Special Calamity Physics
Sarah Sze , from a personal history essay, working off Susan Sontag:
In recent years, images on screens have become substitutes for materials and objects. I’m sent virtual glasses to try on, thanked with a virtual flower, or asked to light a virtual candle in honor of a death. A half century ago, Susan Sontag wrote, “All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.” To that material plenitude we have added virtual plenitude.
Sontag continued, “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” As a sculptor, I work with ephemeral materials such as live plants, water, and wind; I construct sprawling compositions with ambiguous beginnings and endings. For me, part of the challenge is to recover our sense of time through tactility—through materials, through texture, through the senses.
Sampling can be a common good
Non sequitur: Eat your gun, Sze artist Statement
I.
Before retired detective Lance White Man Runs Him inserted his service revolver into his mouth and pulled the trigger, he thought about what he might convey to those who wanted to know why. And he knew that the attempt to convey was essentially fraudulent, that the parade of horribles he had witnessed, been part of, or perpetrated were shadow reasons, appendages that might circulate through the gray nameless miasma he felt but that didn’t account for the thing itself. (Had he been a native English speaker, he would’ve known to say nameless gray miasma).
Babies:
There had been the baby who died of infection, malnutrition, and dehydration, left in a mechanical swing for something like a week, a diaper so soiled that maggots had begun to breed and hatch and burrow their way into the baby’s buttocks. He didn’t die from the maggots (e. Coli infection) but that detail sufficed for the jury to send the baby’s parents (yes, meth and childhood abuse for both) to jail for life. Which the good detective didn’t necessarily feel vindicated by, as it turned out.
There had been a baby who died of SIDS or something natural, he couldn’t remember - but whose mother - out of grief and drug-induced psychosis - put into a microwave to revive or reincarnate or whatever twisted thought might have infested her mind at the moment. It was hard to know what to charge her with, based on what the evidence showed - he couldn’t forget - but then a few days into it someone looked at the baby monitor and determined that a recorded file was recoverable and showed that the baby had stopped breathing in her crib before mom came to check on her in the morning. The mom took a leap off of Rapid City’s tallest building three days after being released.
There had been a baby who was left in a car that sat running outside a convenience store in Sturgis for three hours on a stifling August afternoon the week before the rally started. No one noticed until it was too late. That was a tragedy, not a murder - mom had gone into the bathroom, insulin in hand, but didn’t get herself in time, passed out, was taken to the hospital, and woke to ask the question that no doctor or nurse or anyone else, really, ever really knew the answer to.
Wrecks:
Lots of car wrecks. Sad, lonely, painful. Ugh.
Bullets:
Early on, a hunting accident maybe, or family. Then he saw or thought he saw lots of bullets.
And, though this remembrance of things past all passed over him in a matter of moments, he went from being emotionally crippled, to sort of halfway physically crippled, spiritually thwarted, etc, to just feeling plain old and tired.
He was readjusting his grip on the gun when he thought of a line about cops that always stuck with him: “the more maladjusted tend to be more satisfied with their work than the less maladjusted.” And it struck him that now that work was over, he was just that: one of the more maladjusted. Not sure what kind of mission, though.
Sarah Sze states:
Images in Debris is very much about the leftovers of an experiment, so, for example, you see a broken egg. But it’s kind of Darwinian: things die out, things stay around, things get added. For this show, I’m interested in the idea that, in some ways, images have replaced objects.
