Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Coda 1
There will be three codas to the silence project, each trying to give more concrete examples to the previous posts. One will be the conversation at Bard, between myself, Nick Keys and Joan Retallack, which we are currently editing. One - hopefully - will be a conversation with the Slought foundation. Finally, the one now available is a summary of my thesis about Cage and technology at the end of the trip. This can be found here.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Copenhagen/Malmo
Last night Alexi Kukuljevic and I, as part of the Machete group, gave our lecture in Berlin, entitled, "A Grey Present? Pessimism, Culture and the Contemporary". The video of the event will be uploaded on-line here in a few days: http://vimeo.com/basedinberlin . The talk was mostly an allegory about based in berlin, but also, in a way, about the silence project.
An event had been discussed also last week for Signal gallery in Malmo, though time constraints made that impossible. It would have been a conversation about the videos by Cage available on ubuweb. As it was, the trip became for me a more personal haven to discuss ideas and reflect with friends about this and other projects. As such, this post will just be a short anecdote below. I leave tomorrow for Toronto, then down to Bard, where Nick Keys and I are planning a series of conversations about Cage over the course of four days, but it is still in planning stages.
----------------------------
At the Louisiana museum of modern art, an accompanied three or four year old enters a video screening by a well-known practitioner of relational aesthetics. The video seems to go on without a logic, and the child begins to ask when it will end. The father says he does not know; the video does not have a time. But the child notices that something else: the video is documenting a day, and the sky is getting darker. I bet it ends when night comes, says the child. His father does not respond. Indeed, when the last light in the town goes out, the screen goes black, and no image returns.
An event had been discussed also last week for Signal gallery in Malmo, though time constraints made that impossible. It would have been a conversation about the videos by Cage available on ubuweb. As it was, the trip became for me a more personal haven to discuss ideas and reflect with friends about this and other projects. As such, this post will just be a short anecdote below. I leave tomorrow for Toronto, then down to Bard, where Nick Keys and I are planning a series of conversations about Cage over the course of four days, but it is still in planning stages.
----------------------------
At the Louisiana museum of modern art, an accompanied three or four year old enters a video screening by a well-known practitioner of relational aesthetics. The video seems to go on without a logic, and the child begins to ask when it will end. The father says he does not know; the video does not have a time. But the child notices that something else: the video is documenting a day, and the sky is getting darker. I bet it ends when night comes, says the child. His father does not respond. Indeed, when the last light in the town goes out, the screen goes black, and no image returns.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
based in Berlin
Today ends the first part of my trip to Berlin as I leave for a short trip to Copenhagen tomorrow. A lot my time here has been spent around the show "based in Berlin," a somewhat controversial showcase of young artists from around the world who live work in Berlin. (Already when I told someone in Maastricht that I would be participating in the show as a speaker I was harangued at length!) The show is, unambiguously, part of the political campaign of Berlin's social democrat mayor. It was originally conceived of as an "achievement" show and permanent art space, though the curators re-routed this towards a focus on emerging artists, fees for work and projects, and the use of already-existing structures. A standard critique of the show takes exception to its excess (there is already a Berlin Bieniale), its purpose (the political campaign), and to the question of resources (wasn't there something better to do with 1.6million Euros for the arts?).
A lot of what I have been thinking about with Cage is the question of artist communities, and how Cage's work built and grew through his participation in such communities (from Cornish to Black Mountain to the New School, etc.). While there is much worth criticizing in based in Berlin (and a lot of not very good art), the question of community perhaps opens up some other thoughts about it. For one, its very conception is about a city where art and creative thinking in general flourishes because its central location, cheap rent, and post 89 romantic allure have made it a gathering place for producers and thinkers the world over. But the show has also interestingly expanded the art community here. While important collectives have boycotted the show for good reasons, they have also lost the opportunity to engage with the broader public: most of the people one sees at based in Berlin are less art world insiders that curious onlookers (including a surprising number of young children). Of course, at the same time, the turn to look at community does not obviate the problems of the show, or the idea of community itself. Although Berlin a city with an ever-increasing Turkish population, for example, one sees very few Turks at the gallery spaces of based in Berlin. But the negative aspects of the show are also some of its most intriguing: for example being forced to consider the often-implicit ways in which funding for the arts drives even the most radical organizations. The explicit hand of the mayor here may force self-critical artists to reckon with the invisible hand that participates in their own work.
