Uncertain Spectator(s)

Found at Smokers Paradise

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:21:00 -0400

F.O.M.O.

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 11:24:39 -0500

F.O.M.O.

Are you familiar with this term? I suppose I am a bit slow on the pick-up of trendy acronyms, as I was introduced to it just last week. But it is instantaneously familiar and useful. In the event you are not already in-the-know, I will ensure you will not longer be left out.

e.g., my recent introduction to the term:

“She seems to have a penchant for surrounding herself with charismatic assholes.”

“Yeah, she seems to have a serious condition of FOMO.”

“FOMO, what’s that?”

“Fear of Missing Out.”

“Oh my god, how did I not know about that term before? Have you known it for long? How did you learn about it?”

e.g., Performance Art:

Performance Art exploits the Art World’s endemic FOMO. You have to know about it. You have to be there for the real thing. A photographic document is produced of the event—not to stand in for what happened, but to give you a taste of what you missed. You can count your friends and frenemies in the blurred edges of the audience. But don’t fret. After the selected images enter the history books and remain there for a few decades, you can claim to have been there. You’ve heard enough hearsay to recreate the event in your mind. Memories will grow fuzzy and few will remain to testify whether your presence was real or a FOMO fabrication.

e.g., between one place and another:

The value of global cultural mobility is diagnostic of our collective FOMO. In exhibition press releases, the names of the participating artists are accompanied by country codes. Preferably two or more at once: born in one place (if possible, a remote, rural, ethnic, and/or authentic geography), and living between two others (must be urban cultural centers, better at least two separate countries, and even better, two different hemispheres).

My FOMO tactic is not to stay in any single place for longer than 6 months. This way, whenever I am greeted by friends with, “Where have you been?” I am able to simultaneously provoke FOMO vacillations within myself—Caitlin, you’ve been missing out on everything here—and my friends—what has Caitlin been up to while I’ve been living the grind in ______?

e.g., Uncertain Spectator:

You have missed out. Or you will soon have missed out. You are plagued by FOMO because you have not made the journey to see “Uncertain Spectator” at EMPAC, despite the urgency of its subject and the caliber of the exhibiting artists. It is in Troy, NY, which is not so far (from some places). But undeniably out-of-the-way. You replied to the invitation saying you would attend—just as you said you would attend that exhibition in Berlin / Oslo / Torino / Shanghai / Bogotá / Miami / Deep-in-Brooklyn’s-new-Chinatown. All happening in the same week.

Thankfully, there is ample documentation. And this blog. And another exhibition opening soon in Seville, Spain, on a similar topic: “Publics and Counterpublics” at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo. Or better yet, you should allow your FOMO to drive you to Troy to see “Uncertain Spectator” before you travel to Seville, because then you can see both. And this one was First. And you can have been both there and there.

- Caitlin Berrigan

Specters, David Levine

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:21:00 -0500

David Levine, Spectator, Paul McCarthy, Los Angeles, 1971, 2010

The main characters of David Levine’s series, Specters, are not camera-ready. They are incidental evidence of this formative moment when the visual arts cannibalized all art disciplines and called it, Performance Art.

Levine says, “The idea is to think about the audience, who are at once constitutive of the main event—this was the breakthrough of performance art—and yet are completely disposable relative to the ‘main event’ itself. They are forgotten actors, straining to learn a new part.”¹

They did not come dressed to be photographed; to be forever preserved as The Witnesses. They gather in the shadows of iconic performance art documents, endlessly circulating as the primary visual memory representing an event made history. In Specters, the audience is isolated from the ‘art spectacle.’ Their complexions are mottled by the moiré of the art history books from which Levine lifted them; their lack of focus deepens their mystery.

David Levine, Spectators, Valie Export, Vienna, 1968, 2010

Levine brings new attention to these characters whose role was indispensible to the formation of contemporary art audiences. It seems he is motivated partly by nostalgia for this critical turn in art history, coinciding with his early childhood. He was too young to be there.

