Tacoma will never be a destination

Why Tacoma will never be a destination, TAKE ONE.

The City of Tacoma wants more than anything to get white upper-class residents from Seattle to move into its newly-renovated apartments and gentrified condominiums. In so doing, it realized that there is a vast hole in the city's culture and none of their traditional methods of beautification work. Or more accurately, the artists realize this. On a big wall in Portland I saw a large mural which said, "Art fills the void" with a big banana next to it. Art clean-up, homeless person eradication, racial profiling, and building pointless highways have gotten the City of Tacoma nowhere. No one wants to put their feet on the street, if that was ever the goal, and the city is even shittier because now there's more condos and cops and very few small business districts.

Even though they hire professionals from Community Development Corporations and consultants to tell them where they got it wrong, the city cannot do a damn thing to get its house in order. They should have listened to the consultant Lars Gemzoe who came all the way from Copenhagen to say that pedestrians (not to mention bicyclists) in Tacoma are obviously "invisible in the planning process" and that "people, life, and vitality are the biggest attractions of a city." But instead of hearing out the wisdom from that successful public art architect, the city council and mayor seem to take their advice from successful fascist mayors like Rudy Guliani and bankers who think they can be like the Medici family - moneymen of the Italian Renaissance - by only funding "high art" for the rich and famous.

"People, life, and vitality" are the biggest reasons why most people even want to travel at all, or get out of the house, or explore new cities. I was excited to go to San Francisco again last week because of the people, life, and vitality there. Nobody complains that the weeds are overgrown in Golden Gate Park. In fact, the vegetation is half the charm. My friend and I ooed & awed at the overgrown brushes and trees and envied their verdant walkabouts. The ganjaweed dealers deal out in the open and the cops don't seem to be needed at all. Adults must be "accompanied by children" in order to step foot on the kids' playground. The kids know best. People from all over the city come to the park to enjoy the day.

Tacoma's parks, sadly, are like golf courses. If that's the case who would want to come out of their offices for their lunch break? This weekend for our antiwar march, the city would not allow the Food Not Bombs group to cook food in the park. We either had to have a business license or $1,000,000 in insurance to do this. Yet another reason to stay home. The City thinks art means building more art museums for stagnating, glass-enshrined exhibitions you'll need to pay to see. Art has a department. It's someone's responsibility. It must not interfere with commerce, unless it is commerce.

The recession is causing an exodus in the Tacoma art community. Artists say want to live in cities like Portland where their work is appreciated. In Tacoma city henchmen claim to "work with the community" to solve problems, but I have never seen any of these people, and I work with the community too. They don't advertise these community groups because they want to autonomously take action to eradicate art and sterilize the city when no one is looking. So the message to everybody in the community is: this is simply not a good time to venture into new and uncertain territory, like art. In the words of artist Chip Van Gilder in the Tacoma Volcano:

“I‘ve pretty much dropped out of the artist community. I found a minimum-wage day job... I put a few years effort into getting my work out there and helping others, but the foundation didn’t produce any long lasting results. My personal feeling is that the good ole boy society of the Tacoma business has done everything it can to eradicate art as a culture in Tacoma.”

Eradicated art as a culture. That's what Tacoma did. That's why it will never be the great city it imagines itself, in its wildest dreams, as "the city of destiny".

Painterly cats

Museum of Non-Primate Art

It's hard to eschew concepts like "genius," "creativity," and even "author" when you discover that the painters behind these works of art are cats. Those were, after all, concepts postmodern art tried to relinquish. But these surface-oriented paintings wouldn't be as significant to us if it weren't for the fact that cats with special abilities sat down and painted them.

Digital Ethnography

Digital Ethnography is a study, an anthropological discipline. Professor Wesch (blog) at Kansas State University has a team of students every year study the internet and its new trends. I tend to think academics are generally behind the major trends, not participating in them or generating them. But one of KSU's methodological principles is known as "participant observation", whereby the observer-academics take part themselves in the trends that shape online culture. Sometimes, as Prof. Wesch's very viral 2007 YouTube video demonstrated to the world, the academics can become an internet phenomenon themselves.

If you participate in internet culture at all, like if you read a blog or have a myspace, you'll enjoy watching this exciting hour-long lecture by Prof. Wesch, which I posted below. One of the students who participated in KSU's Digital Ethnography project during the first year, self-nicknamed "thepoasm" (also featured in the following video), I was following on YouTube and watching her weekly vlog posts. She has very insightful reflections on the nature of the internet and what it's like to participate in online culture. I recommend checking out her YouTube page.

Question: What is the Purpose of Studying Philosophy?