When I am asked about participating in the show, I usually tell people it is somewhat allegorical. For one, I won't be speaking about Cage directly, but will be bringing up a number of the themes invoked on the blog. I also won't be speaking directly about the issues above (actually I'll be speaking about Pieter Brueghel's The Triumph of Death), but they will all be present. In a way, as well, I will be speaking about the questions of new media that have been guiding us here, and how communities are still shaped by spaces regardless of technological innovation. The following of this blog is small, but probably no smaller than the number of people who read your standard unpublished dissertation. new forms of technology won't change who an academic audience is, but it may enable the types of creative contacts that once only happened among people based in the same city. Then again, if we do only manage to reach out to those already in the conversation, no matter how much it helps our thought grow, the question of the effects beyond that conversation (what Bertolt Brecht called the cunning to spread the truth) remains undecided
A lot of what I have been thinking about with Cage is the question of artist communities, and how Cage's work built and grew through his participation in such communities (from Cornish to Black Mountain to the New School, etc.). While there is much worth criticizing in based in Berlin (and a lot of not very good art), the question of community perhaps opens up some other thoughts about it. For one, its very conception is about a city where art and creative thinking in general flourishes because its central location, cheap rent, and post 89 romantic allure have made it a gathering place for producers and thinkers the world over. But the show has also interestingly expanded the art community here. While important collectives have boycotted the show for good reasons, they have also lost the opportunity to engage with the broader public: most of the people one sees at based in Berlin are less art world insiders that curious onlookers (including a surprising number of young children). Of course, at the same time, the turn to look at community does not obviate the problems of the show, or the idea of community itself. Although Berlin a city with an ever-increasing Turkish population, for example, one sees very few Turks at the gallery spaces of based in Berlin. But the negative aspects of the show are also some of its most intriguing: for example being forced to consider the often-implicit ways in which funding for the arts drives even the most radical organizations. The explicit hand of the mayor here may force self-critical artists to reckon with the invisible hand that participates in their own work.
When I am asked about participating in the show, I usually tell people it is somewhat allegorical. For one, I won't be speaking about Cage directly, but will be bringing up a number of the themes invoked on the blog. I also won't be speaking directly about the issues above (actually I'll be speaking about Pieter Brueghel's The Triumph of Death), but they will all be present. In a way, as well, I will be speaking about the questions of new media that have been guiding us here, and how communities are still shaped by spaces regardless of technological innovation. The following of this blog is small, but probably no smaller than the number of people who read your standard unpublished dissertation. new forms of technology won't change who an academic audience is, but it may enable the types of creative contacts that once only happened among people based in the same city. Then again, if we do only manage to reach out to those already in the conversation, no matter how much it helps our thought grow, the question of the effects beyond that conversation (what Bertolt Brecht called the cunning to spread the truth) remains undecided
Friday, June 10, 2011
In his critique of Cage, Theodor Adorno wrote:
The risk I am alluding to manifests itself in what I have heretically termed the loss of tension. The real social emasculation of the individual, which everyone feels, does not leave the artist unscathed. It is scarcely imaginable that in an age when the individual is so
diminished and is conscious of his impotence and apathy, he should feel the
same compulsion to produce as did individuals in more heroic epochs. Given the
anthropology of the present age, the call for a non-revisionist music is to
expect too much. Composers tend to react to it by renouncing any control of
their music by their ego. They prefer to drift and to refrain from intervening,
in the hope that, as in Cage's bon mot, it will be not Webern speaking, but the music itself. Their aim is to transform psychological ego weakness into aesthetic strength.