Yet there is also irreverence to Levine’s motivations. Specters questions the emergence of the ‘Performance Art Document’ as an orchestrated object in and of itself, for which the audience is instrumentalized, coached and socialized to represent the spectacle and its reception to subsequent art audiences who missed out—or who are not yet born. Decades later, the earnest gazes and unselfconsciousness of the 1970’s audience seem almost quaint, as they reflect and absorb the tension of this experimental moment.

David Levine, Spectator, Marina Abramovic, Amsterdam, 1977, 2010

Yet I presume that many of these characters know who they are. With the exception of some unsuspecting street audiences, I imagine these self-satisfied individuals are able to identify themselves as accessories to the iconicity: “I was there.” Imagine a lecture at the Guggenheim, say Joan Jonas is showing slides of a mirror performance in downtown Manhattan. “Look, there’s Robert,” Roselee says. “And that’s me in the puffy coat.”

Audiences have become primed for all photographable events. They, too, perform for the Document. They are aware of being there. Recently, I shared with a curator a photograph of a performance of mine in Berlin. He noticed a figure in a dark coat behind the two women caught in an embrace, transferring a mouthful of milk from one to the other. “Oh look,” he said, “there’s David Levine.”

David Levine, Spectator, Joan Jonas, New York, 1970, 2010

-Caitlin Berrigan

….

^1. From e-mail correspondence with the artist, 01.11.11.

David Levine lives and works in Berlin and New York. He is represented by Feinkost Gallery, Berlin and Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles.

Reciprocity, Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Noncatharsis

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 08:29:00 -0500

When uncertainty and anxiety are the driving forces of my art practice, it is exciting to see entire exhibitions devoted to the subject, such as “Uncertain Spectator” at EMPAC and “Publics and Counterpublics” at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo. What follows is a brief excerpt from an essay on the conceptual tactics of anxiety that drive my art practice.

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Anxiety is a noncathartic feeling that has had no legacy of inspiring Greek tragedies, operas or epic novels. It is among literary theorist Sianne Ngai’s taxonomy of “ugly feelings” that “could be said to give rise to a noncathartic aesthetic: art that produces and foregrounds a failure of emotional release (another form of suspended ‘action’) and does so as a kind of politics” (2005: 9). Ngai traces the spatialization of anxiety not as a matter of interiority, but as a vertiginous in-between of unarticulated insides and outsides. The self-reflective agitation of anxiety, she argues with some contempt, has become the “distinctive ‘feeling-tone’ of intellectual inquiry itself” in the modern era (Ngai 2005: 215). Anxious intellectual inquiry turns rationality into an inconclusive oscillation. It is the antecedent to absurdity, which is similarly noncathartic in its complete suspension of reason and failure to cohere.

I am more interested in disruption as an artistic strategy rather than in the catharsis of shock, which often narrows the nuance of response. The intention to shock is a form of manipulation, funneling the audience to one margin or another and narrowing the nuance of response. More often than not, the most interesting issues raised by shocking artworks are silenced because the audience is preoccupied with the emotional tumult of offense, the smugness of identifying with the naughty perpetrator, or disinterest because the artwork is not extreme enough. Polarization fails to recognize the tendency of individuals to waver, to be hypocritical and uncertain, to fail even amidst our best intentions, to be stumped. Certainly, épater la bourgeoisie is at times the necessary and effective approach, and shock is measured with an entirely subjective Geiger counter. But for the insidiousness of the biopolitics I address in my practice, discomfort and ambiguity are richer political territory. The self-reflective agitation of anxiety provides no emotional release. Instead, rational intellectual inquiry oscillates without conclusion.

Art that reveals the boundaries of our anxiety without pushing us to one edge or another instead invites confusion, and perhaps opens into transformation through contact, contagion and encounter. In my art practice, I endeavor to develop sites of potential with concern and responsibility, yet the resolution of intellectual inquiry becomes the task of the audience. It offers discursive conflict without final reconciliation. The artwork may not occasion satisfaction or offer the absolution of guilt through participation. But in revealing layers of ambiguous emotions, it opens a space to confront uncertainty and form responsibilities in an embroiled world of permeable, distributed biota. Anxiety is illuminating.

