Nonnus

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.

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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A Worthwhile Motto

Rivington Arms will close after its final show on January 25th. Known for showing very young artists, the gallery was owned by Melissa Bent and Mirabelle Marden (both of whom remain quite young themselves).

Artists formerly represented by Rivington Arms include the group Lansing-Dreiden and Dash Snow. Snow, of course, has been celebrated as the return of the bohemian superstar artist. Lansing-Dreiden are a collaborative who have produced drawings, animated films, and music. 

Completely unrelated

Here's a worthwhile motto we came across: "Your life will be rich if you study and critique what you love. Get to know what you love. And then do what you know."

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Educational Ritual, Natural Trance

Listening to Touch Radio's presentation of field recordings recently, we found ourselves concentrating on the quietest of sounds. Hearing it with another required us to abandon the headphones. Eyes just went closed. Heads lowered, or bowed, themselves—seemingly without the mind telling them to.

Why did the body part of ourselves start working this way? One reason, certainly, has to do with the fact that the sound of hooves splashing and elks braying is so compelling. The experience of listening carefully feels ritualistic; like tuning in to spirits around a ouija board or a séance. The ears need to work harder than usual to pick out what is a hoof-beat, say, and what is just mic noise or tape hiss. The tempo and pacing of this piece of "music" (recorded and minimally edited by Diane Hope) is based almost entirely on the choices of birds, elk and coyotes. The seeming randomness of the elk's decisions about when to produce its honking sounds set us trying to understand the mindset of this hoary creature.

Imaginitavely notating the beast's song, like a composer's amanuensis, we found that it features more bars full of rests than even the most minimal of conventional compositions. The impossible time signature slowed our own heart and mind to an unusually peaceful tempo. Rests can be contemplative, meditative, worshipful. But thank God the honking of an elk is entirely non-sentimental. Little unearned emotion is found in the wild. Thank you, forests and rivers. Thanks, too, pagan spirits. You earn it every day.

Nature gives us calendars and mathematics that are less precise, less useful, but certainly more musical than our own abstractions of time into the hands of a clock and the squares of a wall calendar.

Hold on while we go look something up in Sanford Kwinter's Architectures of Time:

"Nature itself is wild, indifferent, and accidental; it is a ceaseless pullulation and unfolding, a dense evolutionary plasma of perpetual differentiation and innovation. Each thing, it may be said, changes and arrives in time, yet the posture of externality that permits precise measure and perfect mastery can be struck and assumed only in space; one must withdraw oneself from the profuse, organic flux in which things are given, isolate discrete instants as projected frozen sections, and then interpolate abstract laws like so much mortar to rejoin these sections from the new perspective."

Difference née relativity, indeed, Mr. Gillick.

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A Helpful Criticism

Contemporary spiritual and religious culture rarely rises to the level of its "influences." Rather than create an addition to current movements and traditions, religious messages are packaged as advertising or propaganda. While more subtle than previous generations' fundamentalisms, this religious culture remains (often unknowingly) oppositional, apologetic or proselytizing.

When contemporary movements and extant artistic traditions are participated in, we choose popular, less-serious forms incapable of communicating complex or difficult content.

A Modest Goal in the Form of A Helpful Criticism

From a recent review in The Wire (the names aren't important):

"___ and ___ can scarcely be called the freshest of influences, but ___ finally manages to insinuate themselves into the ___ tradition rather than merely mimic its shape and form." 

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Ben Marcus is a Rat-Drifter

The fictional character Ben Marcus explains his allergy to words:

"I don't like to write, I don't like to read, and I like language even less. My father read to me as a boy and I was mannered enough not to stop him. It was unbearable–book after book that failed to make or change me, my father's lips twisting and stretching during a supposed story hour, massaging a stream of nonsense inside his mouth. I have always tried to be polite about words–good manners are imperative in the face of a father wrestling with a system that has so clearly failed–yet I find language plainly embarrassing. It is poor form, bad manners, that so much hope is pinned to such wrong sounds out of the mouth, to what is really only a sophisticated form of shouting and pain. It is not pleasant for me to hear 'foreign' languages, either. All languages are clearly alien and untrue, and, absent of so-called meaning, it is repeatedly clear that language is a social form of barely controlled weeping, a more sophisticated way to cry. To speak is to grieve, and I would prefer not to listen to a weeping animal all day and every day, sobbing and desperate and lost. Particularly when that animal calls itself my father" (Ben Marcus, Notable American Women, New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2002, pp. 93-94).

As an artist, Ben Marcus is an arch self-sabotager. He takes the ideas of previous language insurrectionists and quarantines them in literature. Worse, he subjects them to the middle-class.  The feeling of vegetative distance– the absurd, pervert sexlessness, for instance–which oozes out of Marcus' prose can only come from a panel of academic and domestic representatives who have taken up residence in his brain. By essentially letting the PTA edit his books, then, Ben Marcus successfully puts the avant-garde in the living room.

Charline von Heyl's Artist's Book Sabotage in Artforum

Antonin Artaud encouraged the use of the actor's "screaming box," the nonverbal voice, as a weapon against passive misunderstanding. Meredith Monk uses non-language in her performances and compositions. She doesn't like it when "one has to sit and listen to words all the time when really none of the other faculties are being used." That covers theater and music art, now consider the book abstracted to its least wordy, most optical form:

"Rejecting both written language and illustration, Sabotage is a sort of image-text that gets straight to one of the book format's most abstract possibilities: the material production of a sort of counterspace that exists beyond meaning" (John Kelsey, "1000 Words: Charline von Heyl's Talks About Sabotage, 2008" Artforum, October 2008, pp. 330-339). 

von Heyl in the same publication: Sabotage is "a book that mimics the feeling of a story without ever delivering."  "I want to get abstraction to a point where it screams that it is something: a representation and a thing. I am interested in a kind of iconic statement that, in the moment when you actually try to read it, refuses exactly that and insists on having nothing to say."

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Art & Spirituality at PS1

NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith is on view at P.S.1 through January 26, 2009. The exhibition, co-organized by the Menil Collection in Houston, takes its title from a phrase coined by the poet Ishmael Reed. In 1970, Reed wrote, "Neo-HooDoo believes that every man is an artist, and every artist a priest."  

The exhibition draws attention to some contemporary artists' interest in ritual, folk beliefs and spirituality from outside organized religions and Christianity.  Ultimately, Holland Cotter of the New York Times writes:

"multiculturalism,which reopened the door to spirituality in art, is out of fashion. . . . After several years of submersion in lightweight post-Pop painting, clever design and quip-driven soft politics, we seem to be ready for something with a little more depth, breadth and soul. . . . [NeoHooDoo] is not forceful enough to be an answering sort of show. But it asks old questions about unanswerables . . . in slightly new ways, and that's a start" ("Making Secular Art Out of Religious Imagery," New York Times, October 29, 2008). 

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