Data input 9-16 to 9-22
Read (books):
THE PIECES FROM BERLIN, MICHAEL PYERead (short stories)
The Weirdoes, Otessa MoshfeghThe Surrogate, Otessa MoshfeghRead (Longform/essays/reviews/articles):
The Comedic Beauty of Laura Owens by Roberta Smith (NY Times, Nov. 16, 2017)Amy Sherald’s Shining Second Act by Roberta Smith (NY Times, Sept 16, 2019)Playing it Cool by David Salle (review of Alex Katz – NY Review of Books 1/18/2018)Good Manners in the Age of Wikileaks by Slavoj Zizek, (London Review of Books, Jan. 20, 2011)Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclosures, the shame – our shame for tolerating such power over us – is made more shameful by being publicised. When the US intervenes in Iraq to bring secular democracy, and the result is the strengthening of religious fundamentalism and a much stronger Iran, this is not the tragic mistake of a sincere agent, but the case of a cynical trickster being beaten at his own game.Art in Free Fall by David Salle (review of Laura Owens – NY Review of Books, 2/8/2018)Owens’s work is the apotheosis of painting in the digital age. The defining feature of digital art—of digital information generally—is its weightlessness. Images, colors, marks, text, are essentially decals in a nondimensional electronic space. They exist, but only up to a point. They can excite the mind, but you can’t touch them. An air of weightlessness remains even when they are transferred to the physical surface of a painting. If these images were to fall, nothing would catch them. They’re like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff, just before he realizes he’s churning air.[. . . . .}The Unbearable Lightness of Painting by Thomas Lawson (MOCA, 2003)The Whitney's Laura Owens Book Comes in 8,500 Different Covers by Michael Wilson (GARAGE, 11/8/2017)L’1%, c’est moi? By Andrea FraserJailbait, by Otessa MoshfeghHow to Shit, by Otessa Moshfegh[Title actually unknown – real talk] Andrew Durbin, Frieze (on Laura Owens)Rachel Kushner interviewed by Laura Owens, [The Believer, [on Kushner’s the Flamethrowers]]Johns, by William H. Gass (NY Review of Books, 2/2/1989)The Key to Act Two, by Venkatesh Rao (ribbonfarm.com, 3/29/2018)Becoming a key is about rewilding your identity as a human, breaking it out of its domesticated uniformity, putting the variation back into the natural selection, doing your bit to reclaim our species nature from this benighted degeneracy – the mathematical term for a system expressing less than its full potential complexity – that is our premium-mediocre civilization.
Video:
Documentary on “Shoot,” F-Space performance piece by Chris Burden, 1971Anthropocene: the Humon Epoch by Ed Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal et al. Poems:
Sara in Her Father's ArmsCell by cell the baby made herself, the cellsMade cells. That is to sayThe baby is made largely of milk. Lying in her father's arms, the little seed eyesMoving, trying to see, smiling for usTo see, she will make a householdTo her need of these rooms—Sara, little seed,Little violent, diligent seed. Come let us look at the worldGlittering: this seed will speak,Max, words! There will be no other words in the worldBut those our children speak. What will she make of a worldDo you suppose, Max, of which she is made.—George OppenMen at 40, Donald JusticeA private singularity, John KoetheCovers Band in a Small Bar, John Koethe90% of the poems in Electric Arches by Eve Ewing
Re-read (books)
LIFT HIGH THE ROOFBEAMS CARPENTERS (SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION)KISSING IN MANHATTAN Re-read (short stories)Wagner in the Desert, Greg JacksonReading:
WHISTLER, LIFE FOR ART’S SAKE, DANIEL SUTHERLANDTHE SILK ROADSFAUST’S METROPOLISSze Redux
I was reading a Zadie Smith essay about your work [The Tattered Ruins of the Map, from Feel Free] and it gradually became clear that you know each other.
Yes, I met her through an art critic, Hal Foster, and now we’re close friends with Zadie and Nick Laird, her husband, who is also a great writer.
It all sounds very glamorous…
Spending time with Zadie and Nick is always interesting; they are absolutely brilliant. But as for glamorous… My teacher, Ursula von Rydingsvard, she’s an artist, and her husband, Paul Greengard, is a Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist. I remember when I was a student, she was on stage and someone asked: “Ursula, you’re married to a scientist, you must have all these incredible conversations.” She said: “Yeah, I’m like, ‘Paul, did you play the plumbing bill?’”