To give some context, we should note that at the time Adorno was deeply interested in what he called the 'authoritarian personality'. Like many thinkers of the time he was engaged with trying to understand how so many people could blindly follow such a malignant leader as Hitler. Borrowing some insights from American behavioral sciences (he was living in LA at the time) and a framework from Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Adorno argued that the objective conditions of contemporary society had so withered the ego that the ordinary individual was led in to the authoritian personality - that is, replacing his own lost ego with the mass ego solidified under one leader.
Adorno seems to have seen Cage failing to resist at this moment, and rather merely transforming the given problem into a supposed aesthetic, without registering the dangers there. My argument throughout is that this kind of critique of Cage fails to register the transformative aspect of his project - in a sense like criticizing a caterpillar for not being able to fly.
So, then, what is this transformation, what is the technological production of global transparency? In his work on Cage, art historian Branden Joseph has argued, quite persuasively, that Cage was influenced by the notion of transparency in Laslo Moholy-Nagy's New Vision. This transparency comes mostly from sculpture and architecture (think Mies van der Rohe or Duchamp's Nude Descending a Stair Case) where the artwork is not entirely separate from the world around it. It is transparent in the sense that, as Cage wrote of Duchamp, it does not force attention to one point or another, but rather allows it move around the various nodes of the sculpture, and even to look through it to the world beyond. The point is not that things become completely transparent, some absolute monism, some God's eye view of everything, but rather that determination of vision gives way to an openness of vision.
There is perhaps another way to think about Cage's notion of transparency, and this comes from Suzuki's Zen and Japanese Culture (which unfortunately I don't have with me, nor can I find a searchable copy on-line). Suzuki there makes the point that both immanence and transcendence have misconceived the subject-object relation, since in both there is either a subject immanent to a world, or transcendent of a world, but in neither cause is there what he calls a transparency between subject and object. This would mean something like what Cage meant about Duchamp's painting - its not that the painting isn't there, or the subject, or the world. Nor is it that all three have specific meanings and determinations that connect. Rather, it would point to the possibility that each of these things could interact in an achieved freedom - that is, by working on one's self(via practices of anonymity, precision, chance)to a space where you could freely interact with objects.
Of course this does sound much lighter than the heavy-hand of Adorno, and we risk a facile old distinction between mysticism and rationality. In discarding terms like immanence and transcendence, it seems Suzuki is interested in getting out of these problems. And he is not trying to do so, explicitly he says this in various texts, in the Hegelian fashion of combining the oppositions and raising them to a higher level. To the contrary, he is trying to dissolve the very oppositions themselves - this also is the work of transparency.
In a famous anecdote from Silence, Cage writes about Suzuki's lecture where he flies all the way from Japan to try to explain a word in Chinese that he cannot in fact explain - and how this is, in a way, the point. We could see here a kind of dull mysticism, but the context of the anecdote is elsewhere. Plane travel is what is key here, and the fact of Suzuki's movements across space and time, the fact of the technological production of new modes of transparency. In the anecdote, this global openness does not mean that things become clear. Rather, it means that we see what is not clear, and learn to work with that.
The risk I am alluding to manifests itself in what I have heretically termed the loss of tension. The real social emasculation of the individual, which everyone feels, does not leave the artist unscathed. It is scarcely imaginable that in an age when the individual is so
diminished and is conscious of his impotence and apathy, he should feel the
same compulsion to produce as did individuals in more heroic epochs. Given the
anthropology of the present age, the call for a non-revisionist music is to
expect too much. Composers tend to react to it by renouncing any control of
their music by their ego. They prefer to drift and to refrain from intervening,
in the hope that, as in Cage's bon mot, it will be not Webern speaking, but the music itself. Their aim is to transform psychological ego weakness into aesthetic strength.
