There is a war on. We are at war and have been, for my entire adult life (for my entire life). The State makes disingenuous gestures toward revelation. Transparency presupposes a viewer, someone to confirm its holy gossamer. The look is directional. To whom do we disrobe?

We, brothers and sisters, we share everything with no end in mind. To post every passing thought, to forget what is past and posted, goldfish-like, this perpetual unburdening can create a confirming feedback loop. Like Narcissus transfixed by an image of himself in the limpid pool and like poor Echo, who forgot her body, forgot herself, doomed to repeat, un-world without end (amen).

This is revelation without illumination. Freud the way of sitcoms, popular psychology has proposed regression as a way to break though those middle-management doldrums. Here, again, we see a self-sustaining loop of pleasure. An incitement to indulgence where play is not a radical gesture but a means to placation.

We are unnaturally shielded from discomfort, numbed. Comfort becomes related to compulsion, dis/pleasure. We return to the source again again again—it comforts no longer, did it ever?

You never learn, girl. All those smarts and you’d still go back for more? Just left you marked, a mark, an easy target.

To this, might I propose a different kind of encounter? Intimacy, brothers and sisters. Serious play as a timely-untimely mode of engagement with art, with each other.

Proximity, to be close to one another, to be truly near and vulnerable. Intimacy allows for multiple registers and spheres, something we care for and carry with us. It implies another, others, exchange, trust that is not static but always the moment before, the moment, and the moment to come, at once. We carry intimacies differently, too, don’t we? With us throughout the day, at different times, in different spaces. Not like that brat of the bourgeois, privacy, that landed inheritance. Intimate knowledge is worn bodily in the broad light of day, mutually held but externally inscrutable.

 I carried your scent on my dress all day.

In Chelsea, going gallery to gallery, bored, until I saw that Eva Hesse, the haptic response: I want to put it in my mouth and suck, I want to pull the string out with my teeth.

Oh, I know we’re not supposed to touch, but I want the knowledge touching produces, piecemeal but specific. The product of cumulative, repeated presence. A weighty thing built up over time. The dance of action-reaction, experience of non-knowledge, relations pre-linguistic or the other of language. Other kinds of languages.

Remember what your mother told you: if you haven’t anything to say, don’t say anything at all. Have relationships instead of talking them. Avoid the infantile babble of the comment field. Words are magic, too, they create and forestall possibility. Against pre-emptive defense, against the over-share. Wait and the weight of being in and out of time, brothers and sisters, in that shimmering, ever shifting shared space of pure possibility intimacy holds. Things half-formed and half-known.

To play like adults. To pull the string knowing everything that can come undone.

jm 05 2012

An earlier version of this piece appeared in pilot press… (no. 7, Spring 2011).

Many of the Prurient albums I have come across (oh how I would like to do so literally; but I’m sure somewhere it has been done) create an ambience of ambiguous dark medieval tension, mostly of a sexual nature. Titles like A History of AIDS, for instance, or Roman Bath help the mind take the chaotic, abrasive noise and screaming to a fittingly loaded venue. This follows a tradition in noise music; names I am familiar with are Whitehouse, Bloodyminded, Macronympha. The descriptions of their songs I’ve read fit in the same world. I’m closely familiar with a band called Arab on Radar, whose vague but very suggestive lyrics were enhanced by a mentally damaged style of delivery and provocative syntax. The best example might be the line “hunting size madness for a death certificate”.

A friend who is a psychotherapist and I were talking about perversions, and she described a typical therapists’ response to hearing of perversions as being extremely bored by them. The same monotonous act repeated ad nauseum for something slightly less than real satisfaction. The meaning of ‘perversion’ is dicey, it gets connoted by ‘perverse’ and ‘pervert’. I read in Introducing Lacan, or was it Introducing Derrida, perversion described as “pere version”, which is French for the father’s version. This led me to some musing. Yes, we call it HIStory, but in our daily lives, the unfolding of family dynamics is really mostly appreciated by the great masses as felt, if not told, from the mother’s perspective, isn’t it? In my own experience, with a father who was unfaithful and left my mother for another woman, this was surely the case. Only in my twenties did I venture to ask my father his version of their relationship’s narrative. I am a man, and don’t believe I have to be to understand and appreciate his side of the story perfectly; to empathize and see the two of them as equals in their responsibility for the relationship. But the swerving, evasive abstractions that came out of his mouth fit my therapist friend’s definition of perversion nicely. I muse on that sexual perversions are perhaps an abstraction of love; which is why they are boring. Acts that create psychic pleasure, soothing some past trauma, but not containing any of the ingredients of human connection, love, profound emotion, and mutual consequence. They are abstractions and we just don’t connect with the emotions they bring out in those who practice them.

