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20180723

Sonic Arts Union: David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley (in memoriam) concert series at the Issue project room was a positive experience. It was exiting to see Mumma perform live. The event served as proof of the grandeur of the New York electro-acoustic scene and movement. The sounds came from a niche and approaches to music were theoretical but the event still attracted active audiences, who engaged with the pieces. Robert Ashley’s 1993 work Love Is A Good Example was the most easiest piece to approach (I should start making spoken word pieces). David Behrman’s Long Throw was a nice ending for the evening but it felt too picturesque. The blues guitar riffs were too much for me.

Joined the On Whiteness: The Reading Group on Saturday at Helena Anrather. The event was hosted by Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan of the Native Art Department International. We read a mixture of texts, the longest was Andrea Smiths’ Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy in which she defines three axises trough which white supremacy engages with non-whites:

  1. Slavery/Capitalism. After slavery ended, the Prison Industrial Complex started.
  2. Genocide/Colonialism. Indigenous people must disappear so that their land can be claimed with out opposition.
  3. Orientalism/War. US need to be in war with “exotic countries” so that they can proof that “exotic” are not US. US is defined by war, it needs conflict with to exist.

The text also defined heteropatriarchy as a building block of  White-America: When nuclear families are set as a norm, it becomes easier to implement hierarchical organisational models upon indigenous communities. She identifies “family” as a technology and argues that in Christian-Americas emphasis on family (and the families right for privacy) results into a lack of interest in public, shared infrastructure: Suburban mindset is a disinvestment. The discussions centred on the topics of forced whiteness and passing. Learning about passing from the indigenous perspective was particularly interesting: Indians are often treated as white because white supremacy want to see indigenous people disappear, to claim their lands.

During the reading group the problematic case Andrea Smith claiming to be a Cherokee were not discussed. More on these issues: Open Letter From Indigenous Women Scholars Regarding Discussions of Andrea Smith (2015). Discovered the Native Land map, a mapping system made to further acknowledgement of indigenous presence in America. Trough this source I learned about the Lenape  and the Canarsie who’s land I now live on. The Lenape article is an interesting read.

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20180719

Booked a trail riding session for next Tuesday 1pm!

Making art with plants, is abstract art – It requires an understanding of concepts and approaches derived from cell biology and theories concerning the climate (that there is oxygen etc.). People cannot build relationships to plants because our interdependency is an abstraction. You can respect a plant but the plant will never respect you – Which means that there is no mutual respect in the relationship.

Respect is a relationship, in which the well being of separate entities is rooted on a shared awareness of specific problems and skills an other entity has (face-to-horse-face). This supports the well-being of both entities: A horse needs human guidance for navigating contemporary landscapes (maps, social networks), a human needs the horses skills in moving in complicated terrain (four hooves, sensory awareness).

In this relationship both entities constantly contest each others limits, to set parameters for the collaboration. When entities work together, the work is a social process (the outcome is the surplus of a successful relationship). One entity cannot surrender decision making to the other, both must engage at all times (relaxation is an important form of engagement). This is what Arja Sulin is saying when she shouts: “Absolute focus!!!” to kids learning to ride. Following this logic it seems that people don’t necessary build relationships to each other either: Words develop institutions which make-us-make-sense of each other according to a predefined logic. This would mean that the only respectful relationships we can form are to animals with whom we cannot negotiate with using words. Weird… Lovecraftian?

Post-Capitalist Ecologies: Energy, ‘Value’ and Fetishism in the Anthropocene (2016) Alf Hornborg. The article has a chapter called “The Money Artifact as the Root of All Evil”, how cool is that? He’s citing Andreas Malm (who coined the term Capitalocene).

Continue reading “20180719”

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20180717

Bought a tickets to Sonic Arts Union: David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley (in memoriam) gig on Friday. I have no idea what the gig is going to be like but the texts are convincing.

Messaged Agnes Denes and requested an interview (Got a reply and send her a list of questions to consider).