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Excerpted from Life Cycle of a Common Weed: Reciprocity, Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Noncatharsis, Caitlin Berrigan, 2009.

Citations:
Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

- Caitlin Berrigan

This Week’s Guest Blogger: Caitlin Berrigan

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 08:00:00 -0500

We are pleased to announce our guest blogger for this week, Caitlin Berrigan. Caitlin Berrigan is an artist who works in sculpture, video, and participatory actions to open a space of potential for confronting uncertainties within the context of social issues. She was an Agnes Gund fellow at Skowhegan and artist in residence at PROGRAM in Berlin. She holds a Master’s in visual art from MIT (2009) and a B.A. in art history and production from Hampshire College (2004). Her work has shown at the Whitney Museum, Storefront for Art & Architecture, Gallery 400 Chicago, LACMA, Lugar a Dudas Bogotà, and 0047 Gallery Oslo, and hallways, mouths, superfund sites…

http://caitlinberrigan.com

Medium of Exchange

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 08:00:00 -0500

As one of the first official acts of 2011, Virginia created House Resolution 557 which proposes the use of alternative currencies should the Federal Reserve go bankrupt. Although the Financial Crisis is said to be over, a great deal of insecurity remains about the solvency of the Federal Reserve. A few clauses from the resolution:

WHEREAS, in the event of hyperinflation, depression, or other economic calamity related to the breakdown of the Federal Reserve System, for which the Commonwealth is not prepared, the Commonwealth’s governmental finances and Virginia’s private economy will be thrown into chaos, with gravely detrimental effects upon the lives, health, and property of Virginia’s citizens, and with consequences fatal to the preservation of good order throughout the Commonwealth;

WHEREAS, in light of the possible instability of the Federal Reserve System, proposals for states and their citizens to adopt an alternative currency consisting of gold or silver, or both, are receiving increasing attention throughout the United States, as evidenced by bills that have been or are being introduced in the legislatures of the States of Georgia, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, and South Carolina;

WHEREAS, the adoption of an alternative currency consisting of gold or silver, or both, would not destabilize the present monetary and banking systems, the Commonwealth’s governmental finances, or Virginia’s private economy, because it would not compel or commit the Commonwealth or her citizens to employ such alternative currency to the exclusion of the Federal Reserve System’s currency immediately, but would merely make the alternative currency available, and enable it to be used in competition with and preference to the Federal Reserve System’s currency, to the degree that the need for such use became apparent; and

WHEREAS, the United States Congress, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve System have taken and are preparing to take no action to provide the United States with an alternative to the Federal Reserve System’s currency, in the likely event that the latter would be destroyed through hyperinflation;

Below are the three pages of Viriginia House Resolution:

- Emily Zimmerman, Assistant Curator, EMPAC

In the Shadow of the Sign

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 11:52:00 -0500

Responses to Anthony Discenza’s signs that have cropped up:

Leo Strut

It Will End in EARTS, from Julia Alsarraf, Curatorial Intern

Sign on 8th Street

—Somewhere on campus

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 18:15:06 -0500

—Somewhere on campus

Anthony Discenza's signs on Rensselaer's campus

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 18:07:33 -0500

A few images of Anthony Discenza’s signs on Rensselaer’s campus on a sunny November day:

Installation Photographs of Uncertain Spectator (Part II)

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:25:54 -0500

Installation photographs of Uncertain Spectator by Kris Qua

Marie Sester, Fear, 2010 in the Lobby

Susanna Hertrich, Reality Checking Device, 2008 on the Mezzanine

Claire Fontaine, Change, 2006 on the Mezzanine

Tue Greenfort, Die Dynamic der Autoren, 2000 on the Mezzanine

Kate Gilmore, Main Squeeze, 2006 on the Mezzanine

Installation photographs of Uncertain Spectator

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:01:51 -0500

A few installation photographs of Uncertain Spectator by Kris Qua:

Graciela Carnevale, Action for the Experimental Art Cycle, 1968 on the Mezzanine

Anthony Discenza, A Leave-Taking, 2010 commissioned take away poster on the Mezzanine

Jesper Just, A Vicious Undertow, 2007 in the Video Gallery

SUPERFLEX, The Financial Crisis (Sessions I - IV) and Lost Money, 2009 in Studio 1

Jordan Wolfson, Con Leche, 2009 in Studio Beta

More installation photos arriving later this week!