So much of what we own materially, we make decisions about digitally
Cogitate on reference, echo, rhyme, and quotation, as these tropes function in paint and sculpture. If a MacArthur grant recipient says her work is influenced by Philip Guston, Andrea Kramer, and the mid-90s graffiti on the bathroom stalls at that one dive bar on Main Street, is that a thing we need to just accept? Is Barthes relevant here? How about Grant Wood? Does Barthes that angelic coterie of textual significance turn pirouettes on his heavenly cloud every time someone invokes him re: dead authors, live authors influenced by dead agonistes, live readers celebrating or mourning the death day of authors that may otherwise be alive? and so on?
updated input
Input week of September 9, 2019
“100 Things About Writing A Novel” by Alexander Chee (Yale Review)
“What 100 People, Real and Fake, Believe about Dolores” by Ben Greeman, [McSweeneys, 10/20/2000]
An Interview with Peter Doig, by Joush Jelly-Schapiro, [The Believer Mag, 3/1/2012]
Doig’s FilmClub
The harder they come
Whether French film-makers (Renoir and others) would have been painters if born 50 years earlier or Internet designers if 50 years later
The Ends of Art according to Beuys, by Eric Michaud/Rosalind Krauss , [October, Vol. 45 (Summer 1988]
Beuys is a voice and intended to overcome the silence of Duchamp
E.g.
The disturbing element in Beuys’s work is not to be found in his drawings, which have their place in public and private collections throughout the world, nor his “performances,” which have their place within the Fluxus movement and within a general investigation of the limits of art. It lies rather, I believe, in the flood of pronouncements testifying to the privilege that he gave, throughout his lifetime, to spoken over plastic language. It is this constant inundation of his ‘works’ by words – both his own and those of others – this frantic proselytizing in which he exhausted himself up to the time of his death. But it is also – and in the very same impulse that led him to repeat what he thought was Christ’s teaching – this constant wish to ‘clarify the task that the Germans have to accomplish in this world,’ this insistence on the ‘duty of the German people,’ above all to deploy this ‘resurrective force’ tha t was to lead to the transformation of the social body by man-turned-artist.
October, at 38-39.
Other themes:
Duchamp is counterproductive because he shows that all objects can be art, but failed to go further and show that all humans are necessarily artists
Beuys’s notion of Gestaltung – the putting into form – is an end, and it will, he claims, “bring about the resurrection of meaning that Duchamp’s silence had buried.”
But the close of the essay shows inherent problems with Beuys Gestaltung and notion of Germany as place to revivify Christianity: if each person is an artist by virtue of the social activity – the putting into form –, then collectively a culture is engaging in the productive and transformative task of social sculpture. Of creating a new form of life. And the risk is that the end of achieving Gestaltung will make (other) people means – that it becomes a feedback loop of subjugation in which real mean and the real world, which become reduced to be the mere instruments of its exercise, mere putty in the work of social sculpture. Which, it being Germany and all, should be cause for concern.
Aside: Beuys founded the Green Party in Germany, if that is a mitigating weight on the totalizing talk of Germanic “duty” and “self-becoming” (and it might not be).
“What Makes Indians Laugh” Surrealism, Ritual, and Return in StevenPazzie and Joseph Beuys by Claudia Mesch, [Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 6:1(2012)]
A View Beyond the Personal by Ange Mlinko, NY Review of Books, 5/23/2019 [Review of John Koethe’s Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016]
HMS Bounty by Rachel Kushner, Yale Review (January 2018)
It’s said that capitalism relies on a system of selling something you don’t own to someone who doesn’t want it. Which is identical to how a Lacanian defines love. The lover makes a gift of his banality as if it were a wonder. He pretends to offer something more than his banality, a piece of the world that reflects his love and that he does not, in reality, possess. In both cases, love and futures, you force something you don’t own onto someone who does not want it.