Arab on Radar’s career was crowned by one fan who gave them a gift befitting of their oeuvre; he crafted belt buckles for them. The band performed in a sort of costume onstage, which morphed over time from the original incarnation of janitor-green polyester uniforms, to a more lower-east-side new york stylish dressy all-black getup. The brass buckles, I was told by the guitarist, were casts the fan made of his girlfriend’s vagina at different stages of arousal. Each brass vagina was then fitted with a pair of wings. Perverse, for sure.

I was looking through a list of Prurient’s releases on the Discogs archive, marvelling at all of the different titles and song names assigned to his music, and the artwork, when I found one release titled Three Sisters. It made me think of some dirty jokes I’d heard but couldn’t remember, involving a lost traveler asking a farmer for a place to sleep, and discovering he had three daughters. You can fill in the rest. I found myself the subject of tame, bland versions of this joke several times over at this point in my life, befriending one or two or all of several sets of three sisters. It is of my encounter with the Rainville sisters I wish to tell you now.

The parents Tim and Sylvia had split up long ago. They had between them created Michelle, Clara, and Joan. Joan, the oldest, was a tall lady with airs, and a sweetness which was rarely on display but was overwhelming when revealed. Clara was a loud, a bit bossy, but truly and always a thoughtful and loving type. The youngest Michelle was at times a hopelessly victimized whiner, and at other times the most disarmingly gentle, down-to-earth and real of them all. I found each of them very beautiful in different ways. Three sisters is one thing; how much more of a tale you walk into when they all have the whitest of skin and the blackest of hair. Suddenly spending a lot of time with all three, I felt like the bartender who sees a priest, a rabbi, a horse, and a lesbian walk in to his bar all at once and says, what is this some kind of joke?

It started when I spent several weeks consoling Clara over the cancer which was slowly killing her father, and the unending pain of trying to care for him while he behaved most ungratefully, and doing so in the memory of his past cruelties which appear to have been numerous. Poor Tim is gone now, and I never met him; I wish I could have asked him for his side of the story. But that is the side of the story that I rarely get to hear, and when I do, feels horribly incomplete and lacking because of the general emotional stupidity of most men in my society. Again, stupidity here is meant in the old sense of the word, I picture it as oscillating between sloppy stupor, and wide-eyed wire-haired alarm. Clara had other woes too; a boyfriend, an eastern european emigre who embodied the ethnic cliche, firmly established in my mind by the enormously popular video game Grand Theft Auto 3. Our anti-hero is the worst kind of crook, not low-level, not high-level, but a bourgeois crook with the level of comfort with violence you’d expect from that tier of society. The boyfriend was not a crook, but felt comfortable mixing heroin, cocaine and entrepreneurship, which suggested to me a man with a certain set of scruples.

We spent evenings at her mother’s apartment. Sometimes we’d lie on the bed with her mother watching back-to-back episodes of Storage Wars, a show about junk dealers bidding on abandoned storage lockers. They had a dog, female, and Michelle was visiting to help care for the ailing Tim, bringing her dog as well, also female. With the female boarder Sylvia kept that made five plus me in what was a very small space stuffed with oversized furniture. I would bask in the wild energy bouncing around the apartment, trying to placate a most insistent dog who spent most of her time lunging at my face, while the sisters argued over who agreed to lend who the purse or leather jacket, eventually reconciling with a promise to do the other’s hair or makeup on her birthday. As their father’s condition worsened, Joan began coming to stay as well. Being a young man around all of this excited female energy I found myself trying to find some kind of connection or emotional satisfaction from a flirtation. And most of the time, the place which seemed to hold the deepest promise was of course in the eyes and conversational embrace of Sylvia.