Some time in October I had passed a note around a philosophy class I was taking at the time. On it, I asked "What is the purpose of studying philosophy?" I knew that a lot of the students in the class weren't majoring in philosophy. Some had in fact not taken philosophy before. So one day before class I was feeling kind of boyish and began passing around notes. Some of the students who received the notes looked up and raised their eyebrows at me. Laughing to themselves, they started to write back. After considerable debate amongst themselves, a handful of students who were in fact majoring or minoring in philosophy decided not to answer the question, saying I was too much of a trouble-maker.

But for the handful of notes which were passed back, their responses were as follows,

"Studying philosophy teaches you how to think: how to challenge assumptions, how to assess meaning, how to interpret situations. Philosophy teaches you how to live a purposeful life by teaching you how to ask 'why?' and how to find reasons."

another, in bright pink colored pen, read

"TO FIND THE TRUTH AND THINK CRITICALLY"

a hurried pen wrote the following,

"To find the ['purpose' is scribbled out] meaning of life and how we should live it."

and finally,

"To be able to mock everything"

Caffeinated Nihilism

Perhaps it is only chemical arrangements within the brain that cause nihilism, or political pollyannaism, and everything in between. Perhaps even our convictions themselves can be traced to millions of movements of afferents carrying messages from the Politburo to our central nervous system. Over the last years studies have shown "leftist" and "right-wing" brains are different. The more liberal the more likely you are to deal well with conflicts. And that's why we ought to have a revolution, since it is the most radical thing to do, and only radicals can deal well with it. But let us not forget to get extremely caffeinated first. Caffeine and red wine in particular can transcend that abysmally nihilistic corner we have backed ourselves into and goad us into action. (Or make us want to kills ourselves quickly, whichever you prefer.) What do conservatives eat that make them single-minded, stodgy, status-quo mongers? Which leads me to my next question, is the world on caffeine any less true than the world on bacon or starch?

Yellow, Blue and Red Economics

On the cover of my microeconomics textbook, Microeconomics and Behavior, is an image from one of Piet Mondrian's Compositions in yellow, blue and red. The choices editors make for textbook art is really quite intriguing to me. It has been said not to "judge a book by its cover", but perhaps - just perhaps - the entire text can be summarized by their choice of this one piece of art.

Piet Mondrian was a neo-plasticist from the early 20th Century. He was largely influenced by the theosophical-mathematical writings of books like Schoenmaekers's Principles of Plastic Mathematics. The De Stijl movement (i.e. neo-plasticism in Dutch) was interested in ideal geometric objects and neoplatonic philosophy. To my knowledge there is no such "plastic" art movement, so it's worth noting that neo-plasticism had nothing prior to itself to build upon. The name itself is rather groundless. The entire movement can be summarized as saying that what is geometrically pleasing is aesthetically pleasing, and this was their measure of truth.

What is the author of Microeconomics and Behavior, Robert Frank, saying about economics then? Microeconomics, like neo-plasticism, is characterized by absolute simplicity in abstraction. Already this is somewhat of an insult to the student of economics. Does the author mean to imply that microeconomics itself or his presentation of it is simplistic? Regardless, the point of the text is not to ground microeconomics in calculus, as has been my experience in the past, but to provide the insights behind the models in order to aid students' understanding.

So already we have evidence for thinking the author believes that the mathematization (ex.g. formalism) of microeconomics is the best abstraction for a perfect aesthetic. It is only when discussions about behavior enter into the equation that doubts about a perfect science of human rationality plague neoclassical economics, yet this is not a small caveat.

The simplifying assumptions and conditions of neoclassical economics rarely hold. I would point out that Mondrian's composition avoids symmetry, and this is perhaps indicative of "information asymmetry" in microeconomics: when information is asymmetric, choices are skewed and solutions distorted. Various problems arise out of this one particular problem. And therefore the discussion of microeconomic decisions from this point on becomes imperfect and imprecise. The realization of the impurity and imprecision of behavioral economics and the autistic (or rather, "plastic") simplifications of neoclassical microeconomics has made the economics profession simultaneously idolatrous and skeptical with regards to its fundamental neoclassical assumptions.

Neo-Plasticism, Neo-Classicalism, all these are fundamentally idolatrous philosophies, versions of Neo-Platonic theories of truth. In my view the discussion of game theoretic behavior and cognitive psychology is a step away from the neoclassical assumptions about human rationality, but the book's author should have chosen something more Dadaist or Fluxist for the cover if he wanted to exemplify an all-out attack on rationality. Instead, just as the profession seeks to preserve some sense of microeconomic purity from attacks on rationality, and the Neo-Plasticists sought to provide some measure for truth in art by grounding it in the purity of mathematical asceticism, so too microeconomics is still reaching for an immutable rock on which to ground its cherished beginnings and foundations. Robert Frank's text as a whole symbolizes a defensive academic discipline whose foundations are struggling to survive the tide of skepticism being mounted against it.