Images from the Uncertain Spectator opening

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:52:00 -0500

A selection of photographs from the Uncertain Spectator opening on November 18, 2010 with a performance by the Troy Chainsaw Ensemble (Jack Magai, Andrew Lynn & Bobby Gibbs, conducted by Sam Sowyrda). Photographs by Travis Cano (November 2010, canot@rpi.edu).

Mezzanine at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC)

Tue Greenfort’s Die Dynamik der Autoren (2000)

Graciela Carnevale’s photographs and statement from her contribution to the Experimental Art Cycle in Rosario, Argentina (1968) in the foreground and Susanna Hertrich’s Reality Checking Device (2008) in the background.

Graciela Carnevale’s photographs and statement from her contribution to the Experimental Art Cycle in Rosario, Argentina (1968).

Sam Sowyrda conducting for the Troy Chainsaw Ensemble

Performance by the Troy Chainsaw Ensemble (Andrew Lynn, Jack Magai, & Bobby Gibbs)

‪Crises of Capitalism‬

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:54:00 -0500

A illuminating animation by RSA Animate in which David Harvey, a leading social theorist, traces geographical movement of the financial crisis and asks whether there might be a better system than capitalism.

- Emily Zimmerman, Assistant Curator

Kierkegaard III: uncertain salvation

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:20:00 -0500

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida has reflected on the Greek word ‘pharmakon’, which appears in Plato’s dialogues. The pharmakon can be either a poison or a cure. Like our English word ‘drug’, it expresses a fundamental ambivalence: drugs can be life-threatening or life-saving. The hemlock that Socrates drinks when he is put to death exemplifies this dual quality, for it is a poison that kills him but in doing so cures him of life, releasing him from bondage to the body and allowing his soul to return to the eternal truths it loves.

In Kierkegaard’s philosophy, anxiety shares with Plato’s pharmakon this ambivalence. It is both a poisoned chalice and a saving cup. Even more paradoxically, anxiety is the cure for its own suffering. Anxiety can save us from ourselves. When Martin Heidegger quotes Hölderlin in writing – this time of modern technology – that ‘Where the danger lies, there the saving power also grows’, he echoes this Kierkegaardian interpretation of anxiety.

This is why ‘learning to be anxious,’ as Kierkegaard puts it, is such a potent process. The person who confronts his anxiety, perhaps through an encounter with himself, touches a ‘saving power’ within himself:

‘Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them. For him, anxiety becomes a serving spirit that against its will leads him where he wishes to go. Then, when it announces itself, when it cunningly pretends to have invented a new instrument of torture, far more terrible than anything before, he does not shrink back, and still less does he attempt to hold it off with noise and confusion; but he bids it welcome, greets it festively, and like Socrates who raised the poisoned cup, he shuts himself up with it and says as the patient would say to the surgeon when the painful operation is about to begin: Now I am ready. Then anxiety enters his soul and searches out everything and anxiously torments everything finite and petty out of him, and then it leads him where he wants to go.’

Here, anxiety is depicted as a soul-searching, soul-purifying, soul-saving pharmakon. We might not know whether we have souls, how to find them, or even what it means to speak of the soul. This is part of anxiety’s uncertainty. But it is also part of the search that anxiety carries out.

Derrida thinks that the ambiguity and ambivalence of the pharmakon is always undecidable, essentially uncertain. In anxiety, search and uncertainty correspond to one another. For Kierkegaard, this uncertain search is where faith begins, and probably where it always remains. The adventure of anxiety is the journey of the soul.

- Clare Carlisle

Kierkegaard II: learning to be anxious

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 10:16:00 -0500

On the question of anxiety, as on other questions, Kierkegaard inclines towards the paradoxical. Although anxiety is a problem for us, the solution is not to stop the anxiety, but to be anxious. At the end of The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard writes:

‘In one of Grimm’s fairy tales there is a story of a young man who goes in search of adventure in order to learn what it is to be in anxiety… This is an adventure that every human being must go through—to learn to be anxious in order that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing in anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.’