The peak of consoling her was also the first time I saw a positive pregnancy test in my life. Just an ordinary day spent with Clara that ended rather abruptly with me confronting more intimacy than I was anticipating. Her subsequent abortion, told to me in great detail, was one of the most poignant experiences I have ever witnessed second-hand, not least because right before the procedure she let them tell her that she was carrying twins. I hope she has found peace with her decision, although based on her descriptions of the boyfriend I think that’s probably less difficult than you might expect. We should all be so lucky to live in a society that makes such peace even a possibility. As the military are fond of saying, peace always comes at a price. Life offers so many ways to pay.

Later when my relationship with her was at an ebb, she appeared in town around Christmas and we ran errands together in the car Tim insisted on buying her before dying. Another ordinary day until she took us to Venus Envy, to purchase herself a vibrator. It was gigantic. I guess dildos are meant to mimic the average as much as the women in skin magazines mimic the average.

Tim’s funeral was appropriately extreme for a serving officer of the RCMP— Canada’s government police for both domestic and international matters, a combination of the CIA and FBI with enough incompetence and boorishness to cover both. Thirty-odd uniformed members, a group of aviator sunglasses and leather jacket-clad undercover types, bagpipes, drums, officers on horseback, the works.

For her eulogy Clara chose to read a letter her father had sent to Joan on the occasion of their first Christmas apart, right after the divorce. Although as an idea this was touching, it was the strangest choice of reading I have ever seen at a funeral, an occasion which is a surprisingly strong field for bad choices. The letter was the definition of perversion, it was the father’s version of the scene, written in its full emotional grip. The emotions this father was trying to clumsily express to his daughters via his oldest, clumsy a choice as it gets, betrayed his benumbed state and inability to communicate anything close to the kinds of emotions one wants to feel when thinking about family connection, the ties that bind, blood. I felt such pity for this daughter who had that experience so familiar to many of us, of a child being burdened with a parent’s emotions. Emotions for which it is not equipped to deal, has no support to help decode (as its parents are too wrapped up in themselves and their projections on each other) and which put front and centre, in their face, the frailty and uselessness of the parent as a source of support, at the time when they need it most.

We marched out to watch them bury Tim, and then returned to have tea and go. But as we all stood around the reception room in what was a refreshingly warm atmosphere, two of the big booted moustachioed mounties asked for everyone’s attention for an announcement.

Tim had a request, from beyond the grave. Tim had hatched a plan for this very day, they announced, decades before, and we were to participate in its execution. Two bottles of scotch were produced, one from the year of Tim’s birth, sometime in the mid-50s, and one from the year he joined the RCMP, 1979. Tim’s wish had been to have all present at his interment drink this scotch together. He had carried them with him for a large portion of his life with this destination in mind. It all happened quite quickly, a hundred shots were poured, and we drank to Tim, we drank Tim’s liquor to him.

I’ve had good luck with funerals, I like to think I’ve been lucky enough to see the ‘fun’ in funeral at every one I have attended. Watching my girlfriend reach into an open casket and give her uncle a good shake with a smile was a startlingly funny snap out of the gloom; so too was my grandmother’s remembrance service, where the German caretaker was the first to arrive. His wife, with her gorgeous crooked face and lazy eye, making small talk with me, glanced up at the box of ashes on the altar momentarily and turned to me, looked me in the eye with her good one as the other drifted on, and drawled, sincerely, in the thickest of accents, “Vas she inzinerated?”. And the funeral of my dear friend CJ, who died at 31, where extremely heavy grieving was punctuated with huge laughs from his many obliging friends, who gave him the greatest send-off anyone has ever had.

But Tim’s scotch was exceptional. This is what’s meant when such favours are called spirits. To have a liquid pour into my body, a liquid which is renowned for its ability, over a period of a minute or two, to slowly work its way into deep places of tension and meaning within the body, felt first in the throat but soon in as unlikely places as the ears, the right shoulder, the bottom of a foot coming to life and grasping the ground. This liquid was of five dimensions as it contained in it all of the time of Tim’s life and working life, the time between his death and funeral, and also his idea. It was the good side of perversion. This was what an afterlife should be, pouring the weeping left behind a drink. Was it a tradition he created, or a once-in-a-lifetime ritual, never to be repeated? Tim got the last word in telling his version of his own life, and it reached deeper inside my physical body than the glassy eyes and trembling lips of his daughters ever could. The experience is gone, the daughters live on, and still melt my heart and open my spirit to them with their gazes and hugs that feel like more. Tim’s drink was a beautiful abstraction of those hugs, that my man’s mind can attach to easily because it is an idea and ideas are easier to think than emotions. But that moment is forever burned in my memory not just because of the gravity of the occasion, but because Tim found a way to be there on his terms, and in dying to give me a real sensation of his life and purpose, to reach into my body with his dead hand and to let me know he knew he was doing it, he planned to do it, it was premeditated. He had an idea of an emotion long before it ever would come to pass, and he found a way to participate in it with a simplicity and profundity that many spend most of their lives searching for.