I Have "KINK"

I recently came across a message online from Seattle artist Aaron Bagley which read:

Show Starts: now
Show Ends: NEVER
send this password: KINK
and a mailing address to [won't repost here]@gmail.com
and receive the next piece of the show.

When I wrote to Aaron Bagley with the message "I have 'KINK'" and included my mailing address he responded by saying "art is on its way soon", and then I knew he was serious.

Days later I received something in the mail from him. This:

Along with this picture came another password. This time it was "Guffman". It turns out "KINK" is the code for only a small piece of the show and each time you send him a password, he sends you corresponding art pieces.

Video Blog: Billy Collins' Poetry

A year ago I created two short videos using audio poetry from Billy Collins and synced them with visualizations. Unbeknownst to me, about three weeks later another YouTube director, JWTNY, starting doing the same thing using other poems from Billy Collins. He, on the other hand, is very skilled in video production and created some very impressive films. But as each of his videos' popularity increased, the popularity of my videos in turn increased, until eventually there had enmassed a small collection of visual poetry from Billy Collins on YouTube. The videos found their way onto several lists and links, and were even hosted on special ad hoc channels.

However, the very first poetry film using Collins' poetry was from lmbrvill, who created a film from the poem "Walking Across the Atlantic" in June of 2006.

Next was Laschmidt76, who created a film from the poem "The Best Cigarette" in September of 2006.

The first poetry film I published of this sort was in January of 2007. This was the "Man in Space" poetry film, in which I used clips from the films Citizen Kane, Catwomen of the Moon, Star Trek TNG: Angel One, and Aeon Flux to punctuate the illustrations Collins was making in the poem regarding the status of women in science fiction and in modern society.

The second video I created from Billy Collins' work was "Sweet Talk". This short video took less than an hour to create, since the images were basically taken from Google image searches. What surprised me was that such a simple video jumped to nearly 85,000 views in about two weeks after JWTNY created his videos.

The first video JWTNY created was "The Dead", a very cartoonish interpretation of a very ominous poem:

Here is one of my favorites by JWTNY, called "Forgetfulness":

Here is "Budapest", which demonstrates some very impressive video production skills:

This one is called "Hunger". You'll notice that the camera angles are very slow-moving but the text is very fast-paced.

Check JWTNY's user page for the full list of his Collins' poetry videos.

The Status of Social Realist Photography

The photograph has been an integral part of social change in the 19th & 20th centuries. For example, it changed the way we think about one issue in particular--child labor--in the United States. The picture on the left is from Lewis Hine's 1908 collection of photos for the National Child Labor Committee, taken in a South Carolinian textile factory. Hine said his photographs of child labor provided unquestionable evidence of exploitation and inserted text captions to put his pictures in context. In the album and book How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis visually documented how child workers in New York and St. Louis operated in the slums, such as those in the oyster picking business.

The picture on the right is a famous photograph of a child poverty project by Stephen Shames, taken in the Bronx in 1989. The picture further below is from Marion Post Wolcott's collection of Farm Security Administration pictures, taken during the Great Depression, depicting the dire circumstances of children during that era. These pictures changed social policy because in some sense the entire photographic enterprise rests on the assumption that what is imaged is real, or that something about it is real. It seems all that is needed is a photograph, and that can be better than any witness. It's irrefutable evidence. This is the "new visual code" that Susan Sontag wrote about in On Photography.

The effect of modern photography on our education now provides "most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the future," Sontag writes. These images change our perspective and in another sense these images anesthetize us to the world. On the one hand, the lack of photographic evidence can anesthetize us to injustice. On the other hand the hyperreality of over-abundant images, where we are so used to seeing them, and using the them as the evidence, the photograph itself is the context. The picture is the story. The photoblog has become and important part of blog life because of this reason. Text is boring sometimes. An article with images will hold your attention much longer than text alone.

Yet there is also an unspoken skepticism involved, since we are never entirely sure that what the picture says is real, though it has been elevated to that status. Susan Sontag (pictured right, perhaps) wrote that the Farm Security Administration even doctored the photographs, and obsessed over the lighting and positioning of the subjects. It's this kind of skepticism that has de-elevated the photograph from its pedestal. And it thus seems that over the course of a century the social realism of the photographic enterprise had lost a great deal of its credibility, like the all-encompassing meta-narratives that lost their weight before then.

This is a curious situation, then, considering that this is supposed to be the age that is dominated by the image.

Facebook Ethnography

It's not just student-ethnographers, entire institutions are using facebook as a means to study social behavior. The NYTimes ran a story last week about higher ed institutions that use facebook for its enormous quantities of unperturbed social data to pattern behaviors, map connections, and discover hidden tastes and preferences. "To study how personal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of social relationships" to be exact.