What is the right way to be anxious? And how can we learn it?

In the state of anxiety, we do not want to be who we are, where we are, how we are. In anxiety, we do not want to be at all. We try to deny or suppress our experience of anxiety, or else we run away from ourselves and from our anxiety. This can be done with the help of alcohol, drugs (legal or illegal), cigarettes, distraction, neurosis, or various illusions of security.

The alternative to this conditioned response of fight or flight is to be anxious: to remain in anxiety, to exist within it, to feel it fully without railing against it or seeking an escape route. In this way, the human being becomes acquainted with herself, perhaps for the first time. It’s like standing outside in a storm, feeling the rain soak through to the skin, listening to the thunder, watching the lightening flash without blinking.

Learning to be anxious in this way requires two things: courage and practice. For Kierkegaard, courage is as important a spiritual virtue as humility – in fact it is probably more important. Practicing courage in the face of anxiety can take many forms. As a Christian, Kierkegaard regarded prayer as the spiritual battlefield on which anxiety is confronted. In prayer, the struggle with anxiety uses the weapons of stillness and silence, and in other religious traditions there are practices, such as meditation, that confront anxiety in similar ways.

Likewise, Uncertain Spectator is a terrain for the confrontation with anxiety. It both stages the artists’ anxious encounters, and invites others to explore their inner experiences of spiritual flight or fight.

- Clare Carlisle

Kierkegaard I: finite and infinite

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 16:27:00 -0500

In 1844 Søren Kierkegaard wrote a book called The Concept of Anxiety, where he suggests that the experience of anxiety isn’t just a response to external circumstances, but rooted in the very nature of the human being. We exist, therefore we are anxious. Even when there’s nothing to worry about.

Why might this be? According to Kierkegaard, the human being is a spiritual being: not just a mind and a body, but a being who is self-aware and self-desiring. We take up a relationship to ourselves, a relationship of consciousness and desire. This is what Kierkegaard means by spirit. We reflect on ourselves and seek to know ourselves, or we ignore ourselves. We want to be ourselves, or we do not want to be ourselves – we might want to be someone else, or perhaps no-one at all.

In The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard also writes that the human being is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite. We are finite, limited by our bodies and other material circumstances. We are limited by space and time: we cannot do or be everything at once. We are limited by our past, which shapes each present moment and cannot be altered. But we are also infinite, unlimited: our minds, and particularly our imaginations, can go anywhere and do anything. We live partly in the dimension of what Kierkegaard calls ‘possibility’. However much the past may shape us, we face an open future, an indefinite space and time of possibilities.

Kierkegaard’s psychology, and in particular his concept of anxiety, is based on this finite/infinite structure of the human spirit. Most of us, for the most part, he claims, do not want to be who we are. (This is an interpretation of the Christian doctrine of sin.) Insofar as we are finite, we rebel against our limitations, refusing to be confined. In tradition theology, this is understood as the sin of pride or self-assertion: St. Augustine saw this as the main sin that conditions all the others. Insofar as we are infinite, however, we shrink back from the open spaces, fleeing in the face of our freedom. This response is anxiety, and in Kierkegaard’s theology it joins pride as the second fundamental form of sin.

Kierkegaard thinks that we are, spiritually speaking, both agoraphobic and claustrophobic. We want boundaries, we want to transgress boundaries. We don’t want to be put in a box, we don’t want to climb out of the box. We do not want to be free, we do not want to be unfree. We do not want to be who we are.

- Clare Carlisle

This Week's Guest Blogger: Clare Carlisle

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 13:43:00 -0500

We are please to announce our guest blogger for this week, Clare Carlisle. Clare Carlisle is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, UK, where she teaches courses in the philosophy of religion, ethics, and the history of philosophy. She is the author of three books on Kierkegaard, and the co-translator of Felix Ravaisson’s ‘Of Habit.’ She is currently working on her own book on the philosophy of habit, which will be published by Routledge in 2013.