bh 05 2012

Courtesy: The Shiny Squirrel

Why is design sometimes understood through pop culture? Is it because pop culture is understood to determine our everyday? If yes, the everyday has become incredibly impoverished and might benefit some clarification (however impossible) again. Writing after French Social Theorists of the 1960s and 70s recent and contemporary makers make similar attempt to broaden the frame of creativity. Based on an institutional critique that sought to reclaim public place for art (not, initially, ironically), Village artists proposed that as a result of similar misconstrual between art and museums,

the patron-to-artist relationship has been eliminated as a major cultural force; and the corresponding concept of the artwork as a hand-made, and individualized object seems as quaint as a cobbler’s boot.[i]

This lineage from modern art back to hand made boots recalls earlier critiques at the start of design history. Ultimately, at issue isn’t the disciplinary boundary or relationship between mass manufacture, digitization and design or art, but our urban social psychology—how we can imagine and enact our everyday, creatively.

The simplest metaphor for the difference between pop culture and the everyday might be the difference between fact and fiction. A popular imagining of, let’s say, a bad neighborhood; a beautiful living room, a good song, a highly constructed image with definitively, quantitatively mass appeal. An artifact of the everyday (if there could be such a separation), would still be constructed, and may nevertheless draw mass attention. But it also wells up within the benefits and challenges of chance, consensus, and—I want to say—nature (social, material, geographic, ecological, cosmic, etc.)

Pop culture imagining is not by definition fantasy. A lot of it, however, focuses on longing and lack in order to endorse fear. Commercial culture then panders to assuage any doubts about clean skin, good breath, and these types of things. Such fears and the pretentions to resolve them are very real. How can the everyday be successfully enacted en masse in a way that does not perpetuate the needs, restrictions, and prejudice of pop culture? Consider taste really is the answer.

The total aestheticisation of phenomena has been observed as most dangerous for its capacity to repress social and political response. To illustrate, this may be most apparent in fashion, where revolutionary forms are routinely commodified, thereby cleansed of their power to change. Ultimately, bell-bottomed, flower-power dirty long-hair hippies have as much in common with steel-toed, pierced, tattooed, cropped and bleached punks—they both originate as anti-establishment movements; for independence from conventional culture, anti-war, anti-establishment. However, co-opted by mass production, they are cleansed of their power to signal change, and instead contribute to the propaganda of need, despite themselves.

Really there can be no such thing as mass culture. This is the greatest fallacy of pop. And this is why it so successfully nourishes itself on groups of individuals attempting to distance themselves from it. Imagine that everyone—from the senior citizens who order only coffee, to the loitering teenagers on break, to the preteens oogling Happy Meal treats—everyone who eats at McDonald’s does so with an ironic sense that they are just visiting, that somehow they don’t quite belong. Each and every citizen encapsulates mass culture.

When you enter a restaurant and await your cue, whether to sit or to wait to be seated; when you avoid the regard of the salespersons’ exaggerated welcome at a clothing department store, or shout back “hello, yes, we’re fine thank you!”, when you navigate public streets, communicate and exchange right of way–you are anticipating a scripted role, party to the society of spectacle where multivalent customs and divergent expectations have dramatically heightened routine interdependency.

Turn of the last century theory proposes that with the mechanization and urbanization of culture, the psychosocial city is nullified, its nerves worn raw by the clash of electric rails. More recently we discuss the commercial urban social animal through the tale of narcissus. In a previous post, I suggest that in the contexts of the present, we gain greater understanding through a story called The Return of Echo.

If there is an echo to the narcissus of what we call popular culture it is a Romantic provocation. Developed by Classical notion of aesthetics, anyway already much more than the image. Leach’s “beauty parlor culture” must be actually about sensation inasmuch as aesthetics means sensorial experience, its effect and affects. This might be a stance easy to chastise for being highfalutin, but it is just as likely that that’s the kind of idealism is what we “need”. Ironically, near drowning in a flood of perfect images, we seek return to profound values, tradition. An idealism plain and everyday as a cobbler’s boot.