To give some context, we should note that at the time Adorno was deeply interested in what he called the 'authoritarian personality'. Like many thinkers of the time he was engaged with trying to understand how so many people could blindly follow such a malignant leader as Hitler. Borrowing some insights from American behavioral sciences (he was living in LA at the time) and a framework from Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Adorno argued that the objective conditions of contemporary society had so withered the ego that the ordinary individual was led in to the authoritian personality - that is, replacing his own lost ego with the mass ego solidified under one leader.
Adorno seems to have seen Cage failing to resist at this moment, and rather merely transforming the given problem into a supposed aesthetic, without registering the dangers there. My argument throughout is that this kind of critique of Cage fails to register the transformative aspect of his project - in a sense like criticizing a caterpillar for not being able to fly.
So, then, what is this transformation, what is the technological production of global transparency? In his work on Cage, art historian Branden Joseph has argued, quite persuasively, that Cage was influenced by the notion of transparency in Laslo Moholy-Nagy's New Vision. This transparency comes mostly from sculpture and architecture (think Mies van der Rohe or Duchamp's Nude Descending a Stair Case) where the artwork is not entirely separate from the world around it. It is transparent in the sense that, as Cage wrote of Duchamp, it does not force attention to one point or another, but rather allows it move around the various nodes of the sculpture, and even to look through it to the world beyond. The point is not that things become completely transparent, some absolute monism, some God's eye view of everything, but rather that determination of vision gives way to an openness of vision.
There is perhaps another way to think about Cage's notion of transparency, and this comes from Suzuki's Zen and Japanese Culture (which unfortunately I don't have with me, nor can I find a searchable copy on-line). Suzuki there makes the point that both immanence and transcendence have misconceived the subject-object relation, since in both there is either a subject immanent to a world, or transcendent of a world, but in neither cause is there what he calls a transparency between subject and object. This would mean something like what Cage meant about Duchamp's painting - its not that the painting isn't there, or the subject, or the world. Nor is it that all three have specific meanings and determinations that connect. Rather, it would point to the possibility that each of these things could interact in an achieved freedom - that is, by working on one's self(via practices of anonymity, precision, chance)to a space where you could freely interact with objects.
Of course this does sound much lighter than the heavy-hand of Adorno, and we risk a facile old distinction between mysticism and rationality. In discarding terms like immanence and transcendence, it seems Suzuki is interested in getting out of these problems. And he is not trying to do so, explicitly he says this in various texts, in the Hegelian fashion of combining the oppositions and raising them to a higher level. To the contrary, he is trying to dissolve the very oppositions themselves - this also is the work of transparency.
In a famous anecdote from Silence, Cage writes about Suzuki's lecture where he flies all the way from Japan to try to explain a word in Chinese that he cannot in fact explain - and how this is, in a way, the point. We could see here a kind of dull mysticism, but the context of the anecdote is elsewhere. Plane travel is what is key here, and the fact of Suzuki's movements across space and time, the fact of the technological production of new modes of transparency. In the anecdote, this global openness does not mean that things become clear. Rather, it means that we see what is not clear, and learn to work with that.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Berlin
Also in A Year from Monday, Cage speaks of a wireless world. It was part of the utopian planning coming out of Cage's engagement with Buckminster Fuller, starting in 1948 when they were both instructors at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Fuller, a former government employee, inventor of the geodesic dome (think Epcot), had a little revival a few years back as part of architectural dreams for effective city planning - long since abandoned after various modernist failures. Fuller's head seems back on the block these days, considering for example Adam Curtis' most recent BBC documentary, 'All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace'. Fuller failed, like the dreams of a networked, ecological society Curtis is critiquing, because they failed to take account of power. Linking alternative community movements who built geodesic domes to leaderless uprisings in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine, Curtis detects the same failure: the belief that power and politics can be removed, and humans can spontaneously self-organize like machines.