This is similar to the KSU digital ethnography researchers I have been tracking on YouTube, who use study the use of video and personal communication. One student-researcher and vlogger, named thepoasm, tells you everything about her professors, why she's studying, and what she wants from YouTube. She has become a vlogger herself and it has been interesting to see the transition take place progressively.

If institutions and researchers are behind this, it's easy to see why corporate marketing managers are interested. The goal is to create a Facebook that will become so consumerist that making purchases directly from Facebook will be common. FacePal - a PayPal client - is already in beta-testing. This will likely be integrated with the Marketplace feature, which allows you to create classified ads for housing, jobs, and other sales. But a highly corporatized Marketplace will make Facebook just like any other shopping site, so corporate exchanges will likely have low volume at least at first.

There is a rule for academic research that anything public can be studies. It's not clear whether online content is public or not. If you are someone's friend, potentially wall comments and things like that are public, since facebook publishes everything in the mini-feed. Although federal rules govern much of the academic research, each university approves professors’ research methods and they have different interpretations of the guidelines.

Most researchers do not get their studies approved by online subjects before studying, however, since that would compromise their behavior. It's also invasive to go ahead studying. KSU uses YouTube to study the way society works, and this is understandable since YouTube is public. Facebook is private and much more personal. The boundary between purely academic interests in social behavior and corporate manipulation is thin. It seems that the point at which academic research begins studying "tastes and preferences" is when it becomes of interest to corporate sponsors.

Insomnia and Film and Society

Last weekend I participated in Apple's Insomniac Film Festival, where participants are instructed, with the use of props and plot devices, to create a short film in 24 hours. And this prompted me to think about the connection between insomnia and film.

Consider the metaphor that film states are structurally like dreaming states. In film we see a dynamic exchange between values and representations through the official language of universal separation. What we witness when watching a film, or what we are doing when creating a film, is exploring the surfacing and resurfacing of cultural spectacles within our societies. And we notice that the architecture of the dream is like the architecture of the film. Things basically "pop up" in film as they would in a dream, we make dramatic jumps in plot, we reorder sequences, we squeeze time into a picture that we both perceive and real and experience as real for the time being.

I am taking this metaphor to the extreme. It would seem then that when there is no film, there is no sleep. Or perhaps that films are substitutes for sleep. What, then, for the chronic insomniac? Can films be like his insomnia? In some sense, yes, because he is always watching films in the Cartesian theater of the mind, where consciousness "happens". But in another sense, no, if we reject the Cartesian view of the mind. The film of the insomniac would be exactly like his reality. It would be, in effect, a reality television show. Films brought about by insomnia have no potential for fantasy, no potential for metaphor.

This metaphor itself which I am using is apt to explain the various forms of insomnia-induced phenomena in our present spectacle. In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, where sleep disorders and insomnia are common, we see films that imitate the state of insomnia, the state of constant application of caffeine, the circadian rhythm of chaos and disorder. The individual insomniac's film is one with no context, no framing device to explain the disorder of the environments in which we, subjects, live. This sugggests that the societies we live in are societies of insomnia. I should say what I mean by this, because it appears I'm creating a new metaphor for modern society. The insomniac society is a feature of societies bent on performativity (as Lyotard would say about modern society) -- it does not mean everyone literally never sleeps. The deprivation is built into the creation of the society itself.

Descartes says in the Meditations on First Philosophy that if he were dreaming, then in some sense, any mathematical truths he happened to think up would still be true. This is the nature of mathematics. While the caffeinated filmmakers who participated in the 24-hour Insomnia Film Festival may share the creativity and imagination that comes with a good night's rest (the night before), the insomnia embedded into our society gives rise to all sorts of new discoveries and creations that would still be true whether we slept or not. This is the nature of human creativity and imagination, and this is what insomnia means for society. In a sense, life for us is presented as immense accumulation of the products of insomnia.

Now, to say something about the future of awake-ness, which is ultimately what the insomniac cannot live without: if we are truly on the verge of a post-human singularity point, perhaps sleep is something that can be mimicked or obtained in some other way. The limits of human creativity and imagination are bound by the sleep cycle. It has been suggested that sleep is more important to mammals than nutrition, in the sense that a Scientific American study found that mammals die quicker from sleep-deprivation than from lack of food energies. If we surpass this barrier with biological technology, allowing us to live in a constant state of awareness and insomnia and restfulness, we have surpassed not only the limitation of the human body but the limitation of the mammalian impulse to, in fact, sleep. And if this analysis is true, then in this vein of understanding, insomnia is a method and a profound feature of transhumanity.

An Epiphenomenal French-Canadian Short Film

At the One Reel Film Festival in Seattle, a short film called "Moi" is the story of Alexis, a 15 year old boy who is somewhat pretentious. Passionate about cinema, he dreams of becoming a film director. But his life collapses the day when, through the gaze of others, he suddenly becomes aware of his reality. He's is actually mentally retarded, and throughout the film the audience was made not to notice. Suddenly Alexis undergoes a metamorphosis while at a movie theater and discovers his own interminable retardation. We are then shown bits and pieces of his interaction with his family from the earlier half of the film, except now we are given a privileged perspective to see what is really going on. We then understand why other people had reacted to him in strange ways. By the end of this short film, we feel deeply disappointed by the reality we are faced with.

The duplicitous filming on the director's behalf, compels me to say something about the problem of mental causation in this film. On the face of it, it would seem that Alexis's mental events cause his physical events. Nevermind the fact that I don't believe there are any real mental events for the moment. The problem is that how can his mental events, the mental being a completely separate substance, ever have any affect on the physical events?

The film does a good job of pointing this out. At first, we believe Alexis is acting the way in which he thinks he is acting. There is no other option. We believe what we see on the screen at this point. The way Alexis thinks he is acting is presented to us as 'mental events'. In fact, we believe he is even a bit pretentious at his filmmaking interest because of this presentation--we see how his creative mind works when he's storyboarding his films. However, to a large extent he is not really doing the things he thinks he is doing. So his mental events are causally disconnected from the chain of physical events that are going on. To say that he has a "different" set of mental events going on is to miss the point, however. They are anomalistic events. To talk about them as this way is irrelevant. They're physical events, but the kind of mental events we're shown don't play any role in the causal chain whatsoever.

Some critic may respond to this and say that, in fact, the film actually shows what Alexis mental events are by showing us how he views the world, and how the world actually, physically is. Since the world is show from Alexis's point of view for the first half of the film, this point must be taken seriously. However, this specific point of view is simply the "what-is-it-like" quality, which happens to be Alexis's consciousness. It has nothing to do with mental events. There are no mental events that are not the result of a language problem that makes it seem as if there are such "mental" events. There are only physical happenings, and Alexis's dementia can be explained in terms of physical disorders, physically.

This is a provocative film on many levels, the least noticeable of which is probably the problem of mental causation, as I have pointed out. The most strikingly provocative message of the film is that, here we have a young man who is in fact retarded, and look at the way people are treating him with such disrespect. All along we, the audience, understand that inside he is a smart boy and aspiring film director worthy of our respect.

Art Will Save Our City

Much of social realism simply tells the story of capitalist oppression of the masses. If it is reacting to something it is the capitalist modes of art such as the Romantic exaggerations of individual identity and court-style paintings of imperial leaders. The hungry people, begging the bourgoissie for food, are romanticized instead. There is no place for them in the ancien regime of the capitalists. Death can come for them at any time, and they are thus revolutionaries. There is only one way to push forward, and that is to take revolutionary control of the polis, and let a dictatorship of the proletariat reign:

The images in this video are from my own observations in Chemnitz, Germany, which is one of the few places in the post-DDR region that maintains large, public social realist sculptures, including a gigantic head of Karl Marx with quotations from the Communist Manifesto behind it on the plattenbau. Some of the most disturbing images are from what was the Bolshevik Revolution in 1919, including depictions of men being gunned down, (and yet we have no clear idea what the reason behind it is.) 1919 was a fairly smooth revolution, although the Mensheviks and the White Russians (supported later by the allies) increasingly clashed with the regime as time wore on. So one begins to wonder whether the images of soldiers are communist revolutionary party members, or oppressive capitalist imperialists. Hints that they are actually the communist vanguard are revealed in the way that one soldier is pressing his boot into a man's head. They appear to be protecting the sick or the poor. But there is a contradiction, since as art they are decidedly menacing figures, and obviously meant to strike a bit of terror in the onlooker.

One of the slogans in German reads, "The Party has a thousand eyes." And this clue leaves no doubt that it was a form of terrorism. Public art as perpetual terror, reminders of the regime's capability. Lenin believed that all Soviet art forms should “expose crimes of capitalism and praise socialism...created to inspire readers and viewers to stand up for the revolution”. He introduced an experimentation period to discover what the new nation's art form would be, if it needed an art form at all. Headed by Stalin in 1932, the central committee of the communist party developed the Union of Soviet Writers. This organization endorsed the newly elected ideology of social realism. By 1934 all other independent art groups were abolished, making it near impossible for someone not involved in the Union of Soviet Writers to get work published. Any literary piece or painting that didn’t endorse the ideology of social realism was censored and/or banned.

An example of Communist ideology represented in Chemnitz are the larger-than-life-size Adam and Eve figures which stand proudly, as if to say human nature is not what the capitalists have believed. The Communist view of human nature is that people are by nature benevolent, or at least can be forced to be benevolent, and that we possess a certain social awareness previously unrecognized under capitalist regimes. Adam and Eve are unashamed by their nakedness, and are not depicted in Drurer's style -- that is, with leaves covering their genitalia.