A Pair of Shoes, Vincent Van Gogh, 1886

Earlier theorists sadly describe a “studied avoidance” of regard for strangers in the new industrial city, for example on the subway or in elevators. Yet with previous mechanisms the urban context is now also suffuse with communication. Narcissus hears. So echo resonates in the local, lived, in-the-flesh, platonic interaction—whether medial or not. No longer entirely blasé, nor really isolated in any kind of disciplinary, ivory tower, the contemporary flâneur echoes tightly connected privacies as a mutual respect for public space. Like a tuned appreciation of Da sein—Heidegger’s Being—but that is fragmented.  Like Simmel’s blasé, but compounded with greater, palpable weight and significance. Like Victorian notions of the “cone of vision” but reverse-selected, to focus on the peripheral, transcendent. Hyperreality bands about across cities, Being is capable of shining in multiple directions. Kinda like the way being partially consumed by a mobile can also be an invitation to relax in anothers’ company.

Ultimately an echo can only be understood through more reflexive interpretation of the world. Being reflexive is structuring communicative products so that the audience understands the producer, process, and product are a coherent whole. To be more formal, being reflexive means the producer deliberately, intentionally reveals to an audience the underlying epistemological assumptions that caused the formulation of a set of questions in a particular way. For example, I am sitting here listening to The WNYU New Afternoon Show at as I write this.

Echo is the city―catatonic cacophony, serene noise, a dynamic, labyrinthine series of baffling, wonderful contradictions rejecting exploitation, rejecting rejection. Art effectively absorbed into architecture, the space a person or group makes for itself is its ready made reality. Wallpaper* culture also follows in the wake of FLUXUS, Dada and Surrealism: everyone an artist, everything is art. I know it.

I won’t name them, but there are obviously fascinating, growing compendiums of creative projects based on collaborative contribution, extra-economic exchange. They are largely component of our weird ease with communication. Let’s work also to continue the conversation.

The most important point to be made is that the return of Echo is a search for answer to the most pressing of contemporary concerns: how to live comfortably, ethically, with stranger friends. The risk of anomie is significantly different from that of the initial industrial revolution–it is medial, rather than mechanical, the human as machine is now human as flickering media. Tomb stones are an absolute image. So imagine the infinite possibilities of the virtual, as other images. This is to realize the impossibility of history. There can only be now.

sb 04 2012

Psichê Complexo Itinerant, Courtney Smith, 2004-2011

In a publication following extensive programming at Parsons School of Design, editors Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Lois Weinthal present a collection of new writings on interior design. While beginning with the assumption that discourse on the interior has moved beyond taste, together the essays prove aesthetics persistently inform the field. Taste reigns, it seems, even after 1) modernist attempts to rationalize the subject, 2) approaches combining the social and environmental sciences (especially those concerning the practice and politics of representation), and 3) notions of public and private, including designs for outer space.

sb 04 2012

The Aurora Diamonds, Natural History Museum London, 2006

In The Blurring of Art and Life Allan Kaprow writes about modern art in the 1960s,

on its way from the gallery to the museum, stopped off at a collector’s home, looking out of place there because it was lived with. Now it is the reverse. Kitchen-Sink art, Pop art, Common-Object art, Assemblage, Junk-Culture, Rearrangeables, Multiples, and Environments, united in their appeal to, and often literal involvement in, the themes and space of daily existence, appear absurd and out of kilter in museums where they cannot be lived with.[i] 

This is something that resonates in many ways with my own experience. Most obviously from the vantage of design studies; designers and engineers, objects and interactions are always already destined for life. Tupperware and twitter are self-consciously domestic, design objects.

I can vouch for Kaprow’s prediction also through the collapse of my own studio and living space; the apartment galleries I’ve shown in in Montreal and Toronto and until now, living in Bushwick where the loft-based and apartment gallery fosters a whole new appreciation and depth to the understanding of extra-formalist work.

