is a topic I will explore more for my work. 

- - - - -

from page 72 of World War Z, by Max Brooks

- - - - -

cursed crew from Pirates of the Caribbean, under water and moonlight

- - - - -

underwater zombie from Shock Waves

Deluge (sunset over the ocean)

"We are looking upon the utmost finality which can be written, glimpsing the darkness which will not know another ray of light. We are in touch with the reality of extinction."

- Henry Beetle Hough,1932. Writing about the extinction of the Heath Hen for the Vineyard Gazette

when it rains it pours

Hunger Games billboard on the green line Morgan St. CTA platform

* * * * *

Smoke

Hummingbirds make explosions in the dying white flowers—not only the white flowers are dying but old women are falling from branches everywhere—in smoking pits outside the city, other dead things, too, are burning—and what can be done? Few people know. Dogs have been lost in more than one place, and their owners do not love the Countryside anymore. No—old women have fallen and lie with their cancerous cheeks among the roots of oak trees. Everywhere, everywhere. And the earth is sprouting things we do not dare look at. And the smoking pits have consumed other unnamable things, things we are glad to see go. The smoke, tall and thick as mountains, makes our landscape. There are no more mountains. Long ago they were gone, not even in the memory of our grandfathers. The cloud, low over our heads, is our sky. It has been a long age since anyone saw a sky, saw anything blue. The fog is our velvet, our armchair, our bed. The trees are purple in it. The candles of flowers are out now. The fog is soft, it has no claws, not yet. Our grandmothers’ purple teeth crave. They crave things we would not even recognize anymore, though our grandmothers remember—they cry out at a bridge. Too many things to name are gone and we are left with this clowning earth, these cynical trees— shadows, all, of themselves. And we, too, are beyond help. Some only are less cancerous than others, that is all, some have more left, of their bones, of their hair, of their organs. Who can find a way around the smoking pits, the greedy oaks? Who can find a path to take among the lost and dying dogs back to where the hummingbirds, though mad, still explode the flowers, flowers still though dying?

-Lydia Davis, from "Almost No Memory", 1997

* * * * *

11/27/13

too far silly

11/28/13

pot of gold

pennies stuck in the fencing of a CTA platform

11/30/13

"she was blond and ironed"

Reebok brand cross-fit tractor tire

Michelin\Reebok cross-fit shoe

-

loving what you do is not a reason to be paid less than what your labor is worth (!)

12/1/13

 "off the bone"

"... the clock answers my questions about the time very well..." (from Examples of Confusion by Lydia Davis)

the},r (Google drive image/text conversion error for Smoke)

 

parts of the murals in El Taco Veloz, Chicago

10/9-12/13

Jasper Johns - Corpse and Mirror II (oil on linen) 1974-75

10/9/13
"who are we at the whim of (whom?) whom hums the tune"
-from red doc>, by Anne Carson

10/12/13
"the moon tunes the tides"
-from a poetry reading at Current Gallery

the sun tunes the flowers
the woman tunes the guitar
the mechanic tunes the car
the stove tunes the omelette
the fleshlight tunes the cock
the season tunes the leaves (and the colds)
the paper-maker tunes the pulp
the combination tunes the lock
the light tunes the eyes
the sugar tunes the blood
the core tunes the crust
the tuna tunes the sandwich

10/12/13
"Night's bones are still forming"
from red doc>, by Anne Carson

where will we go after we ruin this planet?

A total of 723 confirmed extrasolar planets have been found since the first was spotted in 1995, according to a tally kept by the website http://exoplanets.org.

More than 3,000 sightings by the specialist Kepler orbital telescope await confirmation.

So far, no exoplanet spotted has the potential to be a home away from home; a rocky planet that orbits in a balmy zone, enabling water to exist in liquid form and thus nurture life as we know it.
-ndtv.com

Monster Theory

...America, a society that has created and commodified “ambient fear"-a kind of total fear that saturates day-to-day living, prodding and silently antagonizing but never speaking its own name. This anxiety manifests itself symptomatically as a cultural fascination with monsters-a fixation that is born of the twin desire to name that which is difficult to apprehend and to domesticate (and therefore disempower) that which threatens. And so the monster appears simultaneously as the demonic disemboweler of Slasher and as a wide-eyed, sickeningly cute plush toy for children: velociraptor and Barney.

Note from the author: Portions of this preface and of chapter 1, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” have twice been delivered as part of conference presentations. Invariably the audience giggles at the juxtaposition-so seemingly absurd-of the friendly mascot of PBS (Barney) and the equally but oppositely fictionalized dinosaur who thinks like a human and shreds flesh like the Alien (velociraptor). “That's not funny,” I chide them, knowing full well that it is; what anxiety, then, do we hide by the laughter? What does the dismissal by declaration of absurd mismatch allow us not to have to think about?

- from Monster Theory: Reading Culture, by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

all perishes

The fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
-Plato, "Apology," Dialogues, 399 B.C.

What is death at most? It is a journey for a season; a sleep longer than usual. If thou fearest death, thou shouldest also fear sleep.
-St. John Chrysostom, Homily, c. 388

When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.
-Peter (Ken Foree), "Dawn of the Dead," 1978

All perishes and passes that we see with our eyes. The wealth of this world wanes into wretchedness. Robes and riches rot in the ditch. . . . Their gold and their treasures draw them to death.
-Richard Role (c. 1300-1349), Selected Works of Richard Role

on bad art

"Bad art can be really disheartening. It means not having the self-awareness to challenge or question oneself, and worse, pretending that we’re developing an idea when there never was one."
-Whitney Kimball, 9/11/12, for Art Fag City

working method

"Not that my conviction protected me; it's always embarrassing to pin tail onto thin air, nowhere near the donkey. It might be wrong, it sure looks like it is - but the again, maybe the donkey's in the wrong place, or there are two donkeys, and the tail just got there first."
- Miranda July, from It Chooses You

done othewise

A text should be written, as Craig Dworkin postulates, not in terms of “whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.”
- from Lemon Hound

avacado love boats

It is an unspoken hunger we deflect with knives--one avocado between us, cut neatly in half, twisted then separated from the large wooden pit. With the green fleshy boats in hand, we slice vertical strips from one end to the other. Vegetable planks. We smother the avocado with salsa, hot chiles at noon in the desert. We look at each other and smile, eating avocados with sharp silver blades, risking the blood of our tongues repeatedly.
-Terry Tempest Williams, from An Unspoken Hunger

everything is on fire, slow fire

I'm talking about the individual US citizen's deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we've lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it's all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it's not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than "die," "pass away," the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday...

And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we're remembered, these'll last what -- a hundred years? two hundred? -- and they'll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I'm cremated the trees that are nourished by my windbown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, to only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1863, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to imagine, in fact, probably that's why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.

-David Foster Wallace, from The Pale King

uncreative writing

"In the event, [the UbuWeb conceptual poetry] collection happened to gather a particular kind of writing to make a secondary argument: some of the presumed hallmarks of poetry—the use of metaphor and imagery, a soigné edited craft, the sincere emotional expression of especially sensitive individuals—might be radically reconsidered, and poetry might be reclaimed as a venue for intellect rather than sentiment. Understanding writing to be more graphic than semantic, more a physically material event than a disembodied or transient medium for referential communication, the online anthology showcased works fundamentally opposed to ideologies of expression."
-Crag Dworkin, The Fate of the Echo, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, 2011. [via the essays, seen here]

"Infinite Jest" & "Eat, Pray Love"

"we will prepare ourselves to search for the sacred possibilities still alive in the modern world."
-from "All Things Shining" (Chapter 2: David Foster Wallace's Nihilism), by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly