George Kuchar by Mary Pacios

Sunday, April 28, 2013, 7pm
Kuchar picture star and editor/publisher of George and Mike’s autobiography Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool, Mary Pacios introduces:
Portraiture in Black, 1995
Jungle Jezebel, 1994
Mike Kuchar’s Leticia’s Poem, 2002

Thursday, March 14, 2013, 7pm
Eclipse of the Sun Virgin, 1967
Pagan Rhapsody, 1970
A Passage to Wetness, 1990
The Cage of Nicolas, 1994

Monday, November 26, 2012, 7pm

Artist Ashby Lee Collinson introduces:
Portrait of Ramona, 1971 (16mm)
Neil Golderg’s She’s a Talker, 1993
Les Blank’s Gap-Toothed Woman, 1987

Sunday, September 30, 2012, 2pm

Critic Charles Bernstein introduces:
I, of the Cyclops, 2006
Zealots of the Zinc Zone, 2010
Webtide, 2010


Tuesday, August 14, 2012, 7pm
The Devil’s Cleavage, 1975 (16mm)

Thursday, April 19, 2012, 6:30pm
At WESTERN BRIDGE, Seattle

Weather Diary 1, 1986

Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 7pm
Mongreloid, 1978
Wild Night in El Reno, 1977
Weather Watch, 1991

Monday, March 23, 2012, 7pm
Weather Diary 1, 1986

Monday, September 26, 2011, 7pm
Empire of Evil, 2011
Midnight Carnival, 2011
The Butchered Beefcake, 2011

Sunday, September 25, 2011, 7pm
Hold Me While I’m Naked, 1966
Secrets of the Shadow World, 1999
Ascension of the Demonoids, 1985
I, An Actress, 1977

Sunday, June 26, 2011, 7pm
We’s A Team, 1989
Zombies of Zanzibar, 2010

Monday, January 31, 2011, 7pm
Delectable Destinations, 2010

Sunday, July 11, 2010, 7pm
A Reason to Live, 1976
Stench of Satan, 2001

Monday, December 7, 2009, 7pm
Symphony For a Sinner, 1979

Monday, September 21, 2009, 7pm
Orphans of the Cosmos, 2008
Mongreloid, 1978

Tuesday, April 22, 2008, 7pm
Faulty Fathoms, 2006
Hush, Hush Sweet Harlot, 1999
I, An Actress, 1977

THE COLLECTION
LINK (12 MB)

THE SELECTIONS
Stephen Scobie, 2013
Caitlin Murray, 2012
Tim Johnson, 2012
Will Holder, 2012

 

A MODEL OF ORDER: Ian Hamilton Finlay and the French Revolution[1]

By Stephen Scobie

The French Revolution may seem like an odd choice of topic for a late 20th century Scottish experimental poet. Yet Ian Hamilton Finlay, one of the leading figures in the international movement called Concrete Poetry, was for many years fascinated by the events of 1789 to 1794 in France. He found in the Revolution—in its iconography and its ideology—an exemplary test case for ideas about contemporary politics and aesthetics, and the flexibility of Concrete Poetry’s visual idioms provided the ideal medium for exploring these ideas.

Most of the works in this exhibit date from around 1989, which was the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. Finlay indeed proposed works for the official celebration of the Bicentenary that were rejected by French authorities, amidst fierce and undignified controversy. His evident admiration for such extreme Revolutionary leaders as Maximilien Robespierre and Antoine Saint-Just[2] was misinterpreted as a simple-minded endorsement of the Terror.[3] Nevertheless, Finlay remained fascinated by the French Revolution, and continued to produce many works relating to it, before and after 1989. This exhibition is devoted to a selection of these works.

The iconography of the official celebration was itself more than a little ambivalent. Images of the liberated Bastille prison were everywhere; the tricolor abounded; and postcards offered endless risqué variations on the theme of “sans-culottes.”[4] Conspicuously absent, however, was any evidence of what is, arguably, the Revolution’s most potent visual symbol: the guillotine.

The guillotine is the dark shadow of the Revolution. It’s fine to proclaim Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, but no one in Paris in 1989 wanted to celebrate the Terror. In the orthodox historical interpretation, the French Revolution is exemplary among revolutions in showing how the fervor of high ideals degenerates into factional bloodlust: how, in the famous words of the Girondin (moderate) politician Pierre Vergniaud, “it must be feared that the Revolution, like Saturn, successively devouring its children, will engender, finally, only despotism.”[5] The guillotine is the emblem of this degeneration, the visual image of the Terror. As an image, the guillotine still has the power to terrify, to disturb, and to disrupt the complacency of any “politically correct” celebration.

Finlay, however (and this was a large part of the objections to his proposals), never ignored the guillotine. Take, for example, an emblem created by him in 1991: a drawing of the guillotine accompanied by the caption “A model of order even if set in a space filled with doubt.”[6] As with so many of Finlay’s works, the point lies in the interaction between the visual and the verbal, the image and its accompanying text. In this case, the text is also a quotation, and thus brings with it all the implications of its original context. But before I discuss that source, I would like to consider the words as they stand. That the French Revolution was “a space filled with doubt” is obvious enough; but in what sense, then, was the guillotine “a model of order”?