The relationship between these two fields—on an admittedly microcosmic level of experience—brings to light a contradiction between design studies focused on the object, and extra-formalist art work. Perhaps this is only a paradoxical irony, although the tendency for design to define itself through art has been touched on before, with relation to the production of exhibitions. This can also be examined very straightforwardly, although I can think of no better way than through the question: Is there the possibility of a work beyond capital? I am afraid to say that this is a question that has become confused. So I’ll attempt to deal with this moot, idealists’ problem here.

While design objects share a particular affection and belonging with the everyday as do artworks of the 50s and 60s (through the whole relational program today), they are distinct in many important ways. For example, the off-the-shelf example design objects (within popular conception as well as more scholarly reflection)―Tupperware and twitter—are also self-consciously consumer items, while abstract paintings, on a certain level, are not. Of course we need to assume that art works (and the art historical canon itself) emerge out of some impulse other than to satisfy economies of collectors if we are to pursue this comparison. That this is increasingly difficult to rationalize should be cause for our every waking moment and preoccupation. It’s enough to make me ask here.

How can the complex relationships between capital and creativity be explained? Changed? First, in relation to design studies it seems of the most ridiculous insanity to suggest that design, architecture, “decorative arts”, whatever we want to call them, are more important as means to the peaceful survival of being on this planet, than as economic indicators. This is heresy perhaps especially for architecture which suffers the most in an economic crisis, and is conventionally and sometimes professionally difficult to understand as more than a most smug reflection of elite concern.[ii] As per designers―they make things like business cards and letterhead―why should they problematise the union of art and commerce–art and industry was the slogan of the The Crystal Palace, The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, so often noted as the origin of modern, industrial design history. And I am quite sure that along with the odd engineer design education continues to draw artists—it did me. Ultimately I still think it can be a means for deeply creative social change.

The problem is more difficult to express in relation to art and life in Bushwick. There is a palpable sense of excitement in a neighbourhood of New York City recently recognized by The New York Times as the newest arts district. Especially for a community of artists in large part (I hope safely to suggest), influenced by folks like Kaprow and his 1950s abstractionism, beats, the factory, Wooster Collective, FLUXUS and so on. Artists also must live, and while our idealism may have led us here it doesn’t take long to notice this city is about fierce cash hegemony. Recognizing the modern and recent history of art fueled by cultures of negation, the closest we may have come in the last ten years to a truly anti-commercial movement is the traditionally trained (post)socialist thinkers–I know a few. Indeed, maybe the fade in concern for developing independent systems is as much a reflection of life in Brooklyn, or the United States, than it is a more general trend in design and art. It has long been a concern.

However there are broader evidences of a new right. And maybe the best are in design and art. Someday, they will be described well enough to be realized, and realized with enough cunning that they avoid both cooptation (as harmfully absurd disposablities) and critique (as vainglorious luxury productions). Certain ongoing movements suggest that to point to any examples in particular would be to put them at just such a risk, so for now we just hope to know an “honest” work for ourselves.

For a change, I’ll brave a report from my ink journal with the gentle suggestion that afterwards, everyone go to http://icaphila.org/exhibitions/happyshow.php

Waiting in my accountant’s office flipping through magazines under the hesitant notion that I may not be allowed (for some reason) to continue living, it occurred to me that the boundary between content and advertising has become increasingly moot. Not only from my personal perspective, it seems, but for a change in economies: publishing as well as broader ideological “mechanisms”.

I can’t recall—I think it was a New York interior design rag (my accountants seem like they’d be into interior design)—but it was completely, 100% chock-full of ads. Meaning, written content as well as photography, graphics, layout, everything was determined by vanity commissions. The less-self-conscious supposed to be content came in the form of collections of items glamorously displayed as the advice of a nameless editor—but were clearly culled from the donations of aggressive marketing campaigns. “Gifts”. Spring colors all very much as can be expected. I felt instantly exhausted and fell asleep until the accountant was ready to meet.

This isn’t the case everywhere, but the discussion of a problem with all of the meaning in a magazine being developed by commercial interest seems increasingly rare. It’s become difficult to rationalize (if express), some notion of content not meant to sell some type of product. Right now—am I ultimately in some way selling an idea? In order to sell my self, as some kind of arbiter of (somehow) more significant meaning?