"He raged at the hypocrisy of the aristocracy democracy."

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 10:55:00 -0500

I found an article on lexical > gustatory synesthesia, a rare form in which words conjure up a strong companion taste. Most manifestations of this seem obvious in a Pavlovian way, but James Wannerton states that “Whenever I hear, read, or articulate (inner speech) words or word sounds, I experience an immediate and involuntary taste sensation on my tongue. These very specific taste associations never change and have remained the same for as long as I can remember.”

BBC News reports that he “has a toffee flavoured nephew and used to have a condensed milk granny. His next door neighbours are a mixture of yoghurt, jelly beans and a subtle hint of a waxy substance. James is not mad, nor is he on a taste orientated drug trip - he has a neurological condition called synaesthesia, which mixes up his senses.”

Mr. Wannerton conceals his special crossed wires, as if people will expect him to conjure or produce food when they bark words at him? Who wouldn’t want “safety” to taste like buttered toast?

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If I had a full-blown clang association, by now I’d be pretty far gone.
(most hardcore internet drifters & seekers generate, participate in, or are party to clang associations, including:

Word salad. A jumble of words that are not apparently linked and may be hard to understand.

Disorganization. Jumping from one idea to another without transition.

Neologism. Making up words that have no meaning to anyone but the speaker.

Echolalia. Repeating others’ words or phrases.)

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“[George] Bush’s spontaneous public statements also suggest that he listens to and uses words based on their sound, not on their meaning—a practice known in psychology as ‘clang association.’ This accounts for many of his famous malapropisms: commending American astronauts as ‘courageous spacial entrepreneurs,’ referring to the press as the ‘punditry,’ wondering whether his policies ‘resignate with the people,’ warning Saddam Hussein that he would be ‘persecuted as a war criminal’ after the fall of Iraq.”
(Justin Frank, Bush on the Couch. Harper, 2004)

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Homus Erectus, 2006, Fiona Banner

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The bottle brush emerges from a tromp l’oeil rip in the canvas.

The rip is simulated in paint, but it is “repaired” with actual safety pins.

Below the rip is a hand, painted by a commercial sign painter and signed by him, “A. Klang.”

from Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp

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The following is from a web site called Frontier Psychiatrist:

Disorder of stream of thought:
(I’ve split up these into disorder of thought form and stream, but several could be argued both ways)

Flight of ideas is when the content of speech moves quickly from one idea to another so that one train of thought is not carried to completion before another takes its place. The normal logical sequence of ideas is generally preserved although ideas may be linked by distracting cues in the surroundings and from distractions from the words that have been spoken. These verbal distractions may be of three kinds: clang associations, puns and rhymes.

Retardation of thinking is often seen in depression, the train of thought is slowed down, although still goal directed. The opposite is pressure of speech and this is often seen in mania.

Perseveration is the persistent and inappropriate repetition of the same thoughts. In reply to a question a person may give the correct answer to the first but continue to give the same answer inappropriately to subsequent questions. This is especially seen in ‘organic’ brain disorders like dementia.

Disorders of thought form:
Overinclusion refers to a widening of the boundaries of concepts such that things are grouped together that are not often closely connected.

Loosening of associations denotes a loss of the normal structure of thinking. The patient’s discourse seems muddled and illogical and does not become clearer with further questioning; there is a lack of general clarity, and the interviewer has the experience that the more he/she tries to clarify the patient’s thinking the less it is understood. Loosening of associations occurs mostly in schizophrenia.

Three kinds of loosening of association have been described:

Knight’s move thinking or derailment where there are odd tangential associations between ideas.

Talking past the point (= vorbeireden) where the patient seems to get close to the point of discussion, but skirts around it and never actually reaches it

Verbigeration (= word salad = schizophasia = paraphrasia) where speech is reduced to a senseless repetition of sounds and phrases (this is more of a disorder of thought form)

Circumstantiality is where thinking proceeds slowly with many unnecessary details and digressions, before returning to the point. This is seen in epilepsy, learning difficulties and obsessional personalities

Neologisms are words and phrases invented by the patient or a new meaning to a known word

Metonyms are word approximations e.g. paperskate for pen

Derailment (aka entgleisen) is where there is a change in the track of thoughts. There is perserved, but misdirected determining of tendency/goal of thought)

With drivelling there is a disordered intermixture of the constituent parts of one complex thought

Fusion is where various thoughts are fused together, leading to a loss of goal direction.