Certainly, it was as a “model of order” that the machine was first proposed to the National Assembly, in 1789, by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (who later bitterly resented the fact that his name had become attached to the instrument of his idea). It was part of a typical Enlightenment proposal for the rational reform of the criminal laws; the guillotine would be the most efficient, humane, and egalitarian method of execution. It did away with the variety of different methods—most of them long drawn-out exercises in torture, or else liable to hideous botching by incompetent executioners—that were applied in ancien régime France. Henceforth, no one would be broken on the wheel or hung, drawn, and quartered; the quick death of beheading, once the “privilege” of the nobility, would now be the common lot of lord and peasant. Engravings presented by Dr. Guillotin show the executions taking place in private, rural settings; they suggest, as Simon Schama says, “dignified serenity rather than macabre retribution.”[7] By the time the guillotine was officially adopted in 1792, it had also become important for the state to reclaim the legal monopoly of violence. The guillotine replaced not only more barbaric methods of official execution but also mob lynchings, the kind of indiscriminate massacre that took place in the Paris prisons in September 1792.

In all these senses, then, the guillotine can be seen as “a model of order.” It stood for the values of rationality, humanity, and control that formed the Revolution’s ideology (though not always, by any means, its practice). Many of the revolutionary politicians, including Robespierre and Saint-Just, had gone through a school system that included intensive study of the oratory of the Roman Republic. The stern Roman ideals of civic duty, memorably presented in David’s painting of Brutus and his dead sons, were at the center of the Revolution’s idea of Virtue. It is all too easy for a modern audience to scoff at the protestations of Robespierre and Saint-Just, and to see their “virtue” stained by the blood spilled by Dr. Guillotin’s humane device. But they themselves saw no contradiction.

In a folder of cards entitled 4 Blades (1986), Ian Hamilton Finlay presents four linked quotations, each one printed on a drawing (again by Gary Hincks) of a guillotine blade:

Frighten me, if you will, but let the terror which you inspire
in me be tempered by some grand moral idea.

The form of each thing is distinguished by its function or
purpose; some are intended to arouse laughter, others terror,
and these are their forms.

The government of the Revolution is the despotism of liberty
against tyranny. Terror is an emanation of virtue.

Terror is the piety of the Revolution.

The first quotation is from the 18^th century writer and encyclopedist Denis Diderot; the second from the 17^th century painter Nicolas Poussin; the third from Maximilien Robespierre; the fourth is by Finlay himself. To read the interaction of these quotations is a complex matter—and is, indeed, an exemplary exercise in the “reading” of Finlay’s poetry. Diderot’s reputation is that of a moderate, reasonable man, the epitome of the Enlightenment; Robespierre is commonly dismissed as a totalitarian fanatic. Yet both insist on the moral function of terror. Poussin’s description of form as determined by function relates not only to the aesthetics of neo-Classical painting but also to the single-minded efficiency of the blade on which it is here inscribed; and his evocation of terror as one of the purposes of art echoes back to Aristotle and the classical doctrine of catharsis. Finlay’s dictum hinges on the very equivocal reaction that a contemporary secular audience is liable to have to the word “piety.” The visual format presents each quotation in an equivalent way—these are four blades, all of them aphorisms with a cutting edge—but also balances them against each other—these are four blades.[8] None of this is to argue that Finlay is, in any simple way, endorsing terror (the Terror; terror-ism); it is to suggest that the issues are nowhere as simple (or, as it were, clear-cut) as the conventional historiography of the French Revolution has come to imply.

4 Blades is balanced, in Finlay’s work, by a lethally simple booklet entitled 4 Baskets (1990). Each page features a drawing, by Kathleen Lindsley, of a wicker basket; the drawings are detailed, realistic, and charming. Each drawing has as a title a single word, an adjective drawn from the cultural vocabulary of the Enlightenment. The first basket is entitled “Domestic,” and it contains three French loaves and a bottle of wine; the second is entitled “Pastoral,” and it contains a fishing net and an abundant sheaf of corn; the third is entitled “Parnassian,” and it contains a wreath of laurel leaves, the poet’s crown; the fourth is entitled “Sublime,” and it contains two severed heads.

The alliance of Terror and the Sublime was a central aspect of Enlightenment aesthetics, notably proclaimed (ironically, since he was a bitter opponent of the French Revolution) by Edmund Burke:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and
danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is
conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner
analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime….
I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification
of power….  That power derives all its sublimity from the
terror with which it is generally accompanied….
Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly
or latently the ruling principle of the sublime.[9]

Finlay follows through on this association on numerous occasions: for instance, in the print Two Landscapes of the Sublime (1989), which juxtaposes the guillotine with the most traditional “natural” instance of the Romantic Sublime, a waterfall.  The same point is also made in a folding card entitled “SUBLIME,” which takes a sentence from “FH” (Friedrich Hegel) and adds to it a sentence by “IHF”:

Where the eagles circle in
darkness, the sons of the
Alps cross from precipice
to precipice, fearlessly,
on the flimsiest rope
bridges.

In the Place de la Révolution
the man-made mountain
torrent clatters
and clatters.

(The “man-made mountain” is an allusion to the fact that the extreme Jacobin faction in the Constituent Assembly was popularly known as “The Mountain.”)

For Finlay, then, the association of Terror and the Sublime is brought firmly into the political arena (in ways of which Burke would have utterly disapproved). A modest folding card from 1989 bears the title “A Proposal for the Celebration of the Bicentenary of the French Revolution”; inside, in large red letters, one reads simply: “A REVOLUTION.” In 1984, he designed a medal (struck in bronze by Nicolas Sloan), one side of which shows two Classical columns flanked by the word “Virtue,” while the other side shows the two vertical columns of the guillotine, flanked by the word “Terror.” Virtue and Terror become, quite literally, the two sides of the same coin. In Finlay’s work, this conjoined evocation of Virtue, Terror, and the Sublime, within a political setting, is not simply an exercise in 18^th century antiquarianism, but a direct challenge to the political values of contemporary liberal, secular society.

