Nonnus

Unmaking

Is anything made for spectacle-based markets (blogs and so-called social networks definitely included) a part of real life, or just someone's commercial interests?

Image-producers, including those who write, design, create and teach, can be called "radical." Many even act out of, or in reaction to, political and religious motives. But artists have functioned as a very different kind of iconoclastic radical for almost a century. "The artist is no longer a maker of images, but an expert in their unmaking" (Boris Groys).

"What would happen," Groys wonders, "if all art created within market structures were to be judged as morally suspect in the same way as the art produced in totalitarian societies?"

The marketplace is not for people.

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World Series Wednesday

Twenty-Five Years Ago:

Now that's a celebration. In our nation's greatest metropolis, and no Yankees fans in sight. Photo from yahoo sports/AP.

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What's Wrong with Theology: A Short Case Study

Earlier today, browsing the Amazon page for Augustine's Essential Sermons, I came across this passage from the "Product Description":

The eleven volumes of Augustine's popular sermons (Sermones ad populum) . . . showcase Augustine the brilliant speaker and engaging preacher of the Word and have proven an indispensable resource for contemporary scholarship. . . . [Edmund] Hill's translation and extensive notes have received many accolades by scholars, but professors have clamored for a one-volume anthology in paperback form that would be affordable to students and that could be used as required texts in teaching undergraduates, graduate students and seminarians. . . . Students and preachers alike will discover Augustine's masterful interpretation of the Word of God and creative skills in engaging the people of God.

What's wrong with this description? More importantly, who is missing? These sermons are "an indispensable resource for contemporary scholarship," and the translations have received "many accolades by scholars," and this one-volume anthology will be useful for "undergraduates, graduate students and seminarians." But where is the layperson?There's a reason they ain't titled Sermones ad professorum. They were preached in a church to laypeople, and now they are tragically of interest primarily to scholars and students training to become scholars. The devoted layperson has been left out of the picture altogether. Language like this is a symptom of a disease — the co-opting of theology by the academy from its place in service to the church.

Augustine himself would have been unhappy with our bifurcation of theology and spirituality, or their institutional parallels, academy and church. Consider:

Factum audivimus: mysterium requiramus.
(We have heard the fact, let us seek the mystery.)

One of the maddening things about my "Christian spirituality" classes in grad school was the constant separation students fretted over between "head" and "heart." This may have been a legitimate problem, but the way they articulated it made it sound like the problem was somehow too much theology. Wrong! A bifurcation of "head" and "heart" is the result of faulty theology, not too much. Something we could learn by reading more Augustine.

(A bracing post-Enlightenment tonic for this ailment is Andrew Louth's marvelous book Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology, which Eighth Day Books has put back in print.)

Several Silences

 

Thoughts on Several Silences at the Renaissance Society

Helen Luke says: "We suffer from this noise--talk, talk, talk. In Victorian times everything was covered over thickly with whitewash and often an undercoat of hypocrisy. Now we have reacted by wanting to talk about everything in public, even the deepest, most secret things. Today, it is vitally important to know that the silence when one is alone is the only place where the final, really transforming thing may be known."*

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The work of Ryan Gander, A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor, blankets the majority of the Bergman Gallery floor with 100 glass bubbles or "moments." Within each bubble an etched sheet of paper is caught in motion--a blank page suspended. The motion of the paper is still, as are the marble-like containers that hold them. The piece captures action in stillness--or is it stillness in action?

If the viewing emphasis is on the trapped sheet of paper, you have the brief sense of the potential power and beauty of a silent moment. Perhaps an individual instant of awareness is about to be revealed from the quiet. Or as Gander's title may suggest, that the artist is keen to the futile potential of the paper, a yet un-done and undoubtedly great drawing has just slipped away, and he is mourning its loss.

But what of the crystalline spheres that lie en masse around the room? The scattered placement of the large glass marbles seem to show that the objects themselves were once in motion, and perhaps as marbles are wont, were rolling and crashing about at a frenzied pace. In a culture of talking, colliding and crashing, maybe the marbles wondered, what is the point of speech without understanding? and stopped moving altogether, bringing about a serious stillness. Despite previous false transparencies, maybe the newly muted in this space find a kind of communication that can see, perhaps for the first time, that each contains the same sheet of paper within.

Gander's objects can elicit a memorial to potential and a hopeful corporate pause, creating several--or at least a few--silences of its own.