Capital requires the confidence that you can do business with time. Alan Badiou says the revolution to come seems impossible only if you swallow the lie that the present is not. Once you see how impossible life already is, then the possibility of a real true actual emancipatory horizon comes into view. Got it?
[ . . . .]
In the Doge’s Palace in Venice there is a room that was once the largest indoor gathering place in all of Europe. Capacity was two thousand important men. The doges ruled Venice for six hundred years. There were 120 of them. The term of service was life. Around the upper edges of this grand salon, on all four walls, are painted portraits of all the doges. All the doges, that is, but one, a single Venetian doge who is represented by no portrait but instead a black banner, and under the banner text in Latin that reads, Here is the space reserved for Marino Faliero, decapitated for crimes.
Faliero was doge for only one year. One year of six hundred. One doge of 120. And yet: anyone who has ever been in the great salon of Venice, once the largest gathering indoor space in all of Europe; in fact, anyone asked to name a Venetian doge, a single one, any doge, will name Marino Faliero. Or at the very least, a person, when asked, will say, “The one whose memory they tried to erase. That’s the one I recall.”
[I have been in this big room, twice, and I remember the black banner, but not the man who – having been subject to erasure – became infamous and known]
Philosopher-Poets: John Koethe and Kevin Hart by Paul Kane [Raritan, Summer 2001]
Koethe’s poems typically chronicle what it is like to be experiencing life the way he does, rather than presenting the events themselves, which remain offstage and largely unavailable to us as readers. There is an intimate distancing at work whereby we get to know the poet’s experience without ever getting to know what happens to him. This makes Koethe a poet of the ambiguous antecedent . . . .
From ON BALANCE BY ADAM PHILLIPS:
The Authenticity Issue (114-15)
In her memoir Room for Doubt, the American writer Wendy Lesser has a chapter about living in Berlin; and her sense of what contemporary Berlin is like prompts invidious comparison with New York. There is, she has a sense, a “richly reflected innocence” about contemporary Berlin,
a zeal for the new that is both premised on appreciation of and wariness about the old. We have nothing like it in America. Every fw years New York ( and then the rest of the country) goes into a tortured soul-search and decides that we are all too ironic, that irony must now be thrown out so that something more – more what? more childlike? more authentic? more credulous? – something fresher and newer, at any rate, can be ushered in. But you cannot will such reforms.
The antidote for irony, and its sppposedly enerveating effect is, in Lesser’s telling list, something more childlike, more authentic, more credulous; reminiscent of Clare, and Banville in a different way, when the word ‘authenticity’ is used, it conveys something about immediacy. Irony is, as we say, a distance regulator and there is something that we nostalgic Romantics feel estranged from and want to get back to or closer to: the childlike, the authentic, states of credulity. The authentic in this list represents the retreat of skepticism, doubt, even reflection. It is trustworthy, and we can entrust ourselves to it. It allows us to yield rather than requiring our vigilance. If we can be more childlike, authentic and credulous, it is assumed, something fresher and newer can be ushered in, as though irony is our defense against the new, a kind of character armour, and if we could shrug it off, we could be more vulnerable, more receptive, capable of exchange and not ambitious for insulation.
READING, AND UNCLEAR IF I AM CONFUSED BY IT:
Form Follows Flow: A Material-driven Computational Workflow for Digital Fabrication of Large-Scale Hierarchically Structured Objects, by Laia Mogas-Soldevila, Jorge Duro-Royo, Neri Oxman
Design for the Modern Prometheus: Towards an Integrated Biodesign Workflow by Sunanda Sharma (M.S. Thesis, MIT, Media Arts and Sciences)
DORMANT READING
Whistler, life for art’s sake, Daniel Sutherland (no progress made at all)The Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan (no progress made at all)Zen and Japanese Culture, D.T. Suzuki [Purchased Kawaza Museum in Oct. 2018, been “reading” Since then]Swann’s Way (Davis) (no progress made at all). . . . . more . . . OR . . . . i suppose, less, worse, what have you.
