Category Archives: odds and ends

Visibility is Relevance

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lizzie in cctv screen

Recently I read somewhere the phrase, “VISIBILITY IS RELEVANCE”.

But now I can’t remember where I read it, and google returns nothing useful.

I’m pretty sure it was in relation to art and its histories – the way that the perception of some artwork having “relevance” to a particular time and place is NOT related to any inherent quality of the work itself, but rather to how visible the thing is in society.

That is, once something is granted a substantial amount of “airtime”, it becomes relevant to current debates around art and contemporary culture, regardless of whether or not we think it “deserves” to be relevant. Thus relevance and visibility are “intrinsicly interwoven”.

Does this explanation make any sense at all? I wish I could find the original reference…

Cold Turkey

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centrality of the computer

For a while now I’ve had an idea brewing. As time passes, the more it firms up in my mind, and the more real (and scary!) it seems.

So here it is: for a period of one year I will give up computers and mobile phones.

This idea presented itself while I was working on the Bon Scott Blog. At first, it emerged as a sort of bodily need – I was spending way too much time on the computer, and I needed to stop.

I am, to a degree, addicted to email and electronic communication.

It is noticeable to those around me – sometimes they are bombarded with emails from me, which they can’t keep up with. And it often means that although I am present to you, online, I am simultaneously absent to those who are physically near me. This can be very annoying to them.

The main reason I want to do this, as a project, is to make myself available to the myriad of diverse artmaking processes and tools which are not mediated by computers. Before I started blogging-as-art, I used to work in different ways: screenprinting, sculpture, rubber-stamping, performance, carpentry… The problem is, the computer became such an incredible tool for focussing my creative energies, that all these other ways began to drop away. I crave a more physical interface with the world, but the computer does not like that idea. Like HAL, my computer just keeps coming up with reasons why I need never leave.

When I first began to use blogs as an art-making tool (in Bilateral Kellerberrin, 2005) I was fascinated to have the ability to “capture” experience in the real world, and “feed back” stories about experiences into encounters in physical places. This created a kind of mutually productive loop.

But that was three years ago. I remember, while working in Kellerberrin, I first opened a Flickr account. Access and uploads were slow. I rarely included pictures on my blogs, and when I did, I would shrink them to 30kb and apologise to my readers! Blogging was a sustainable (so I then thought) way to document experience without getting too heavy, a great way to publish without the need for paper and printing and deadlines and editors…

But now, with broadband, just plain text on the screen seems boring. Everything has to have multiple pictures and videos and sound files. And I have about 8 blogs which I maintain, they all need regular weeding and preening. Before you know it, a mere minute’s worth of interaction in the real world results in an hour’s processing of material online. The balance has tipped in favour of the virtual, and I find myself sitting in front of my screen for much longer periods of time.

It’s not good on my back, it’s not good on my eyes. The worse my eyes get, the more I have to lean in to read the screen, the worse my posture becomes.

Recently, I read an article which compared compulsive email-checking (I am a victim of this repulsive trend) to poker-machine use. Both have a regular chance of a small payoff. With email, if you keep checking regularly, there is a chance that sooner or later you will win a “prize” – an email will pop into your inbox, as a sort of reward for your gamble. This keeps you hooked.

[Actually, while writing this, I googled “email addiction” – over three million pages came up. Crikey, this is no small phenomenon! And I’m not even experiencing the worst of it – I don’t have a PDA. God help those who do…]

When will I start this project? Well, let’s say, mid-late 2009, when I’ve finished my big computer-based writing project currently underway…

To build a comfort zone

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I can’t stand it when bands say, you know, on this album we really stepped out of our comfort zone. What does that mean? This is not a f—ing game. This is soul, man. It’s about humanity. It’s not a test. People who went to university are always trying to get themselves out of their comfort zone and I always say, ‘I’m working class. It’s taken me 15 years to build a comfort zone and I’m not getting out of it for no f—er.’

–Noel Gallagher, from Oasis.

The Dilletante in The Conversation

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sal with cash

Sal Randalph has done A Good Thing by wrangling Mr Randall Szott to do an interview. Randall until recently ran a great blog called Leisure Arts. All three of us (Sal, Randall and myself) share artistic and theoretical touchstones.

I met Sal for the first time when I was in New York back in November. She took me to a nice little organic place near her studio on the lower east side and I had a bowl of soup and a cup of tea. It was rather expensive and Sal only had a coffee. We spoke passionately (I fear I sometimes ranted) about the things we were excited about at the time: things you might expect like the legacy of conceptual art and Allan Kaprow and re-enactment; but also unexpected stuff, eg: Sal has become convinced of the importance of Donald Judd.

Amongst a million other activities, Sal periodically works on a project called “Free Money“, in which she, quite literally, gives money away to people. They sign up for an appointment and then they meet at a cafe and have a chat, but the first thing that happens is Sal gives them the cash. Then the conversation can go wherever it needs to or wants to. There is no need for the person to hang around, Sal is not “buying their time” or anything.

I should point out that our meeting in New York was not an instance of Free Money.

But it was a great meeting, we were excited penpals who finally connected in the flesh.

After we left I realised we had not “split the bill”. In fact, Sal had paid for most of it, even though her small coffee probably constituted a quarter of the total. I felt strange about this. I worried that Sal might think I was trying to get out of paying my fair share, having just heard of her tendency to give away cash. Like somehow we had played “Free Money” without any advance agreement on the idea.