This is certainly false, but its not clear what Curtis' solution is. At one point in the film, he appeals vaguely to the Enlightenment separation of 'man' from nature - and the insistence that only by this abstraction can critique and intervention occur (in terms of critiques of ecology, he is not too far from Slavoj Zizek). When I watched the film at Jan van Eyck, the question came up about Cage's involvement with Fuller, and if the critique was applicable to him. Certainly to the extent that he does not accept the abstraction/intervention solution model. But nor does he accept this vision of an ecology without politics or concern for power. D.T. Suzuki, a Japanese philosopher/cultural figure whose relationship to Cage is my broader interest, argues that Zen should never be confused with naturalism or spontaneity. For Suzuki, spontaneity is earned, not given. One does not exist in a cycle of abstractions and always-too-late-interventions. Rather, one is embedded in the present in such a way as to change it through perpetual engagement and self-improvement.
The question is, can there be a combination of a thinking of power and politics with this ethic of earned spontaneity. In this way, we would never fall back an impractical models of critique, nor get so lost in an immediate present as to fail to organize properly. For Cage, this question is always tied to a thinking of technology, and here at least Curtis would seem to agree. We are not machines, but our lives are connected to them, mediated by them, to a degree controlled by them. Though limited, Cage's idea that technological production - engagement with contemporary media - can be woven into projects is a potential starting point. It would not claim that technology is one thing or another, but that it is essentially indeterminate, and its indeterminacy is the task of the human to work through. (My starting thesis for this project was that such production would lead to 'global transparency'. A definition of this will be a future post.) For now, the point would only be that we should not throw the baby out with the bath water - ecology, networks, etc. are neither the human, nor what the human is opposed to.
In 'The Century', Alain Badiou defines the manifesto (I am citing from memory), as that which attempts to name that which has no name in the present. In giving it a name, it opens up a possible thinking of what needs to be done. The friend I am staying with was telling me today about Martin Kippinberger's Metro-Net, a linked global system of subways, for which he began to make entrances leading nowhere. My host has made a few as well. Like most utopic projects, they name a future, attempt to create a future, that has no real basis in the present. But in so doing perhaps they help create the resources for its coming into being (perhaps also a link here with Terminator and Terminator 2 - the arm from the future that allows the robots to be built).
After a few days without internet here in Berlin, using some friendly advice, a youtube video, an exacto knife, a kitchen knife, a German translator and some luck, the city of Berlin is now wireless for me as Cage would have wished. Though it is certainly not so for everyone. And they are saying again that phones cause cancer and the waves are bad for the bees. Still, to transform Cage's dream seems more important now than merely abandoning it.
This is certainly false, but its not clear what Curtis' solution is. At one point in the film, he appeals vaguely to the Enlightenment separation of 'man' from nature - and the insistence that only by this abstraction can critique and intervention occur (in terms of critiques of ecology, he is not too far from Slavoj Zizek). When I watched the film at Jan van Eyck, the question came up about Cage's involvement with Fuller, and if the critique was applicable to him. Certainly to the extent that he does not accept the abstraction/intervention solution model. But nor does he accept this vision of an ecology without politics or concern for power. D.T. Suzuki, a Japanese philosopher/cultural figure whose relationship to Cage is my broader interest, argues that Zen should never be confused with naturalism or spontaneity. For Suzuki, spontaneity is earned, not given. One does not exist in a cycle of abstractions and always-too-late-interventions. Rather, one is embedded in the present in such a way as to change it through perpetual engagement and self-improvement.