Omission is where a thought or part of a thought it is senselessly omitted

Substitution is where one thought fills the gap for another appropriate more ‘fitting-in’ thought.

Concrete thinking is seen as a literalness of expression and understanding, with failed abstraction. Can be tested by the use of proverbs.

Thought block refers to the sudden arrest in the flow of thoughts. The previous idea may then be taken up again or replaced by another thought.

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Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight, 1981, Mark Tansey

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“The sky is above and there is the sea below and in between is the carnival.”
—Paul Noble

Ye Olde Ruin, 2003-4, Paul Noble

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The Giver of Names, 2000-, David Rokeby

“The Giver of Names is quite simply, a computer system that gives objects names. The installation includes an empty pedestal, a video camera, a computer system and a small video projection. The camera observes the top of the pedestal. The installation space is full of “stuff”… objects of many sorts. The gallery visitor can choose an object or set of objects from those in the space, or anything they might have with them, and place them on the pedestal. When an object is placed on the pedestal, the computer grabs an image. It then performs many levels of image processing (outline analysis, division into separate objects or parts, colour analysis, texture analysis, etc.) These processes are visible on the life-size video projection above the pedestal. In the projection, the objects make the transition from real to imaged to increasingly abstracted as the system tries

The results of the analytical processes are then ‘radiated’ through a metaphorically-linked associative database of known objects, ideas, sensations, etc. The words and ideas stimulated by the object(s) appear in the background of the computer screen, showing what could very loosely be described as a ‘state of mind’.
From the words and ideas that resonate most with the perceptions of the object, a phrase or sentence in correct English is constructed and then spoken aloud by the computer.”

- Marina Zurkow

Nervous Eating/Nervous Abstaining

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 13:02:00 -0500

“As a sensory experience, taste operates in multiple modalities—not only by way of the mouth and nose, but also the eye, ear, and skin. How does food perform to the sensory modalities unique to it? A key to this question is a series of dissociations. While we eat to satisfy hunger and nourish our bodies, some of the most radical effects occur precisely when food is dissociated from eating and eating from nourishment. Such dissociations produce eating disorders, religious experiences, culinary feats, sensory epiphanies, and art.”
- from Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Performance Research 4, 1 (1999): 1-30

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“In 1993 the theme of the Oxford Symposium was ‘Look & Feel: Studies in Texture, Appearance & Incidental Characteristics of Food.’ In her performance Alicia Rios mashed up a variety of pink and white foods with her hands; strawberries, marshmallows, meringue, cream. Enticing images of food were then accompanied by the amplified sounds of chewing and swallowing. Finally, she rolled about on a transparent mattress filled with potato chips.”

The distinguished food writer for American Vogue, Jeffrey Steingarten hailed it as “a major event in the 50.000 year history of gastronomy… The point” said Mr Steingarten, was that Ms Rios had taken the act of masticating food out of its context by using the external organs, the fingers, instead of the smaller internal ones, teeth, tongue, and palate. She had thus made public an act which is essentially private.
-Paul Levy, The Wall Street Journal, 21.7.93

- from Alicia Rios’ web site

Urbanophagy (Eating the City) (2003-07) Alicia Rios

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Lick and Lather (1993) Janine Antoni

“Lick and Lather, self-portrait busts—seven in chocolate, seven in soap—were shown at the Venice Biennale. Halfway into the show, a young woman, a teenager from Czechoslovakia who was there with her parents on vacation, bit three noses off my chocolate heads! One after the other until the guards stopped her.”
- from an interview with Antoni, BOMB

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Wild Zone 1 (2001) LA Raeven, Video still