Neither of us has not mentioned anything about it since, even though we have exchanged several friendly emails in the interim.

See the funny things money does to a man?

Giving Up

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peanuts never give up
(thanks to Charles Schultz for this drawing, and to this page for some motivational thoughts: “What separates the losers in life from the winners is that the winners press on.” Yikes. )

Liz Pulie, erstwhile publisher of Lives of the Artists Magazine mentioned to me recently that she was interested in giving up.

How can I explain? It’s been a while since she put out an edition of her mag. Has she given up production? Not really…it’s just that…like my Bilateral Blog, enthusiasm and energy to write comes in irregular bursts, and it can seem like things are getting stagnant, or that the whole project is set to collapse during the quiet times.
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we know nothing

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the freezer was getting stinky

our icecubes smelled like fish

there were some frozen bones and heads in there

the remains of meals eaten too far from garbage day

it would have been too soon to put them in the bin 

so we froze them

 

but months pass and the freezer becomes an icey trash can

and i wonder        –          i ask lizzie

how can something frozen       give off smell?

 

i suppose

she says

things are always melting

at their surface

 

but this doesn't seem right to me

 

how can something melt if it's below zero?

 

all of which simply shows       

we know nothing

much 

about smell 

The Art of Knowing

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"It is by the manipulation of materials that we come to know those materials, that is, to know a part of our world, and this is also how we come to know how to do various things with materials. That is, knowledge is, paradigmatically, the skilled making that is the primordial meaning of 'art'. And of course: in this process, we also come to know various propositions, for example, those embodying procedures for the further development of skills. We come to be able to describe, say, clay, and the vessel made of clay, with a depth and an appreciation that only arises in thorough and involving experience. And this in turn ramifies into our experience of the vessel thus made, and of similar vessels: as we understand more, our experience of use is enriched. Indeed, the experience of making a vessel may lead to a cherishing of vessels and their makers, an understanding of and respect for persons and things that could not arise by other means."

 

p 131 – Crispin Sartwell, The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions, State University of NY Press, 1995.

compartmentalisation

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The idea of art and the aesthetic as a separate realm distinguished by its freedom, imagination, and pleasure has as its underlying correlative the dismal asumption that ordinary life is one of joyless, unimaginitive coercion. This provides an excuse for the powers and institutions that structure our everyday life to be brutally indifferent to natural human needs for the pleasures of beauty and imaginitive freedom. These are not to be sought in real life, but in art, whose contrast and escape from the real gives us human sufferers temporary solace and relief. By thus compartmentalizing art and the aesthetic as something to be enjoyed when we take a break from reality, the most hideous and oppressive institutions and practices of our civilization get legitimated and more deeply entrenched as inevitably real; they are erected as necessities to which art and beauty, by the reality principle, must be subordinated. Still worse, those rigid and cruelly divisive institutional realities then further justify and glorify themselves through the high art our civilization produces in trying to transcend and escape them. Art becomes, in Dewey's mordant phrase, “the beauty parlor of civilization,” covering with an opulent aesthetic surface its ugly horrors and brutalities. These, for Dewey, include class snobbery, imperialism, and capitalism's profit-seeking oppression, social disintegration, and alienation of labor.

-from Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, Rowman and Littlefield, Oxford, UK, 2000, p24.
(referring to John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934)

Ian Milliss

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Ian Milliss has just uploaded his new website. True to character, it’s information rich, but lacking in images. I like this a lot.

Ian is a legendary Aussie conceptual artist and an inspiring activist, having been involved in the defence of Darlinghurst’s Victoria Street squats in the early 1970s. There are some terrific articles about all his activities at the site.

Here are a few of my faves:

  • New Artist. Around this time, Milliss stopped exhibiting art altogether. This document gives an idea why…(1973)
  • The Barricades. In which he takes an aesthetic approach to describing the construction of barricades at Victoria Street. (1974)
  • Don’t moan, organise! (with apologies to Joe Hill) by Ian Burn and Ian Milliss. In which Burn and Milliss call for the restructuring of the Sydney Biennale along artist-run lines. (1979)

There really is a lot of great stuff on Ian’s site. It will become essential reading for many of us involved in art and activism, and who are interested in finding new ways to be artists (rather than just content providers to an existing system).

instructional artworks

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in preparation for a workshop accompanying the erwin wurm show at the mca, i am compiling a few links for "DO IT YOURSELF" and/or instructional artworks.

the DO IT manual:
http://www.e-flux.com/projects/do_it/manuals/0_manual.html

and erwin wurm's contribution with some cute drawings:
http://www.e-flux.com/projects/do_it/manuals/artists/w/W002/W002.html

101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself, by Rob Pruitt:
http://www.e-flux.com/projects/pruitt/index.php3?num=1

fluxus performance workbook, compiled by Ken Friedman, Owen Smith and Lauren Sawchyn (315kb pdf document, to download right click the link and "save target as" or "save link as"):
http://www.performance-research.net/documents/fluxus_workbook_print.pdf

any suggestions to add to this list welcome!
………….
update:
margie suggests:

Henry Bursill's  Hand Shadows To Be Thrown Upon The Wall [Originally published by Griffith and Farran in 1859!!]:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12962/12962-h/12962-h.htm

and also from Margie:
assignments galore (and they're fun) from Miranda July et al:
http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/index2.php