The question is, can there be a combination of a thinking of power and politics with this ethic of earned spontaneity. In this way, we would never fall back an impractical models of critique, nor get so lost in an immediate present as to fail to organize properly. For Cage, this question is always tied to a thinking of technology, and here at least Curtis would seem to agree. We are not machines, but our lives are connected to them, mediated by them, to a degree controlled by them. Though limited, Cage's idea that technological production - engagement with contemporary media - can be woven into projects is a potential starting point. It would not claim that technology is one thing or another, but that it is essentially indeterminate, and its indeterminacy is the task of the human to work through. (My starting thesis for this project was that such production would lead to 'global transparency'. A definition of this will be a future post.) For now, the point would only be that we should not throw the baby out with the bath water - ecology, networks, etc. are neither the human, nor what the human is opposed to.
In 'The Century', Alain Badiou defines the manifesto (I am citing from memory), as that which attempts to name that which has no name in the present. In giving it a name, it opens up a possible thinking of what needs to be done. The friend I am staying with was telling me today about Martin Kippinberger's Metro-Net, a linked global system of subways, for which he began to make entrances leading nowhere. My host has made a few as well. Like most utopic projects, they name a future, attempt to create a future, that has no real basis in the present. But in so doing perhaps they help create the resources for its coming into being (perhaps also a link here with Terminator and Terminator 2 - the arm from the future that allows the robots to be built).
After a few days without internet here in Berlin, using some friendly advice, a youtube video, an exacto knife, a kitchen knife, a German translator and some luck, the city of Berlin is now wireless for me as Cage would have wished. Though it is certainly not so for everyone. And they are saying again that phones cause cancer and the waves are bad for the bees. Still, to transform Cage's dream seems more important now than merely abandoning it.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Jan van Eyck Academie
The first event in the project took place here in Maastricht on Sunday night. A link to the audio recording can be found here.
The event raised more questions than it answered. I began by discussing the question of the lecture format, and its relationship to determination. Cage was opposed to determinate structures, which he called "inhuman." Determinism in his sense meant anything that was not open to "no matter what eventuality," that is, anything that demanded a movement from point a to point be in a specific pattern. The lecture I was focusing on, "Indeterminacy," from "Composition as Process," begins with the grammatically ambiguous phrase, "This is a lecture on composition which is indeterminate with respect to its performance," that is, again, that the composition does not demand a teleology, but rather lets itself unfold through chance. (This is not, as I will be discussing in the future, simply haphazard, but is a very precise practice for Cage. See the anonymously published thoughts on precision in this issue of Machete for a theoretical exposition, which is close to but not entirely the same as Cage's practice.)
If we look closely at this sentence which begins Cage's lecture, we notice a grammatical ambiguity. Does the "which" modify the lecture, or other "composition(s)"? In other words, is Cage's lecture itself indeterminate, or is he discussing other indeterminate compositions? It becomes clear once we start reading that the latter is the case, but it is also clear from a note that Cage wants to critique himself for the lecture itself not being indeterminate. A note before the lecture reads, "The excessively small type [indeed it is! (see link to Cage's articles below)] in the following pages is an attempt to emphasize the intentionally pontifical character of this lecture . But it is exactly such determining sovereign figures as the Pope, the dictator and the composer that Cage is trying to free us from with indeterminacy. The lecture as a determinate event therefore goes against this very aim.
After beginning my lecture with these thoughts, I asked to audience to feel free to interrupt me, or ask questions, or engage in some dialogue. But I also noted Cage's own problem - that I was still trying to impart some specific information. And, like lecture at this moment in his career, my lecture remained pontifical. Later on, Cage would give less specific lectures and rely mostly on assemblages of quotes or anecdotes rather than specific information. The How to Get Started project (see below) is also about such concerns. I am still looking for my own method here, and this talk remained pontifical.
The other attempt I made was to speak from notes, and not from a pre-written paper. I worry that in so doing I may have not fully explained certain terms. What has been nice in the past few days is the opportunity to have conversations with people after the lecture, where we have discussed quite a bit about precision, compassion, critique, transparency, and the subject. Thoughts on these topics will follow on the blog over the next few days. And, in a nice way, this slightly abstract first lecture, conjoined with the blog, will allow for a kind of unfolding of ideas for which the first audio recording is just the beginning.