Finlay in no way diminishes or ignores the violence, the destructive power of Terror. Indeed, he faces it head on, in ways which (he believes) modern secular society does not. “Democracies,” he writes, “are not at ease with their weaponry, or with their art,[10] because both depend on ideas of the Absolute which, in Finlay’s view, secular society cannot accommodate and prefers to ignore. “Classicism was at home with power,” he continues; “the modern democracies (whose secularism has produced extraordinary power) are not.” By its reinsertion of the Sublime (as Virtue, as Terror) into a society that finds such an equation unacceptable, Finlay’s poetry underlines the distance that separates our society from one that could, authentically, long for the Classical past.

Stephen Bann writes that Finlay’s Classicism is “intimately linked to a sense of estrangement from the Classical, and, for that reason, it has its most clear affinities with the art of those epochs when estrangement from the past was the dominant tone.”[11] There is, in fact, a double distancing here. The Jacobin idealists longed for a Roman past from which they felt separated; Finlay, as it were, longs for that longing. “The world has been silent since the Romans left,” wrote Saint-Just elegiacally. For Finlay, one might say, the world has been silent since Saint-Just left—guillotined, along with Robespierre, in the month of Thermidor, Year II of the Revolution. But his words remain, inscribed in stone at the base of a classical column, set in the wildest, loneliest section of Finlay’s garden at Little Sparta.

* * * * *

Let me now return to where I started, the image of a guillotine captioned “A model of order even if set in a space filled with doubt.” Let me take all I have said about the guillotine, Terror, and Virtue, and invite the viewer of this small exhibition to re-apply it in a new context—or rather, in an old context, namely, the original source of that phrase. It comes from a letter Finlay wrote to the French poet Pierre Garnier in September of 1963. This passage has been widely reproduced[12] as one of the founding manifestos of Concrete Poetry. I think it is still worth reprinting again, at some length:

For myself I cannot derive from the poems I have written any
‘method’ which can be applied to the writing of the next poem;
it comes back, after each poem, to a level of ‘being,’ to an almost
physical intuition of the form… to which I try, with huge
uncertainty, to be ‘true.’ Just so, ‘concrete’ began for me with
the extraordinary (since wholly unexpected) sense that the
syntax I had been using, the movement of language in me, at a
physical level, was no longer there—so it had to be replaced
with something else, with a syntax and movement which would
be true of the new feeling (which existed in only the vaguest way,
since I had, then, no form for it…). So that I see the theory as a
very essential (because we are people, and people think, or should
think, or should TRY to think) part of our life and art; and yet I
also feel that it is a construction, very haphazard, uncertain, and by
no means as yet to be taken as definitive…. I approve of Malevich’s
statement, ‘Man distinguished himself as a thinking being and
removed himself from the perfection of God’s creation. Having
left the non-thinking state, he strives by means of his perfected
objects, to be again embodied in the perfection of absolute,
non-thinking life… ‘That is, this seems to me, to describe,
approximately, my own need to make poems… though I don’t
know what is meant by ‘God.’ And it also raises the question
that, though the objects might ‘make it,’ possibly, into a state of
perfection, the poet and painter will not. I think any pilot-plan
should distinguish, in its optimism, between what man can
construct and what he actually is. I mean, new thought does not
make a new man; in any photograph of an aircrash one can see
how terribly far man stretches—from angel to animal; and one
does not want a glittering perfection which forgets that the
world is, after all, also to be made by man into his home. I
should say—however hard I would find it to justify this in
theory—that ‘concrete’ by its very limitations offers a tangible
image of goodness and sanity; it is very far from the now-fashionable
poetry of anguish and doubt…. It is a model, of order, even if
set in a space which is full of doubt….[13] I would like, if I could, to
bring into this, somewhere the unfashionable notion of ‘Beauty,’
which I find compelling and immediate, however theoretically
inadequate. I mean this in the simplest way—that if I was asked,
‘Why do you like concrete poetry?’ I could truthfully answer
‘Because it is beautiful.’

This passage invites extensive commentary, some of which I have attempted to provide elsewhere.[14] For now, let me make only a few preliminary suggestions for further consideration.

— “Concrete” poetry depends upon a reworking of syntax in language, in a way closely analogous to the reworking of perspective in Cubism. (Finlay himself was deeply indebted to the Cubist painters, especially Juan Gris.)

— Finlay’s work, both as a poet and as a visual artist, is deeply traditional, in that it depends upon elements drawn from the whole history of Western culture; at the same time, it is deeply experimental, in that the deployment of these elements takes place in ways that are new, unexpected, and demanding. The method of reading each poem is not explained in advance by poetic conventions: it has to be intuited from the form presented by each individual poem.

— The “beautiful” is not merely an intensification of the pretty: it is a high and stern ideal, in which the Sublime meets and acknowledges Terror. It is in this sense that even the guillotine, at the moment when the blade falls, is beautiful.

Further Reading:

Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety. New York: Picador, 1992.

David Andress, The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution. London: Abacus, 2006.

1 This essay is adapted from a chapter in my book Earthquakes and Explorations: Language and Painting from Cubism to Concrete Poetry (University of Toronto Press, 1997).

2 Robespierre and Saint-Just are the Revolutionary leaders most often cited in Finlay’s work. He seems to have had little interest in Danton, and there are only a few references to Marat—though one print does deliciously insert “L’Ami du Peuple” (the title of Marat’s ferocious and scurrilous magazine) as part of a typical front cover for “People’s Friend” (a cozy and conservative Scottish magazine devoted to family, crafts, and domesticity).

