Us, the Earth, and Things

Two recent reads.

Words are from the second--though they'd fit pretty well in either.

"I'm learning to embrace the idea of gardens that need us not to toil against weeds and bugs but rather as a part of the ecosystem, to hold the rudder and help steer nature in a direction of delightful abundance and elegant complexity." 181

"The yield of a system is theoretically unlimited.  The only limit on the number of uses of a resource possible within a system is in the limit of the information and the imagination of the designer." 202

And lastly, a lovely manifesto-of-sorts:

"We have a simple, creative life, full of family and friends, laughter and love, connected to the land and supported by meaningful work, with the time to appreciate it and experience it fully." 163

Words to live by. 

Francesco Clemente

Heavy and light, earth and sky and mind.

Arterial Images

I'm looking at these images for a body-inspired sound art installation I'm doing collaboratively in January.  These are images uterine arteries--but they happen to also look like a ton of other things.

Land! From Above!

More aerial imagery here!

Harrell Fletcher and Michael Rakowitz

One part of a series of artist to artist conversations, in book form.  These guys are art as social practice professors.

"Come Together" events: "I ask a set of people (sometimes ten, sometimes twenty or more) to each fine someone who does not see themselves as an artist but is knowledgeable about some topic and would be willing to discuss or demonstrate it publicly for ten minutes.  I organize it so that all of the presentations happen one after another...it really surprises the students to realiz that there are so many interesting people who go largely unnoticed around them all of the time." 22-3

"The notion that a sketchbook full of ideas is more important than the one you choose, or the collection of architectural models of buildings that were never built being more inspiring thanthe one that does, was an incredibly liberating notion..." 24

"I think there are undoubtedly people all over the world who have amazing "art" ideas but we never know about them because they aren't considered "artists" and don't have access to a means of producing and making the projects available to the public." 49

"I as an artist am raising questions about ethics, function and utility by submitting a project that simultaneously problem-solves and problem-makes." 54

"The residual idea exists as a pragmatic metaphor, a statement demanding a culture capable of enabling its existence, a poetic critique of reality." 67

"It might be impossible...to change the world, (but it is) possible to change the dinner conversation." 75

Omar Rodriguez Lopez

Had the great fortune of putting together some collaborative album art a few days ago, and this fellow came across the radar as inspiration for that, and a new dream project that's germinating.

Textiles, Maps, and Microbes

Looking at Leah Evans' artwork, an interesting juxtaposition of micro and macro, natural and man-made, and also a beautiful aerial abstraction and textural medium that creates a magic that is purely decorative, purely pleasurable.

" I have decided that maps create more questions than they answer."

The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art

by Don Thompson

If I ever teach any sort of college class on more practical applications of art, this book would make the curriculum too.  It would be really interesting to do some kind of in-class re-creation of all these complexly interwoven interpersonal and economic relationships that create the strange animal that is the "art market".  Quite an eye opener.

Again much too complex to hone down into my typical entry.  This book delves into webs of different parties' competing and carefully balanced (though ever evolving) interests, strange stories of objects and people from an almost-foreign world--a different universe of value--and a number of densely math-y explanations for why these stories simultaneously make so much sense and none at all.  I have a feeling that what follows will do it no justice at all.

"Art tells you things you don't know you need to know until you know them." Peter Schjedahl, art critic 53

"Art is sexy! Art is money-sexy! Art is money-sexy-social-climbing-fantastic!" Thomas Hoving, former Director, Metropolitan Museum of Art 53

"When the auction hammer falls, price becomes equated with value, and this is written into art history." 178

"...the 'hidden cost of rewards.' The theory says that rewarding highly motivated persons to undertake a task actually reduces their intrinsic motivation.  It suggests that rewards related to output--for example, selling a painting--motivate more output, while subsidies that simply reward effort may decrease output." 181 ...how Randian...

Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy

by Dave Hickey

Incidentally, one of the most densely packed things I've read in a while, and I'll probably be unpacking it for another while.  It's not one that I can easily break down into memorable sound bites--but on the other hand that probably affirms my initial thought that this may be the first book I've read that would make it into my theoretical post-secondary art syllabus.

On books, art, music: "In society, these objects were occasions for gossip--for the commerce of opinion where there is no truth.  In school, they were occasions for mastery where there is no truth--an even more dangerous proposition..." 14

"...what works of art might do in the world-how they might redeem isolation...by creating about them a confluence of simple hearts, a community united not in what they are--not in any cult of class, race, region, or ideology--but in the collective mystery of what they are not and now find embodied before them..." 30

"There is a vast and usually dialectical difference between that which we wish to see and that which we wish to see represented." 47-8

"...there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity." 50

On democracy: Hickey relates a typical story of a friend visiting his Las Vegas home, commenting on how much more "authentically" beautiful the natural sunset is than the artificial neon lighting of the strip.  "The genuine rhinestone or...the imitation pearl".  He counters with the idea that if Vegas is artificial, then at least it is an artificiality with no artifice--a place where money is just money, with no undercurrent of accrued wealth commensurate to time it's been owned, no correlation with status.  Each person's money is no more than money when facing the odds at the machines.  This is particularly interesting to read after doing some research into fine art auctions, situations which in some ways mimic a casino. 52

On psychedelic art, language, and the reactionary: "So in general, we might say that these anti-academic styles prioritize complexity over simplicity, pattern over form, repetition over composition, feminine over masculine, curvilinear over rectilinear, and the fractal, the differential, and the chaotic over Euclidean order.  They celebrate the idea of space over the idea of volume, the space before the object over the volume within it.  They elevate concepts of externalized consciousness over constructions of the alienated, interior self.  They are literally and figuratively "outside" styles. ...(but) for all their pretense of rebellion, these styles are only truly rebellious in their ebullient, pop-psychedelic appropriation." 94

"...it always seemed as if language were a tablecloth positioned neatly upon the table of phenomenal nature until some celestial busboy suddenly shook it out, fluttering and floating it, and letting it fall back upon the world in not quite the same position as before--thereby giving me a vertiginous glimpse into the abyss that divides the world from our knowing of it." 95  .,..and how art (particularly in his opinion, psychedelic art) can serve as an "incandescent bridge", making something out of this nothing, filling it with possibility.

"The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and excited." 101  On the importance of human imperfection

"I have always associated the desire to make money with a profound lack of confidence in one's ability to make a living."  106

"When you trade a piece of green paper with a picture on it, signed by a bureaucrat, for a piece of white paper with a picture on it, signed by an artist, you haven't bought anything, since neither piece of paper is worth anything.  You have translated your investment and your faith from one universe of value to another." 109

On Jackson Pollock and when drip painting went from being "okay" to being mandatory (in certain circles/schools), and the evolution of art as compared to that of basketball: "Henceforth it has always seemed to me that the tick of civilization lies in recognizing the moment when a rule ceases to liberate and begins to govern." 157

"Thus, in modern painting, our comfort level with illusion is always a matter of how exquisitely we delay the illusion's taking hold..." 186

On the danger of assigning any moral value to art: "The sports world conducts and ongoing referendum on the manner in which we should cooperate and compete.  The art world conducts an ongoing referendum on how things should look and the way we should look at things-or it would, if art were regarded as sports are, as a wasteful, privileged endeavor through which very serious issues are sorted out." 204

"If you catch their eye, their hearts and minds will follow" 209

Bird by Bird

By Anne Lamott

"We need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here." 32

"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor." 93

"There is ecstasy in paying attention" 100

"Perhaps we have the same problem with the word solution as we do with the word moral.  It sounds so fixative, and maybe we have gone beyond fixing.  Maybe all we can do is make our remaining time here full of gentleness and good humor." 107

"Sometimes I go about pitying myself.  And all the while I am being carried on great winds across the sky" 127

"I get up.  I walk. I fall down.  Meanwhile, I keep dancing." 130