*Helen M. Luke, The Way of Woman: Awakening the Perennial Feminine (New York: Doubleday, 1995), chap. 18.

Further Shifts in the Balance Between Religion, Politics and Art

Notes from Matthew Jesse Jackson's August 2008 Bookforum review of Art Power, by Boris Groys:

Boris Groys was born in East Berlin in 1947 and was educated in the Soviet Union.

"Having witnessed firsthand the fall of a secular superpower, Groys takes for granted that there will be further shifts in the balance between religion, politics and art." He is uniquely positioned to comment on culture created in a "free market" system.

Groys questions whether institutional critics have it right when they assert that art made for spectacle-based markets are more a part of "real life" than art presented within the historically and critically informed space of the museum.

More interestingly, he asserts that it is the terrorist and anti-terrorist alike who practice image-making. These iconophiles attempt to shock or seduce viewers into compliance or participation by adding to "modernity's infinite sequence of images." [We would also note that free-market religious cultural production most often operates in the same way, adding to the stuff of material culture.] These image-producers can be called "radical" (acting out of, or in reaction to, political and religious extremism), but artists have functioned as a very different kind of iconoclastic radical for almost a century. "The artist is no longer a maker of images, but an expert in their unmaking."

"What would happen," Groys wonders, "if all art created within market structures were to be judged as morally suspect in the same way as the art produced in totalitarian societies?"

He compares Jesus Christ to Duchamp's readymades:

Since Christ is outwardly similar to other men, and the readymade resembles other objects, both embody a "difference beyond difference"; that is, they manifest a difference "that we are unable to recognize because it is not related to any pregiven structural code." In art, [Groys] concludes, the "new" is not merely that which is different, but that which is different in a different way.

According to Jackson, Groys's "art criticism is a work of art that unfolds through philosophical language, rather than a collection of philosophical essays on art." He quotes Groys: "Art criticism has long since become an art in its own right; with language as its medium and the broad base of images available, it moves as autocratically as has become the custom in art, cinema, or design."

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Monica Ponce de Leon

Architect Monica Ponce de Leon lectured on Disciplinary Transgressions at the Art Institute of Chicago this week. As a full-time academic (newly appointed Dean of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Michigan) and a full-time industry practitioner (Principal in Office dA), she is well-suited to speak on such a topic. She balked at the tired academic model of interdisciplinary studies and suggested plans to bring to the academy what her practice already incorporated: an amalgam of industrial design, architecture, urban design and engineering. More outward-reaching. Less navel-gazing.

She has a fascination with both digital production and hand-assembly. She often develops a system of flexible fabricated components to determine an aesthetically varied built structure. A project that begins as a small-scale exploration of materials and technology can transform into a site-specific installation, or when clients come knocking, into the surfaces and structures of an entire building.

Ponce de Leon's interest in surfaces, described as skins or clothing, was exemplified by Office dA's proposal for the House in New England. In order to cover the structure with twisting, winding strips of rubber in the construction phase, strange things occurred: collaboration. The rubber manufacturer did not want to be held liable for this modified use, so the installation and testing was then championed by the construction team who ultimately discovered a new way to use the material. Violà! A solution.

While Ponce de Leon's presentation at the AIC focused on the practical matters of materials, technology and client and site constraints, I wanted to know her thoughts about the overall impact and form of the building. How does she achieve such surprising and elegant geometries? Even among architecture "friends" she wasn't going to reveal everything.

Christian America is Changing

Jeff recently summarized a bit of Robert Louis Wilken’s book The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. Our impression was how similar conservative Romans then sounded to conservative Christians today. Both fretting over the changes in the world as they know it.

Then Damon Linker helpfully mocked Newsweek's attempt to sell magazines with their over-the-top cover story headline "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." Linker's point is an excellent one. Christianity will remain, but the preferred theologies will change. Liberal (mainline) Protestantism was favored through the middle decades of the twentieth century. And now we're left wondering if we will continue to see a move toward "a synthesis of traditionalist evangelical Protestantism and orthodox Roman Catholicism, as the religious right has advocated over the past decade or so?" That synthesis has recently lost political momentum because it was seen as the religion championed by the very unpopular George W. Bush.

Mr. Linker asks "What will provide the theological content of the nation's civil religion now that the 'mere orthodoxy' of the evangelical-Catholic alliance has proven unsuitable for a pluralistic nation of 300 million people?" His vote is for the resurgence of an Enlightenment-era moralistic therapeutic deism.