One of the last images in the video is a bit of graffiti on giant head of Karl Marx which reads, "Make love not war." The political subconscious of post-DDR Germany is largely something like this. The youth, skateboarding around the figure of Marx, are seemingly unaware of Marx's bulky presence in the nearby park. They have a n aloofness from the past, and they are usually the only ones bold enough to hang around the big statue, as if to say it doesn't really bother them, that big head of his. They have a much higher conviction that wars and violence are unwanted, unnecessary things. Fashion is something they have a command of, and so is popular culture. Yet social realities for them is still the same as ever: ex.g. that hungry people will starve unless society will feed them. And so there is a feeling of collective action, of collective responsibility for this sort of thing. And still, just as their fashion individuates them, they feel responsible for their own actions. While enjoying the freedom to choose their own lifestyles, they recognize the goals of the great social utopianisms, and work towards them in roundabout, semi-capitalist ways.

An Area in Which to Act

American abstract expressionists, such as American artist Jackson Pollock (right) and Dutch artist William de Kooning, have long been outspoken in their views that painting is an area or a space within which to simply come to terms with the act of creation. Indeed, there is something ironically self-proclaimed as "objective" about this so-called abstract expressionist style, or "action-painting" (tachisme) as it is sometimes called. In a move towards greater objectivity, Pollock rejected the traditional easel and moved his work to the floor, where he met the resistance of the hard surface.

"On the floor I am more at ease," Jackson said. "I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting."

Objective? Something here sounds suspiciously like the modernist urge toward objective purity, and as we postmoderns know, this simply cannot be achieved.

For Clement Greenberg, the greatest art critic of the 20th Century, the physicalness of the paintings (with their clotted and oil-soaked surfaces) was the tool to understanding them as documents of the artists' existential struggles. The spontaneous activity of the artist revealed something personal about his psychology and unconscious struggles. The paint was dripped onto the canvas, as if to say it doesn't matter where things land anymore. In Jackson Pollock's work you can sometimes find cigarette butts. Smoking a cigarette for Pollock must have been an unconscious urge, an addiction, that led him to drop them somewhere on the canvas. Of course, something about that seems very coordinated. One can imagine Pollock tossing the cigarrette over his shoulder, and only moments later turning around anxiously to see if it landed on the canvas.

Hardly spontaneous!

'Spontaneous' isn't the right word to describe the action painters. Jackson in fact is supposed to have had an idea of what the piece was to end up as. Granted only the artist understands when the artwork is 'finished', yet isn't to have an idea of what you are planning to do the opposite of spontaneity? The place in which to act spontaneously suddenly becomes a place in which you plan to act spontaneously, and thus defeating the purpose.

The tide soon turned against abstract expressionism, and in the 60s there was a revolt against their sensibility, called "Post-Painterly Abstraction" which favored openness and clarity over dense painterly surfaces of abstract expressionism. The density of the action painters was seen as not so spontaneous, and much more like a kind of dwelling. Post-Painterly Abstraction was soon emulated by Minimalism, Hard-edge Painting, Lyrical Abstraction and Color Field Painting. The avant-garde shifted from the false "objectivity" of Pollock toward an even more "objective" geometric precision and socio-political theatricality, commentary and observation.

American painting was declared "dead" by various critics, like the American minimalist Donald Judd, who cited three-dimensional, volumetric objects as the embodiment of "visual truth". The anodized aluminum sculpture on the right is an untitled work by Judd. Pictorial illusionism as it had appeared in painting--which is flat and merely depicts space, was described as "deceptive" and "outdated". Yet as California remained the creative center for developments such as hard-edge painting, American painting seemed far from "dead". The places in which artists acted, painted, or sculpted, went back to being formal places of creative study. Creative spaces for Jackson Pollock had been hard floors, mainly. The new backlash creative spaces were places to build strong visual truths, and hard-edge geometric boxes of purity.

This makes sense from a perspectivist point of view. Nietzsche said in Beyond Good and Evil that he had his own truths that the weak people of the planet simply could not obtain. They were his truths, they were stronger truths, and some would never know them or come to understand them. The truths Nietzsche expounded might not even have been meant for anyone living at the time of his writing, which he assumes is true. The geometric truths of minimalist sculpturs are true in the same way. They are bold, unprecedented, and undeniably austere. "American painting" is certainly not dead at the time of Judd's writing, but the statement is profoundly prophetic. It is a weak and dying-off movement. American painting will undoubtedly be taken over by stronger, more pictorially bold forms of art, such as minimalist-veined sculpture and mixed-media.

The era of being falsely spontaneous and objective about one's activities is out, and the era of the self-conscious construction of subjective truth is in. Long live the truths of minimalism!