Participated in a talk by Imara Limon’s on New Narratives at the Amsterdam Museum at the Independent Curators International spaces in Manhattan. The New Narratives program is an ongoing series of events, exhibitions and pedagogical programs which seek to develop critical approaches to the Amsterdam museums existing  practices and permanent collection. Visitors of the museum have been offered “colonial nostalgia” trough exhibitions which focus on the “Golden Age of the City”. For example Dutch 17th century group portraits and the display of luxurious objects disguise the violence of colonial practise, trough which wealth was accumulated the families displayed in the paintings.

Limon explained that the past isn’t painful, what’s painful is that contemporary institutions have not changed and diversified their practices. Diversity and inclusion are frequently discussed (superficiality trough banderols on museum walls) but the discussions seldom have an impact on how the museums actually work. To change the narrative she had organised museum tours which were guided by a diverse range of guides, who made sense the collection from their perspectives. They were also working to add new subtext to items in the collection. “It’s not about output – It’s about the input” she explained.

I’m not sure but I thought that this meant that they are trying to change how the museum make sense of the world (I tried to ask more about this but I couldn’t frame my question properly). When asked if there are taboos that she was advised not to address (trough her curatorial work) Limone answered that “You can say anything but who is listening”. A taboo she addresses was that there is not enough diversity in museum staff, which underlines the impact colonial history has on present day.

I’m in serious trouble in navigating these discussions. I can seem to find proper terms to initiate discussions. I fear that museums cannot change: They reproduce the past indefinitely.

When the Harlem Renaissance Went to Communist Moscow (2017) Jennifer Wilson.

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20180705

Visited galleries with other residents of ISCP (Didn’t get to know people yet but at least I recognise them). We went to Ronald Feldman Gallery and got an introduction to the space by Mr. Feldman himself (and gallery staff). Feldman was excited about the works he talked about (the works on display had an artist-as-archivist/witness emphasis). Their summer exhibition includes Dressing to Go Out / Undressing to Go In (1973) by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who is represented by the gallery! The frame of the artwork had a cleaning cloth attached to it. Feldman talked very highly of Ukeles and made her sound like a superstar, which strangely, made me doubt Ukeles. Her work as the Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation was framed as the foundation for contemporary artist-to-institution residencies. We were told that Ukeles started to work with sanitation workers because they were underappreciated and that their work was considered “dirty”. This made me feel uneasy. Why were the sanitation workers considered “dirty” and by whom? How does her art effect this? The “dirtyness” and underappreciation of sanitation workers made her initiative to work with them appear more noble (which is definitely not intended). Someone should do a project with Wall Street Bankers – They are surely more dirty then sanitation workers! Her exhibitions in Europe were celebrated.

After Feldman we visited The Drawing Center. There was an exhibition by Terry Winters but I wasn’t in the mood for drawings. The center had worked with The Center of Urban Pedagogy which seems like a really interesting organization. They have produced a comicbook called I Got Arrested! Now What? (2010) which is intended for juveniles who need to learn more about their rights.

The tour ended at the The Grey Art Gallery which presented the “Landscapes after Ruskin” exhibition. Lucy Oakley’s (Head of Education and Programs) gave us a very convincing tour (she was backed up by an intern whose name I forgot). The curator of the show had developed an interesting interpretation of “The Sublime”. The sublime is not about experiencing universal beauty (in landscapes, forms etc.) which is impossible to describe & becoming aware how insignificance humans are compared to nature… It is also awareness of ones mortality and a sense of the frailness of human life. The exhibition linked the anthropocene with the sublime, arguing that these are similar experiences! In both cases we (the spectators) feel ashamed of ourselves… Either for our pompous believe that humans are the owners of the world (The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is humbled by the majesty of the mountains) or for the fact that we have tainted the world with pollution.

This has an interesting link to horses! Students of the Horse & Performance course felt ashamed in the face of the horse (when they failed to execute care taking tasks in an orderly fashion).