One anecdote:
I met a psychoanalyst yesterday who told me I should do less. At least one day a week to do nothing, he said. I asked him if writing about people who wrote about doing nothing (Cage, Suzuki) counted? He laughed.
The event raised more questions than it answered. I began by discussing the question of the lecture format, and its relationship to determination. Cage was opposed to determinate structures, which he called "inhuman." Determinism in his sense meant anything that was not open to "no matter what eventuality," that is, anything that demanded a movement from point a to point be in a specific pattern. The lecture I was focusing on, "Indeterminacy," from "Composition as Process," begins with the grammatically ambiguous phrase, "This is a lecture on composition which is indeterminate with respect to its performance," that is, again, that the composition does not demand a teleology, but rather lets itself unfold through chance. (This is not, as I will be discussing in the future, simply haphazard, but is a very precise practice for Cage. See the anonymously published thoughts on precision in this issue of Machete for a theoretical exposition, which is close to but not entirely the same as Cage's practice.)
If we look closely at this sentence which begins Cage's lecture, we notice a grammatical ambiguity. Does the "which" modify the lecture, or other "composition(s)"? In other words, is Cage's lecture itself indeterminate, or is he discussing other indeterminate compositions? It becomes clear once we start reading that the latter is the case, but it is also clear from a note that Cage wants to critique himself for the lecture itself not being indeterminate. A note before the lecture reads, "The excessively small type [indeed it is! (see link to Cage's articles below)] in the following pages is an attempt to emphasize the intentionally pontifical character of this lecture . But it is exactly such determining sovereign figures as the Pope, the dictator and the composer that Cage is trying to free us from with indeterminacy. The lecture as a determinate event therefore goes against this very aim.
After beginning my lecture with these thoughts, I asked to audience to feel free to interrupt me, or ask questions, or engage in some dialogue. But I also noted Cage's own problem - that I was still trying to impart some specific information. And, like lecture at this moment in his career, my lecture remained pontifical. Later on, Cage would give less specific lectures and rely mostly on assemblages of quotes or anecdotes rather than specific information. The How to Get Started project (see below) is also about such concerns. I am still looking for my own method here, and this talk remained pontifical.
The other attempt I made was to speak from notes, and not from a pre-written paper. I worry that in so doing I may have not fully explained certain terms. What has been nice in the past few days is the opportunity to have conversations with people after the lecture, where we have discussed quite a bit about precision, compassion, critique, transparency, and the subject. Thoughts on these topics will follow on the blog over the next few days. And, in a nice way, this slightly abstract first lecture, conjoined with the blog, will allow for a kind of unfolding of ideas for which the first audio recording is just the beginning.
One anecdote:
I met a psychoanalyst yesterday who told me I should do less. At least one day a week to do nothing, he said. I asked him if writing about people who wrote about doing nothing (Cage, Suzuki) counted? He laughed.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Arrival
Still without a method for anonymity, I will be using pronouns for now. Why anonymity? Cage writes in A Year from Monday:
"I have attempted briefly here to set forth a view of the arts which does not separate them from the rest of life, but rather confuses the difference between Art and Life, just as it diminishes the distinctions between space and time. Many of the ideas involved come from the Orient, particularly China and Japan. However, what with the printing press, the airplane, telegraphy, and nowadays Telstar, the distinctions between Occident and Orient are fast disappearing. We live in one world. Likewise the distinctions between self and other are being forgotten. Throughout the world people cooperate to effect an action. Hearing of anonymity, one can imagine the absence of competition."
Cage walks this constant line between a certain hoaky-ness and a clarity and depth of thought, and its sometimes hard to reconcile them. (Watch him on youtube here, for example.) But much of what I am interested in in this project is to take this idea of anonymity seriously. If you watch the youtube clip, it appears at first very random what he is doing. But it is important throughout to remember that Cage choose everything he did very specifically, to create what he called "no matter what eventuality," a way of freeing up the performance from determination and power. This will be a major focus of my talk tomorrow, which I will upload via sound cloud. I will discuss anonymity, its relationship to Silence, and to new media, throughout this blog, in my talks, and in the articles written for Machete.