3 By “the Terror,” I refer not only to the extreme violence practiced by the ruling faction around Robespierre in 1794, but also to the ideology of Terror, which I will discuss further in this essay.

4 The costume of laborers, adopted as the name of the working class. Literally, “without pants”—hence the ribald jokes.

5 Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989): 714.

6 The drawing is by Gary Hincks, based on an engraving in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris.

7 Schama, 621.

8 Elsewhere, Finlay puns on the meaning of “blade” as “a dashing young man,” presenting an image of Saint-Just as “a young blade.”

9 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. J.T. Boulton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958): 39, 64–5, 58.

10 Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer (London: Reaktion Books, 1985): 155.

11 Stephen Bann, Ian Hamilton Finlay: An Illustrated Essay (Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 1972): 11.

12 It appeared first in the British magazine Image. Its most influential reprint was in Mary Ellen Solt’s anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970): 84.

13 This is how the phrase appears in the letter as reprinted by Solt. As to why the later work alters the punctuation, and changes “of” to “with,” I haven’t the faintest idea.

14 See footnote 1, above, especially for the connection between Concrete Poetry and Cubism.

SATURDAY, MARCH 30
(all films 16mm)

Screening Room
MF, 1968–, variable length

Melting
TA, 1964–65, 6 min.

Olivia’s Place
TA, 1966/74, 6 min.

— —–
TA, 1966–67, 12 min.

( )
MF, 2003, 21 min.

SUNDAY, MARCH 31

Production Stills
MF, 1970, 11 min. (16mm)

Cue Rolls
MF, 1974, 5.5 min. (16mm)

Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer
TA, 1975, 59 min. (35mm)

FRIDAY, APRIL 5

Protective Coloration
MF, 1979, video, 13 min. (3/4″ video transferred to DVD)

Standard Gauge
MF, 1984, 35 min. (16mm)

SATURDAY, APRIL 6

Los Angeles Plays Itself
TA, 2003, video, 169 min. (DVCAM)

FRIDAY, APRIL 12
(all films 16mm)

Projection Instructions
MF 1976, 4 min.

Picture and Sound Rushes
MF, 1973, 11 min.

Production Footage
MF, 1971, 10 min.

The Wilkinson Household
Fire Alarm
MF, 1973, 1.5 min.

The Director and His Actor
Look at Footage Showing Preparations
for an Unmade Film (2)
MF, 1968, 15 min.

Documentary Footage
MF, 1968, 11 min.

Phi Phenomenon
MF, 1968, 11 min.

SATURDAY, APRIL 13

Turning Over
MF, 1975, 13 min. (1/2″ video transferred to DVD)

Get Out of the Car
TA, 2010, 34 min. (16mm)

The Hollywood Theatre
4122 NE Sandy Boulevard
Portland, OR 97212

MONDAY, APRIL 15

Reconversão
TA, 2012, video, 67 min. (DVCAM)

at Northwest Film Center Whitsell Auditorium
1219 SW Park Avenue
Portland, OR 97205

]]> http://yaleunion.org/andersen-fisher/feed/ 0 http://yaleunion.org/angie-keefer/ http://yaleunion.org/angie-keefer/#comments Fri, 22 Mar 2013 06:10:19 +0000 bob http://yucontemporary.org/?p=3848 January 18, February 9, February 22, March 8, and March 22, promptly at 7:30pm
Free, $5 suggested donation

Over the next three months, Angie Keefer will give five different talks. The talks are brainy, but Keefer is not an intellectual doily maker. She is a woman without a program. She writes, edits, and publishes, but through it all hangs onto the particulate phenomena of lived life. And the more evenings you attend, the more inclined you may be to see and hear again with demurral, as mystery isn’t something that evaporates as knowledge increases. It grows along with explanations. Why doodle on the walls of the cave, why send mysterious messages, when one can speak directly? She asks the question not for wooden answers, but as a kind of implacable demonstration.

“Who, among thinkers, is interpreting the great world itself—landscape and culture together—in terms of human meaning? Is interpretation possible at all? We lock in asylums people who see meaning in clouds and rocks, but we heap honors on people who see meaning in children’s jokes and patterns scratched on pots. Where do those of us who are not in asylums draw the line—by tacit agreement—between the humanly meaningful and meaningless? Is the search for meaning among the high heaps of the meaningless a fool’s game? Is it art’s game?”[1] Keefer inches onto these absurdly large questions without making a transparently ideological claim on the viewer, and without disappearing up her own ass, so to speak.

My advice to the budding viewer is to attach yourself to the formal decisions of Keefer’s talks—the how, rather than the what. In doing so, I have come to the low-wattage epiphany that her unadorned “Dick and Jane” sentences, her return of speech to art, is perhaps a pesticide to the claustral cubby of intellectualism.[2] Her style drops the audience into easy acoustic rhythms, so that they may be taken out of easy cerebral rhythms. Some may see this as a simple affect, but I’m with Nabokov, I think that style is not a method, not a tool, not a choice of words alone. Being much more than all this, style constitutes an intrinsic component or characteristic of the artist’s ethic.