“Dutch artists Liesbeth and Angelique Raeven (b. 1971) do not go with the flow. They refuse to consume food thoughtlessly, they refuse to accept womanhood and the feminine roles society assigns to them, and they also refuse to be labeled as anorexic. Both are fascinated by the image of the body as promoted by the fashion world and in advertising, and they subvert this image in their works. The dangerous tightrope walk performed by this set of twins, whose videos and performances are produced under the name of L. A. Raeven, is hotly debated in the art world. They always perform as a duo, celebrating their symbiotic relationship and playing with the notion of “evil twins.” Their performances can be painful, and yet they have to be accepted as valid forms of artistic expression.” –http://www.hatjecantz.de/controller.php?cmd=detail&titzif=00002706&lang=en

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Food-related art projects have moved to Being-In-It-Together participatory models that blur the capital A of Art. Comforting, empowering, outrageous or world-expanding, they are antivenin for the anxieties of globalization, isolation, and exclusion.

Take the spate of art dinners including Matthew Stadler’s Back Room at RIPE in Portland; Amsterdam’s Urbanimlism “convivia;” experimental food systems such as Natalie Jeremijenko’s Cross Species Adventure Club suppers or John Cors’ & Morgan Levy’s Alviso’s Medicinal All-Salt, whose “process harvests two popular commodities, sea salt and recycled pharmaceuticals from water treatment plants;” “sustenance artists” Mimi Oka’s and Doug Fitch’s village-sized baguette; or the elevation of suitcase transport of local comestibles in Kate Rich’s Feral Trade Courier.

Cross Species Dinner (2010) at Bronx River Arts Center /AmphibiousArchitecture, Natalie Jeremijenko

Cross Species Dinner at Bronx River Arts Center /AmphibiousArchitecture from Natalie Jeremijenko on Vimeo.

- Marina Zurkow

Holiday Uncertainty Syndrome

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:48:29 -0500

For me, the official onset of The Holidays marked by Thanksgiving yields a shimmering metaphysical nervousness. Amidst virtual duck fat, bourbon & pecans, and the confusions about agave syrup, I will (do my tryptamine best to) focus my posts on food, gratitude, and performance in all their merry, mangled forms.

Things to feel anxious about this week:

1. Being Grateful Enough
Today I received a lot of thank-you letters, both in snail and e mail:
All State thanks me. The Wilderness Society thanks me. Food and Water Watch thanks me. And although I never bought anything from them, James Perse sent me a personal, very Dwell-magazine-style thank you:

I sense that even more pressure to give (uh, thanks— even more than the Democrats inflicted) is a-coming in…

2. Being Mindful (and guilty) Enough

I should buy local, bring my own bags, not take extra individual plastic bags, not overbuy, make sure I compost everything, make stock from my carcasses (whomever they may be), and freeze leftovers or give them away. I shall remain restive that my food waste in landfills will produce methane, a greenhouse gas 20% more damaging than CO2.

Remember:
“It’s not just about saving food resources and money, it’s about saving the planet.”

3. Eating Too Much
or knowing how to hide it

4. Being Festive Enough
A. Setting the scene:

B. Friday will signal the onset of the steroidal Christmas carols, coming out of every downtown doorway on Broadway where I work.

There will be a density of packaging crowding the already dense landscape of Manhattan. I can help reduce visible waste by doing most of my shopping online, where, for those who already have too much, I can still find a porcelain I Heart Steroids ornament:

for their 362’ artificial trees:

5. Being Too Festive
Exuberant binging can apparently bring on “Holiday Heart Syndrome,” described here as “a cute term…an acute problem.”

Maybe I’m just crotchety.
Out of guilt for all my cranky blurts which not so deftly mask my anxiety about this impending season, I’d like to mindfully, gratefully, and festively say how happy I am:
A. to be spending Thanksgiving with friends in local lovely Brooklyn;
B. that I won’t have to get an airport security pat-down feel-up
C. in order to suffer the grotesque habits of family I feel no affinity for.

As radio producer and audio artist Pejk Malinowski so gleefully documents in his piece “I Hate the Way You Eat” (produced for Studio 360/WNYC)

May all your co-feasters excel as magnificent fressers and inadvertent auditory geniuses at this holiday meal.

- Marina Zurkow