We wonder if all three of America's most popular Christianities may not have had their day. The deism of the founders, the liberal Protestantism of the first half of the last century, and our own conservative evangelical-Catholicism.

Perhaps the confusion of "traditionalist" with mere conservatism will be cleared up with the re-emergence of a more visceral, pre-modern flavored religion. If we were asked, we'd say Americans are increasingly most receptive to the mystical, non-rational knowledge offered by the religions-as-wisdom traditions. It's been said (I've heard it from Dave Hickey and J.G. Ballard) that we're already in a new dark ages in which most of us are incapable of understanding the technology that determines so much of our daily experience. Our "theologies," too, will become much more intuitive, less formal, systematic and academic. Perhaps the immediate future will look something like the short-lived spiritual eclecticism of the 1970s.

It may never be the American Civil Religion, but we might consider preparing for more hippies and a healthy dose of poetic heterodoxy—especially moderate forms of syncretism capable of respecting the distinctive integrity of each faith as it is practiced.

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Adrian Piper: Every Artist a Critic

"The art critic is the official critic, but hardly the only one." —Adrian Piper

Artists communicate in a personal "idiolect." If their work is original, making a unique or valuable contribution, its value will not be obvious. Conventional language must be employed by the artist in order discuss or explain their intentions and unique contributions. As Piper points out, many artists who have found success see no need to learn to discuss their work because success of a kind has already been achieved. "My work speaks for itself," is the favorite mantra, when the artist's success really depends on the critical consensus of art-professional legitimators who have spoken for it.

The artist has handicapped herself by abdicating control over the public interpretation of the work to others who may not have the time or commitment to interpret it properly.

Audiences and readers criticize artists, curators, dealers, writers and editors. Even the non-art professional audience influences the collective evaluation. Most often negatively. "The fact that the general public hates some work may, in fact, be just the épater le bourgeois badge of legitimacy it needs to put it over the top of institutional approval," she says. "The reason being that if ordinary people hate a work, the artist must be doing something right."

The artist also has evaluative responsibilities. This contradicts the too-common, naive, notion of the artist as unconscious genius creating from blind inspiration. As in, "I don't know why I did it, it just felt right."

Criticism at every level requires some basis for believing that the artist we like today will be able to hold our attention when they produce something new tomorrow. Official critics, other artists, collectors and audiences of all kinds do not wish to invest time and money in paying attention to an artist about whom our first impression was mistaken.

Ultimately, the art-world depends on inter-subjective evaluations. When judging an artwork, the professional critic actually risks the least, according to Piper, because he or she is paid to take those risks. The individual artist risks the most, perhaps, because she can hardly afford to be wrong very often.

In the case of the individual artist, aesthetic evaluation must be distinguished from entrepreneurial evaluation. If culture is produced according to market-research, there will be no style independent of such research from which an artist may draw. Advertising draws from fine art because business requires the risk-taking to be minimal, so advertising creative specializes in mimicry, and marketing that copies itself dries up quickly.

Source: "Criticizing the Critics: Artist Adrian Piper delivered a keynote lecture" at the Frieze Art Fair, 2006. Listen via podcast here.

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Opening Day 2009: Limitlessness & the Dead-Ball Era

For opening day this year, a brief review of baseball during the dead-ball era.

Before 1920, the same ball would be put into play with almost every pitch. Because the ball would become softer and more loosely-wrapped as the game went on, hitters choked up on the bat and specialized in placing their hits precisely around the field. Base stealing was also important. 

Home runs of the long fly-ball variety were not common, and stadium dimensions were expansive. In 1908, it was 635 feet to center field at Boston's Huntington Avenue American League Baseball Grounds. When crowds were especially large, fans were seated behind ropes in the outfield.

Because the foul lines are rays extending from home plate, baseball will always possess an echo of mathematical infinitude. As Paul Goldberger points out in his recent New Yorker profile of the new stadiums in New York:

"A baseball outfield, technically, has no outer limits, just as a baseball game has no set time to end. The outfield stops where the stadium's builders decide it will stop. Urban ballparks had façades in front, to fit in with neighboring buildings, but were usually left low and open in the outfield, which had the effect of weaving the park into the neighborhood, so that, from the right place, you might catch an enticing glimpse of the green paradise within."

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Big Diffy Videos

We just realized that we've never posted or in any way publicized these great videos by Big Diffy.

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