A genuine interrogator, a real up-at-the-bow-artist who truly challenges authoritarian thinking,[3] we need desperately. But an interrogative posture is easy and banal. The commitment to ask even one combustible question requires something other than knowledge, posture, and slogans. People who maintain their dignity as artists, in a small way, by being puckish in exhibitions, simply delight the public. True interrogation about form requires homework—thought and risk. It takes a lot of dissatisfaction and dissolution to worm out one good stumper. I am reminded of something Joan Didion wrote about her friend, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick and the willful transgression implicit in the written enterprise: “She knew that to express oneself was to expose oneself, that to seize the stage was to court humiliation, that to claim the independence implicit in the act of writing could mean becoming like the women [Hardwick] describes in Sleepless Nights, left to ‘wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind, totally unprovided for’—and she accepted the risk.”[4]

Angie Keefer (b. 1977) graduated from Yale University in 1999. Her work has taken place at the 2012 São Paulo Biennial; MoMA, NY; Artist Space, NY; and the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, among others. In 2011, she co-founded, with David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey, THE SERVING LIBRARY. The Serving Library is a long-term project that looks at how the role of the library has changed over time, from fixed archive through circulating collection to a disseminating pimple on the internet. Of course, that description is not quite right, but expression is always a compromise.

Our gratitude to David Reinfurt, Stuart Bailey, Kitty Scott, Isla Leaver-Yap, Shannon Ebner, Elad Lassry, James Hoff, Chris Fitzpatrick, Will Holder, Sarah Demeuse, Josh Melnick, Scott Keefer, Jennifer Sikes, and Otto Hauser

1 Annie Dillard. Living by Fiction (New York: Harper & Row, 1982): 14.

2 The argument against intellectual decoration runs as far back as literary criticism itself, and was elaborated on by Mary Karr in her essay “Against Decoration” (1994). Aristotle called metaphors of all kinds the mere seasoning of the meat, and believed that clarity resided instead in everyday words. Ancient rhetoricians admonished writers to avoid, among other things, excessive use of intellectual tropes. These elaborate figures of speech could, it was argued, over-decorate a work and deaden the reader. In fact, early orators had to justify the use of a limited number of tropes by demonstrating the extremity of their own feeling. In other words, unless the orator could convey the depth and sincerity of his or her own experience, the use of these stylistic devices fell into the realm of mere decoration.

3 The spinning pinwheel—and its other incarnations: the tumbling hourglass, the cycling wristwatch, the progress bar —isn’t an implement, it’s a show. It appears intermittently, without warning, to signal a state of preoccupation, so that you, who were formerly in charge, but are now temporarily relegated to the audience, may be gently assured that any further inputs will be moot until the spinning wheel fulfills its distractive function, then disappears, whereupon the simulation of your tool-wielding agency may re-commence. If there is one element in the digital software user experience that cannot be avoided, this is it; you will encounter the pinwheel and its ilk. They are meant to persuade you that your computer is taking a moment to think.

4 Joan Didion, introduction to Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature, by Elizabeth Hardwick (New York: NYRB Classics, 2001).

…Are the world’s artists, with all their noble orderings, playing in the sand? Another way to phrase the same question is this: do artists discover order, or invent it? Do they discern it, or make it up? Finally—are the significance, causality, harmony, purpose, etc., which we find in art objects to be found in the actual world? …Are these structures really intelligences, the product of knowledge, which enlighten; or are they instead only play-pretties, the products of wishing, which console?

It is a shame, having stated the question so tidily, and I hope so poignantly, that we must now disallow it. For the drearily abstract truth of the matter is that there is no final difference between the two choices. The question pertains only to the realm of positivist knowledge—to science. One may discover America, which is actual, or invent a unicorn, which is not. Inventing a trip to the moon is mere literature until we discover a way to get there; the discovery of a unicorn would be very hard news indeed. In science, our fictions do not necessarily create our facts (although, as is well known, they may certainly facilitate their discovery, as Kepler’s elaborate, angelical cosmology led him to posit elliptical orbits). Even in the sciences, however, the matter becomes steadily cloudier as the levels of abstraction climb. What do we mean by asking if a context is actual? According to whom? For all we know of the actual is our knowledge of it, and that knowledge is contextual, partial, verbal, and so forth. Do we know that the brown pelican, Pelecanus occidentalis, is a bird of the order Pelecaniformes and the family Pelecanidae—or did somebody just make that up? Did we discover calculus or invent it? Do we discover or invent a new move in chess? Did we discover or invent the qualities of color and charm in particles? Anti-matter?

Outside of positivism, in the realm of understanding—of human interpretation—invention and discovery are the same process. It is all fiction. Did Plato, or Kant, or Freud, discover a series of significant relationships, or fabricate it? Did Noam Chomsky discover a series of significant relationships, or fabricate it? Did Schönberg? Did Mondrian? Did Confucius or the Baal Shem-Tov discover a series of significant relationships or fabricate it? Did Shakespeare? Did Conrad, did Beethoven, did Donne? The question is meaningless.

But let us go further. The intellectual, interpretive orders which we find in art objects must be there to be found in the actual world, for somebody found them, if only by making them up. But surely there are false interpretations, such as that the Aryan race is destined to rule Europe. Surely there are human orders which only madmen discern, such as the one in which the tide of history is understood to have risen and borne upon its breast the returned general Napoleon Bonaparte, in the person of the speaker. How do we distinguish between those inventions which we honor by the name “discoveries”—such as Freud’s—and those inventions we dismiss as balderdash, such as the doctrine of signatures? Alas, we have only empiricism. Some interpretations, such as Plato’s and Freud’s and Buddha’s, are still proving useful in their respective fields. This, in turn, is a matter of consensus. Consensus within the various cultures sets useful inventions/ discoveries in the shrines of convention, where they reign until consensus changes, when some even more useful fiction replaces the old, as the doctrine of signatures was replaced. This is all very well, and establishes that much of our question is disallowed. But we press on.