The galleries used miniature Greek columns as space dividers or as roofing panels – This is extremely interesting. I think we don’t need to see artworks… We need texts which frame the way we see the world (or fail to frame it, which is fun to witness too). What the curator intended to pass with the “Landscapes after Ruskin” exhibition would have been accomplished with a clever text. After reading it we would have understood media like this in the context of the contemporary sublime.

I’m riding my bike shirtless (it the only way to go).

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20180629

Reading Lovecraft The Shadow Out of Time (1934). After this I’ll read The Mountain of Madness and The Call of Chulhu. Lovecraft might be good source for developing an understanding of horses (and other non-human beasts).

The story of The Shadow Out of Time is told by a man called Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee whose mind is snatched to work in an massive archive populated by drones. He is (along other drones) tasked to document the history of the world (and worlds) in the service of the Great Race. The plant like Great Race is in the process of departing our world and set to live in the future (because they fear the “elder beings”). The library is located in the past of our world (between Paleozoic and Mesozoic periods) but drones (some of who have human minds) that serve the archive come from all ages. The task of documenting everything is so enormous that Nathaniel can’t maintain a stable mind. The archive he describes feels like a data center and narrator is slowly turning into some kind of artificial intelligence. The horror of this story is in the description of the various states of self awareness this intelligence is in. The text is very tricky to read.

The text bundles psychology, archeology and geology. The narrator is on a quest to understand a personal experience (a sudden change in his person and amnesia), this leads to a quest to understand myths, which leads to a quest to understand the world that has created the myths. Perhaps Haraway has used this approach to draft her proposal on different scales that should be thought of when facing other species (biological, cultural and face-to-face). The term “post-human” is mentioned (or specifically a “posthuman beetle race”)! Other interesting concepts are “pseudo-memory”, “memory-rhythm” (a choreography for opening a lock) and “myth-born unreality”. The narrator is excavating trough layers of concealed memories (trauma) and prompted to orchestrate a archeological excavation. The researchers discover archeological and geological evidence which confirms that the narrators pseudo-memories from the distant past are real, that his trauma is based on actual events which took place before his birth. The Lovecraftian world feels very similar to the world of the enchanted, which is depicted in ME AND MINE film (2018).

Here is a description of the archives the narrator is forced to work in and his body when it’s in its virtual drone state:

And then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater and greater, till one night I could not resist it. At first my downward glance revealed nothing whatever. A moment later I perceived that this was because my head lay at the end of a flexible neck of enormous length. Retracting this neck and gazing down very sharply, I saw the scaly, rugose, iridescent bulk of a vast cone ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base. That was when I waked half of Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss of sleep.

Only after weeks of hideous repetition did I grow half-reconciled to these visions of myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved bodily among the other unknown entities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves and writing for hours at the great tables with a stylus managed by the green tentacles that hung down from my head.

[…]

The archives were in a colossal subterranean structure near the city’s center, which I came to know well through frequent labors and consultations. Meant to last as long as the race, and to withstand the fiercest of earth’s convulsions, this titan repository surpassed all other buildings in the massive, mountain-like firmness of its construction.

The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously tenacious cellulose fabric were bound into books that opened from the top, and were kept in individual cases of a strange, extremely light, rustless metal of greyish hue, decorated with mathematical designs and bearing the title in the Great Race’s curvilinear hieroglyphs.

The narrator returns to the archive site in a later episode and tells about the same space when he is in human form:

One thing only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in relation to the monstrous masonry. I felt oppressed by a sense of unwonted smallness, as if the sight of these towering walls from a mere human body was something wholly new and abnormal. Again and again I looked nervously down at myself, vaguely disturbed by the human form I possessed.

[…]

The very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untrodden dust made me shudder. Never before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth, had human feet pressed upon those immemorial pavements.

The way a distant creature is described reminds me of being close to a horse when it’s breathing heavily while trotting:

There was a wind, too – not merely a cool, damp draught, but a violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidly from that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling came.