Dirty Amsterdam

Pencil of light, don’t leave

I made a short film about you

It’s called "Dirty Hostel"

Le Voyage de Balloon Rouge (2007)

Hou Hsiao-Hsien, the film's director, was present at the Metropolis film house in Hamburg for the premiere of his film tonight. But he received no applause at the end. This Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon style love-story film was a disappointment. In fact it was not a film, "just a scenario," based loosely of a short 70s French film by the same title. The red balloon is China. It's also the main characters, who struggle to get their lives together. But too many drawn out scenes with mortorcycles or text-messaging with silly bathroom conversations turned this creative idea into a slow-paced faux French film.

I had high expectations since Hou's films have been awarded prizes from prestigious international festivals such as the Venice Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, Hawaii International Film Festival and the Nantes Three Continents Festival. This is the first Hou film I've seen, but he must be good if he was voted "Director of the Decade" for the 1990s in a poll of American and international critics put together by The Village Voice and Film Comment. Hou's films rarely show outside film festival circuits. And despite such acclaim, his work in Le Voyage de Balloon Rouge is probably receiving more praise than it should. For those with a certain relationship with the director it might be offensive to suggest it was a bad film. So here's why: the actors were lifeless and nearly fearful of the camera. It was tirelessly drawn out and boring. It was painfully austere. The drama was sparse. I was sure whether to laugh or fall asleep. A thought quickly passed that I was watching a badly-scripted student film.

Cindy Sherman Now!

Most gallery art isn't quite what I'm looking for. In fact it's never exactly what I was hoping it would be. Except I was unexpectedly surprised by the work of Cindy Sherman at the Martin Gröpius Gallery in Berlin (a fascinating place itself). Her art is something that left an impression on my thinking for hours. Her pictures are unsettling, and the poke at the heart of American feminist issues, such as media portrayal. All of her early pictures show a frightened young woman, for example, clenching a newspaper article and lying on a kitchen floor, as if about to cry. Or "B-grade" women who are applying to be some kind of actress, and someone hasn't told them they simply aren't good enough yet. They're ugly. They're American. They have big aspirations. She focuses on the people of low art who in turn fetishize the unattainable ideal of high art.

On the other hand, women in Rear Screen Projections look fashionable enough, and there's even something erotic about them. Except you wouldn't say these pictures are erotic: they never strike you as such. In fact all these women have something much more in common. They're all acted out by the same person: Cindy herself. This is what amazes me--this ability to change places, to change roles and characters. She is at once a clown with buck teeth, and in another still she is an ominous blonde on a bicycle. She's the face of the distressed woman in top-down society. And yet not always a woman. There's nothing constant about her, destroying any possibility of there being anything "real" about her. The idea that every photograph is taken of someone named Cindy Sherman is irrelevant. They're all completely different people.

Her work has something of theatrical twist to it. It's photography as if were for film still production. Cindy is also very fashion conscious and woman-conscious. Her Sex Pictures evokes feelings of a voyeurist, except it isn't quite doing that because the artist is inviting us in to see how wretched things really are. Horror Pictures explores the deeply psychological link about women in 80s horror film that drove groups of feminists to write flurries of essays on "the last girl" or the screaminig ingenue.


I would say Sherman's work most closely resembles Rembrandt's. Recall the painting where Rembrandt messed up the head of the lady while the man is enjoying his tall glass of beer. This reminds me of Sherman's work. Rembrandt was a theatrical painter. He also pointed out vices in human behavior. Such as in , for example, gluttony. Sherman points to the same things. She points out vices in women, in feminine behavior, that we presume is linked to something that a man has done. Perhaps women have done it to themselves at the same time. For example, being fashion-conscious is something Sherman appears to attack. And yet much of her own inspiration comes from shopping, she's said. She's feeding her ideas with the things she's opposed to. Another example is female vulnerability. In each picture the female is vulnerable. But how many men, when they look on a vulnerable blonde woman, arouse masculine urges to "protect", "save" and "comfort"? Which of these men really wants the women not to feel vulnerable? Psychologically, they want the woman to feel insecure, and secretly they want to be the ones to whisk her away and comfort her, and then have a dominating form of sex, undoubtedly.

The Fernsehenturm

No doubt the tallest
Walter Umbrecht's last erection
Quick! The Pope will see!

Revolt of the Aficionados (especially Claude Monet)

Is Monet's art optimistic? The aficionados at the Neues National Gallerie in Berlin (pictured left) the aficionados seem to think so. The en plen-air style has such a silly effect on people in galleries. It is faux-idyllic adornment for them. Every woman, mother, and little girl walks by the light-colored oil paints and smiles to themselves, reassured that Monet's art makes everything beautiful for them. Simply, their "beauty" is dishonest. They would hang the prints up in summer garden houses so they're bourgeois neighbors can chat about it over tea. Monet, that is, amongst their pastel swans, their ornamental pine cones and nasty Thomas Kincades. How revolting!