What are we to make of artistic interpretations of the great world? Do they obtain? Do those in what consensus calls a great work obtain in the actual world? We have seen that, so far as we know, interpretations of natural facts do not obtain outside their artistic contexts; Melville has not explained to us whales. Interpretations of human facts, however, may well obtain outside their contexts. In the presentation of Achilles and Lear and Lord Jim and Madame Bovary and Dorothea Casaubon and Ahab we may discern relationships between character and event, or character and its parts, which empiricism, if it could ever be directed to such insubstantial ends, would I think discover to be actual recurring patterns. These structures are actual; the articulation of them is discovery. This is a great value of literature. But this is referential. It presents a model of discoveries, of relationships interpreted out of the great world. Well and good.

But please, what about artistic (not interpretive) values in art? The idea of order is actual; a pebble is an ordering. But do the ordered relationships among all parts which we find in a great short story or sonnet exist in nature? Do the reflexive structures and intellectual patterns and purpose which we find in art—do these obtain elsewhere? Or do we merely make them up because our minds are uniquely adapted for making things up?

This is an appalling possibility. If our minds are selected for inventing bits of order, then art’s highest function is to shed light on the mind. And, terribly, any human artifact is the mind’s own simulacrum. A play or a government, a canal or a culture, is a physical replica by means of which the mind duplicates its own structures unwittingly, as a strand of DNA replicates itself inside a banana leaf. And if this is true, and the natural world which churned out the mind is a wreck and a chaos, like a rock slide, then the mind is a marvelous monster indeed. And the work of art (in addition to being the least of our worries) is always a tour de force in which the mind displays abilities absurdly in excess of, or at least incidental to, their survival function. For the ability to conceive and execute murals and epic poems and symphonies and novels is a grotesque trick of tissue which sprang from the pot of the possible, like the grossly overdeveloped antlers of the extinct Irish elk.

The mechanism would be this. The overrefined abilities which go into the production of art, religion, and any systems of value would have persisted within the expanding brain of the species, and developed further, and in fact made a rollicking success of the lot of us, because they are extremely adaptive—not for understanding what is, but for getting through the winter. The fictive ability to invent and order makes possible the imaginative conception and execution of shaped tools, the agricultural calendar, complex societies with myth, social ideals, and civic order, and other such dreary, survival-enhancing phenomena. The murals and novels, then, while not specifically useful, would be merely harmless excrescences of the same adaptive tissues, or at best, useful models of social ideals, or abstractly, ideas of order. By these lights, there is no order anywhere but in our brains, which are uniquely adapted for inventing it and for handling complex abstractions. These abilities have served us very well. The only significance and value which obtain anywhere are in the mind’s discernment of these fictive qualities in its own manufactured models. We create value and locate it in our monstrously overdeveloped mental self-replication, our stuttering repetitions of our brains’ own order, with which we have covered the gibbering earth.

This is the most dismal view—of art and of everything—I can imagine. It must be admitted that one idea in this book is consistent with this view, and even points to it: the suggestion that we already agree tacitly that human significance is the only significance. Although all the generations of people, ever since we can remember—artists, thinkers, cranks, and pagans of every stripe—have intensively sought and sometimes found meaning in the natural world, none of those meanings has “stuck.” Nowhere does any consensus agree upon any set of human meanings for the natural world, but only for the human world. Our dwelling places where we dwell, along continental coasts and inland river valleys, are the only sites where what we want and so fiercely imagine can be found, the brain’s own baby doll: purpose, significance, and harmony. In the fabrication of these things we are skilled because the skill feeds and preserves us, as the specially adapted tissues of benthic fishes or of dragonflies feed and preserve them. Our brains secrete bright ideas and forms of order; armored scale insects secrete wax from their backs. Thus Cro-Magnon man imagines a long process like dressing skins, like planting grains, like forming diversified societies; thus armored scale insects survive humped under their own goo.

Excerpted from pages 177 to 182 of Annie Dillard’s Living By Fiction (New York: Harper & Row, 1982).

]]> http://yaleunion.org/angie-keefer/feed/ 0 http://yaleunion.org/marianne-wex/ http://yaleunion.org/marianne-wex/#comments Mon, 17 Dec 2012 18:25:50 +0000 bob http://yucontemporary.org/?p=2450 An Exhibition
October 12–December 15, 2012
Hours: Thursday–Saturday 1–7pm

Opening Reception
Friday, October 12, 6:30pm

Some comment in advance of the exhibition, as plain and bare as we can make it: In some circles, Marianne Wex is famous for not being famous enough, in other circles she’s a sociological footnote, and in still other circles, she does not exist. Historical snack food is no more acceptable here than anywhere else, but every so often, some less-known work comes speaking to us so loudly that we take ourselves out of the narrow confines of our own time and motion into the past tense.

The show is a single visual polemic. From 1972 to 1977, Wex rolled the stone of her commitment uphill and compiled an archive. She took thousands of banal and clandestine photographs of women and men in the streets of Hamburg. She re-photographed magazines and newspapers, advertisements, art-historical reproductions, her television, whatever was in reach. She arranged the results on her dotted line and collaged them into large paste-up panels and a book, a kind of expanded sibling entitled Let’s Take Back Our Space: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (1979). At the center of both the panels and the book is a wide disputation about how we create and present ourselves, and the degree to which gender-specific conditioning and hierarchies are reflected through everyday pose, gesture, and pre-verbal communication.