Two anecdotes for now.
1. Very jet lagged, I heard a talk yesterday on "Where are the animals? Animality and relationality", which turned out to be about happiness. Insisting that happiness in English was too hoaky a word, the speaker used the German, glucklich. He argued that any search to become happy was bound to fail, since happiness was not the possession of any individual. Happiness is always exterior. I asked him after the talk if it was exterior, then where was it. Social democracy, he said. I started to reply but someone interrupted. My reply would have been that a distinction between happiness and social democracy is absolutely necessary. But thinking about it more, the two languages seem the more important point. The friend I am visiting here had a show once entitled, "Yes yes I am happy, aber glucklich ich bin nicht". That seems the crucial point - I am happy in the English sense of personal possession, but the glucklick of social justice is lacking.
2. A man tells me about a group of radicals in Amsterdam in the 80s - I forget their name now - and how he is writing a book about their work as architectural practice. Squatting is architecture, he says, and architecture needs to maintain its place as radical social formation. I ask him if he followed at all the upsurge of interest in Buckmisnter Fuller a few years ago - the return to utopian planning - and suggest that he is suggesting a very interesting model. Utopia from below, as it were. He doesn't reply; just tells me the two things he thinks are wrong with Fuller.
"I have attempted briefly here to set forth a view of the arts which does not separate them from the rest of life, but rather confuses the difference between Art and Life, just as it diminishes the distinctions between space and time. Many of the ideas involved come from the Orient, particularly China and Japan. However, what with the printing press, the airplane, telegraphy, and nowadays Telstar, the distinctions between Occident and Orient are fast disappearing. We live in one world. Likewise the distinctions between self and other are being forgotten. Throughout the world people cooperate to effect an action. Hearing of anonymity, one can imagine the absence of competition."
Cage walks this constant line between a certain hoaky-ness and a clarity and depth of thought, and its sometimes hard to reconcile them. (Watch him on youtube here, for example.) But much of what I am interested in in this project is to take this idea of anonymity seriously. If you watch the youtube clip, it appears at first very random what he is doing. But it is important throughout to remember that Cage choose everything he did very specifically, to create what he called "no matter what eventuality," a way of freeing up the performance from determination and power. This will be a major focus of my talk tomorrow, which I will upload via sound cloud. I will discuss anonymity, its relationship to Silence, and to new media, throughout this blog, in my talks, and in the articles written for Machete.
Two anecdotes for now.
1. Very jet lagged, I heard a talk yesterday on "Where are the animals? Animality and relationality", which turned out to be about happiness. Insisting that happiness in English was too hoaky a word, the speaker used the German, glucklich. He argued that any search to become happy was bound to fail, since happiness was not the possession of any individual. Happiness is always exterior. I asked him after the talk if it was exterior, then where was it. Social democracy, he said. I started to reply but someone interrupted. My reply would have been that a distinction between happiness and social democracy is absolutely necessary. But thinking about it more, the two languages seem the more important point. The friend I am visiting here had a show once entitled, "Yes yes I am happy, aber glucklich ich bin nicht". That seems the crucial point - I am happy in the English sense of personal possession, but the glucklick of social justice is lacking.
2. A man tells me about a group of radicals in Amsterdam in the 80s - I forget their name now - and how he is writing a book about their work as architectural practice. Squatting is architecture, he says, and architecture needs to maintain its place as radical social formation. I ask him if he followed at all the upsurge of interest in Buckmisnter Fuller a few years ago - the return to utopian planning - and suggest that he is suggesting a very interesting model. Utopia from below, as it were. He doesn't reply; just tells me the two things he thinks are wrong with Fuller.
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