Of course, they loved the summerly "Etes" (on the right). The smiley-faced critics would use words like "humorless" to describe some of the other works in the Neues Gallery. In fact I heard them say in Prague that Picasso was incomprehensible! And then they walked off with smug grin on their faces. I like those incomprehensible works, for what it's worth. Perhaps even you, Monet, are incomprehensible at times. But this whole business about smiling unrepentantly at art I don't understand. Perhaps because I find nothing to smile about Monet's art. To me the impressions (or, "little blobs of spit" as one critic said) appear like bouts of insanity over a sad, almost blase, fleeting moment. So the smiling gesture is completely obscene to me. My little gallery notebook is chalk-full of comments about the paintings, and many of the meanest ones are directed toward the faux-aficionados who think smiling at art is required of them. Honestly, it isn't a fail-safe response to anything in a gallery. When they saw Otto Dix's "War" in Dresden--a very bizarre Guernica-like depiction of the barbarism of war--they cringed and nearly left the gallery. Canadian women are the worst. (Political isolation also becomes artistic isolation.) This lady in the pink parapet smiles at everything in the Neues Gallery so absurdly, the kind of look unparenting women give to whiny children while the parent's are trying to shush them up. Hodling her dainty audio-guide in hand, she will be sure to get a well-rounded chorus of "appropriate responses" to fill her head.

I might even tag this blog "absurd gestures toward art". (But then, to be fair, I would need to also list the antithetical "appropriate gestures toward art" as well.) I think to be always smiling at a thing you hardly understand seems more like a code of conduct for a cast of circus clowns. After seeing many cheery "Frauen Kopf"s in galleries I don't think I feel the urge to smile back at them. Not at this point. Maybe when I've seen over a hundred, then perhaps I will have developed a well-established relationship, enough at least, to smile back in a non-retarded way.

Brezhnev & Honecker

The East Side Gallery in East Berlin is probably the largest and everlasting open art gallery in the world. Immediately after the fall of the wall, international artists came to Berlin to paint the wall with murals and artistic encouragements. A popular one reads, "No more wars. No more walls. A united world." But the most widely known of these are the figures of Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker holding each other and kissing (pictured right). Perhaps less known is the fact that the kiss was originally a mistake; in a hurry to perform the formality and get it over with, one of them aimed at the wrong cheek, and this resulted in an unintended lipsmacking socialist spectacle. One thing is certain--that it came to represent the absurdity of Communist ideology.

Brezhnev, although anti-Stalinist while Krushchev was in power, was pro-Stalinist once he came into power himself. Stalin was then mentioned positively as Brezhnev began reversing Krushchev's policies and started to wield his own repressive cultural policies. When he criticized the Czech leadership as "revisionist" and "anti-Soviet" for liberalizing its politics in 1968, he was met with the student Prague Spring uprising. The Breshnev Doctrine was essentially that the Soviet Union had the right to interfere with the politics of satellite nations to "safeguard socialism". The Helsinki Final Act treaty, a complete failure for the Western countries, legitimized Soviet repression in the satellite countries. All the Western states received in return was the Soviet promise that human rights would be respected in the Soviet sphere of influence. Yet almost as soon as Brezhnev became Chairman of the Communist Party, and the Supreme Soviet of the Union, an economic-slowdown ensued. Dissidents were routinely arrested. Ironically, Brezhnev referred to this as the "Period as Developed Socialism". In fact, the Constitution used to read, "The developed Socialist society is a natural, logical stage on the road to Communism."

And in 1961, it was Erich Honecker who was responsible for building the Berlin Wall. After a power struggle, he replaced Walter Ulbricht as General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED). Honecker developed a program of "consumer socialism" which used capitalism to boost the performance of the GDR economy. But once Leipzig was protesting every Monday, and the wall soon fell, Honecker was sought after for war crimes and deaths of 192 East Berliners who died escaping to the West.

To depict these two ferocious leaders as being not only in political and ideological union but sexual union as well, successfully illustrates how secrecy and illegitimacy flourished in the Soviet system. It means that something sexual, the mother of all secrets, was taking place behind the scenes, and it hints at much more. For Berliners, to see these two stooges of Socialist power in their region kissing must have been liberating. Emulations and spin-offs of the original work began to surface soon afterward. For example, there is another popular depiction of the Honecker and Brezhnev kissing while a car is crashing through the wall. This seems to suggest that the two leaders are so wrapped up in their own secrets that neither of them is paying attention to where the car is headed, and it ends up crashing through the "anti-fascist protective barrier" into West Germany. Struggling to contain the secrets of Soviet power, the nation crashes itself into Western sphere of influence and thus exposes all its secrets.