Her insistency on meaning has been a stumbling block for some viewers who would prefer to think the work single-minded. But to judge it solely by its frozen message of second-wave feminism is to ignore one’s own ambition as a viewer. It is also to ignore the way that works of art naturally progress from intention to elsewhere. Artists, try as they might, can’t nail meaning in place, so thirty-five years later, we’re left with the work’s frontal voice and everything it has come to say in spite of itself. We might then think of it non-exhaustively as an encyclopedia of gesture; an anthropological portrait of Hamburg in the 1970s; a monomaniacal tract on art history; a neglected classic of appropriation aesthetics; a treatise on photography and editing; an autobiography; and an exorcism.

Marianne Wex was born in 1937 in Hamburg, and now lives in Höhr-Grenzhausen, Germany. She studied at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg and taught there from 1963 to 1980. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she showed her work in national and international solo and group exhibitions (including at NGBK Berlin, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Bonner Kunstverein, and ICA London). Wex’s photo panels were shown in 2009 at Focal Point Gallery in London and in 2012 at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Germany. Yale Union presents the work of Marianne Wex for the first time in the United States.

The program will include a screening of Helke Sander’s film The All-Around Reduced Personality (1978) on Tuesday, October 30, 7pm; a reading by Chris Kraus on Sunday, November 4, 3pm; a screening of Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) at the Northwest Film Center on Tuesday, November 6, 7pm; and a talk by Avigail Moss on Sunday, November 18, 4pm.

Exhibition Pamphlet

This exhibition would not be possible without Mike Sperlinger; Bildwechsel, Hamburg; and the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe.

(1) An Experiment
(2) Standing Leg and Feet Positions
(3) Standing Arm and Hand Positions
(4) Sitting Arm and Hand Positions
(5) Sitting Leg and Feet Positions
(6) Possessive Gestures and Holds
(7) Sitting and Lying
(8) Historical Heads, Heads, and Hands in Advertising

(360 MB) The English printing of Let’s Take Back Our Space.

First Printing, 1979
© Marianne Wex
Frauenliteraturverlag Hermine Fees
All rights reserved
Typesetting: Johanna Albert and
Heidi Schuler (Anthofer’s ComposerSatz, Munich)
Reproductions: Anke Schwart, Die Druckerei,
Zollenspieket Hauptdeich 54, 2050 Hamburg 80
Printed by: Movimento Druck, Alexandrinenstr. 2-3,
1000 Berlin 61, West Germany

This book was edited in German by Lydia Schachtschneider,
Hamburg, translated into English by Johanna Albert, Munich,
assisted by Susan Schultz, Munich. The English edition was
edited by Pilar Alba and Virginia Garlick.

ISBN: 3-923173-00-8

Caption Correction: Panel: 291, PDF Page: 293
About 1200 IOT
Illustration, left to right, standing man, woman and child,
pre-Christian motif,
Freiburg cathedral
14

]]> http://yaleunion.org/marianne-wex/feed/ 0 http://yaleunion.org/saul-steinberg/ http://yaleunion.org/saul-steinberg/#comments Fri, 10 Aug 2012 06:26:46 +0000 flint http://yaleunion.dreamhosters.com/?p=761 The New Yorker’s in-house observer and...]]> An Exhibition
June 16–August 10, 2012

“For more than fifty years, Saul Steinberg was The New Yorker’s nonpareil sketcher, observer, spy and—though he would have thought the word dingy and depressing—its chief cartoonist, too. But then he disliked being called an artist, too, since it called to his mind the salon-swindle of ‘exciting’ objects and collectors’ manias. ‘All of those drawings, whimpering at night in the wrong houses,’ was his dry description of the consequences of selling pictures to collectors, rather than publishers.”* Whatever he is, this exhibition, naming The New Yorker’s consecutive editors, collects some two hundred of his one thousand published contributions, presented as is: magazines, collected through time, some slightly yellowed and hung with that irrevocable library smell, (Longview Public Library, October 22, 1955) and others, mint (V.G.+, no marks, no ears, no creases), en-sleeved and collected with breathy fandom.

If there is a way to think about Steinberg without thinking about the magazine itself, its distribution, advertising, reputation, the dense thicket of Marshall McLuhan adage (old clothes upon old bones), and the bloodless and goofy-footed ghost of Walter Benjamin, then we are blind to it. We can’t imagine how you could see Steinberg’s stenographic line without seeing the page it is on. “Everything has a message,” Steinberg noted, “even the smell of museums. In Europe, museums smell of town halls and grade schools; in America they smell like banks.” The circulatory system has a message, the page has a message, the ads have a message, the neighborhood of fiction and news have a message, all of it makes for juxtapositions as eerily apposite as anything the French surrealists or a blender could come up with. Libido-heavy Masterpiece pipe tobacco banners and pre-ironic ads for J.L. Hudson Vycron® polyester pant-suits running opposite a Steinberg, a Sylvia Plath poem, and a paragraph where Harold Rosenberg pours cold gravy over some poor painter’s heart. But perhaps we’ve left it soft. Sailed in, coveted the shell and neglected the pearl. So we’ll drop this spoon in hopes that you’ll think sometimes of other lovely things.

As a matter of biographical fact, Saul Steinberg (1914–1999) was a misfit. Born in Romania, European to the bone, he made little of his origins; “pure Dada,” he called his native land. He studied and made his artistic beginnings in Italy, receiving in 1940 a doctoral degree in an architecture he never practiced. Steinberg was shaken out of a congenial life by the turbulence of politics and war, and cast to America in the 1940s where he lived strung up between the uninteresting and unfortunate binary of Artist v. Cartoonist.

There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of categories. For them, zoological nomenclature and taxonomy are everything. But good thinkers, the ones that outlive their own historical circumstances, are always much more complicated than the rhetorical truths we have about them. And that’s what we like most about Steinberg. We like the absence of the-world-as-represented-by-anybody-else.

What would impel anyone sound of mind to leave the absence of the-world-as-represented-by-anybody-else for dry, familiar land? We still don’t know. Yet how to account here for our overriding need to write and track the absence of the-world-as-represented-by-anybody-else—to do that, just that, only that, and consider it as rational an occupation as riding a tricycle over the Alps?

*Gopnik, Adam. “Saul and the City.” In The Guardian (Nov. 26, 2008).

During his lifetime, Steinberg’s work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian Institution.

The exhibition program will include a talk by Stuart Bailey of Dexter Sinister on Tuesday, July 3, 7pm; a screening of Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin on July 24, 8pm; a lecture by the exhibition coordinators Robert Snowden and Scott Ponik, Tuesday, July 31, 7pm; a screening of The Right Way by Fischli and Weiss on Thursday, August 9, 8pm. The exhibition will travel in September 2012 to Artspace, a non-profit institution in Auckland, New Zealand.

Exhibition Pamphlet

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An alternative here: (6.4 MB)

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” “You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.

A story by Franz Kafka. Its English title is “A Little Fable.”

]]> http://yaleunion.org/saul-steinberg/feed/ 0 http://yaleunion.org/pcva/ http://yaleunion.org/pcva/#comments Mon, 30 Jul 2012 05:34:55 +0000 yuadmin http://yaleunion.dreamhosters.com/?p=56 Selections from the PCVA Archive
May 7–July 30, 2011

There are biological parents and adoptive parents, and there are appropriated parents—artistic or intellectual—as instrumental in your development as any other, or more so because they are selected by you. It is in that vein that we tell you: The Portland Center for the Visual Arts is our parent. Like any filial relationship, one can’t exactly remember becoming aware of the parent as someone other than a parent, i.e., the notion of PCVA as not just our progenitor, but a place, not just a place, but a memory, not just a memory, but a complicated case—talk about the anxiety of influence, this is literally about how one place makes another.

This exhibition, the first ever show about the history of PCVA, will be largely ephemeral, and the goal, if we can be so crude, is to bypass patricide and discuss what the parent did, how the parent behaved, and how the parent paid the bills.

Founded in 1971 by artists Jay Backstrand, Mel Katz, and Michele Russo, PCVA brought seminal contemporary art to 117 NW Fifth Avenue between 1972-87. Mary Beebe became the director in 1973 and during her prolific tenure exhibited Michael Asher, Allan Kaprow, John Baldessari, Vito Acconci, William Wegman, Joan Jonas, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson, Terry Riley, Eleanor Antin, Phil Niblock, Nam Jun Paik, Robert Irwin, Meredith Monk, and Bruce Nauman, along with numerous Northwest artists. Many of the works, epistles, and internal documents are lent by the Portland Art Museum’s Crumpacker Family Library, which has housed the PCVA archive since 1988.

The opening reception will include a screening of Richard Serra’s Railroad Turnbridge (1976), which was filmed at the St. Johns Railroad Bridge in Portland.

YU wishes to thank Hope Svenson, Sandra Percival, Lisa Radon and the lenders to the exhibition: Portland Art Museum Crumpacker Family Library, Randal Davis, Joseph Erceg, Brian Foulkes and Fernanda D’Agostino, William Hoppe, Christopher Rauschenberg, Stephanie Snyder, Michael Stirling, Paul Sutinen, and Seth Tane.

Plan view of exhibition vitrines, 2011

Two links: a selection of correspondences between the institution and artists (PDF) and a recording of Meredith Monk performing Meredith Monk at the PCVA in 1984 (MP3).

“If what we know generically as serious modern art outlives the seventies—survives final corruption by the orthodox gallery-museum complex, survives the temptation to rejoin “relevance” by abandoning quality and invention—a good part of the reason is going to be the American kunsthalle movement. These places have evolved through an increasing need by contemporary artists to be exposed in circumstances a little more philosophical and a little less marketable than a commercial gallery but without the ponderous weight of “authentication” of a collecting museum. The American kunsthalles focus rather on exhibiting. Most don’t flirt with the architecture of officialdom, either; they remodel space in existing buildings or, if there is an edifice, austerely throw a shell around some decent cubic footage, foregoing auditoria, reflecting pools, colonnades, and bronze plaques….

The Portland Center for the Visual Arts is among the best; the shows (Tworkov, Benglis, Stella, Neel, Serra, etc.) have been uniformly first-rate, the attendance (12,000 yearly) substantial, and the interaction among artists, management, and the community considerable. (I lectured at PCVA once, with Ed Moses, and two things stick with me: the beautiful space—elegant, ample, but unpretentious—and the inquisitive, even argumentative capacity crowd.) And PCVA might well end up being the most important. Portland, on “feel,” is a progressive, literate, good-hearted city; it’s the kind of town where contemporary art might take hold to a degree beyond merely meeting per capita projections derived downward from New York or Los Angeles. Jack Tworkov went as far as to say that the “energy” around PCVA and Portland equaled the kind of community involvement with artists in New York during the germinal thirties, and every artist I’ve ever talked to who’s had work at PCVA has nothing but praise for the way it’s run and what it stands for. If all this sounds a little florid, it’s a disease of art writing when one finds something about which to be enthusiastic; if it sounds a little tentative, it’s because there’s still quite a bit to be done to get the spirit of PCVA to infect the rest of the region; and if it sounds a little chauvinist, that’s because it is.”

Peter Plagens, the west coast editor of Artforum, circa 1980

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