Yet why should I suffer to parse the difference between a fantastic modern travel poster and the glut of promotional copy in a glossy magazine, especially in our time of explosive possibility for alternatives, online? Worse are the complexities this introduces regards user-generated content and social interaction softwares, platforms. Is everyday conversation also always so replete with propaganda of some sort? What about running shoes? The threat of solispist implosion is just too great. And if not, what makes the difference?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzg2yXeChOo

It would be painfully naïve of me to suggest that I could recognize and identify real content. Pop art might suggest no problem at all with publishing everyday life (isn’t everyday life published already, in as far as evening passes and everyone everywhere continues existing simultaneously anyway? ) Like the voice of an announcer. Then you could say that just because it’s published, doesn’t mean anyone is reading. In some ways audiences are as fragmented in neighborhoods as they are in media preferences. Maybe crass commercialism can be one thing while not the whole thing. Is there still any reason to hope for meaning outside capital?

There must be. Capital isn’t universal as we know it, historically or as an abstract concept. Money, although its power is so successfully, so fluidly manipulated to make meaning isn’t the only way. What else is there?

            …

Then today, some work on the train resulted in a spontaneous switch in tracks. Meaning the Rockaway rail would now head towards Manhattan, and vice versa. A sudden change in public like that results in a burst of direct glances, and across everyone’s expression seemed to cross the thought that “something happened”.

Then, fascinated by how New Yorkers react to change. Crowded on the Canarsie-bound platform folks needed to literally shout and wave wildly long minutes before grabbing the attention of unassuming Manhattan-bound patrons now on the wrong side. People got into it. But in every case, shouts were met with averted gazes, even fingers in ears to display ear buds, head phones, any range of self-conscious tactics for indicating I am not available. Not sure where this observation belongs—without sounding like Georg Simmel and other interpretations of the Modern urban psycho-social. On the train, my own head lost in my hands; a man’s calm face obstructed behind the neighborly fence of a baseball cap, a woman beside me reading a kindle, all of us so carefully miles and miles apart.

sb 04 2012

Real Time, Justin Kelly, 2012 Courtesy NUDASHANK

Concurrent with the module system for thesis at Parsons AMT dt, you’ll take writing & research,

In a Name, Fred Eerdekens, 2005

which, for all intents and purposes could also be known as Concept & Methods.

Now, conceptualization and methodology would be a challenging class in any case, however I think it is particularly challenging in this program, because rather than pursue study of a particular area as a group, in the thesis program you each have a unique area of research to master.

Debtor's Inheritance, Katie Murken, 2007

So with that in mind, in writing & research we aim to focus on the common denominator across your individual programs. In 2011/2012 that meant a highly detailed and sensitive understanding of the contexts for each project.

This is not a traditional approach to design thinking, in that it is more akin to the thinking you’d use to create a contour drawing of the negative space surrounding an idea, distinct from how you would draw onto a tableaux rasa or a white cube. Design and technology students approach creativity as engineers–through the careful observation and theorization of total situations, through the recognition of interactions beyond those between “consumer” and “producer”.

Another reason for focus on context is that the contexts of everyday life are now so damn slippery. Throughout the fall we consider context through a variety of domains and specializations

tumblr_m2gscfYFn91qjjis9o1_500

Aesthetically and phenomenologically – because there are new dialectics, networks, and ecosystems informing the everyday. You have not only the relationship between subject and object, but a complicated layering between real and so-called virtual realms. What is the sensory environment your project will belong in?

writing culture, james clifford and george marcus, 1986

Of course related to this are the political, ethical, and socio-cultural realms. As hinted above, will your project engage “users”, “consumers” or “co-creators”? How can you describe the groups and communities your project will live with? We’ll look at a host of new experimental approaches in ethnography to help suss this out.

metropolis, fritz lang, 1927

And finally what are the factual, and fictional attributes of the context for your project? What is the relationship between intention and reality? This, also, is ethics. We’ll address not only the destination for your project, but the possibly generative effects of your work.

amt mfa dt workshop, 2012 Photo: Maurice Sherman

Two key ways writing & research will help you to contextualize your project, in concept and method are 1. Collaborative Workshops, and 2.The Independent Learning Portfolio. We have lots of opportunities to discuss domains // practice discourse // and engage close reading of new studies in the social sciences, philosophy and media studies. And ample means for providing and receiving feedback. In class experiment with coding, and interpreting qualitative social data. (As well as mini-exhibition, guest editors, and off-campus visit)

Objects on the Horizon, Christopher Michlig, 2012 Courtesy Press Street

In the spring we shift from expansive thinking to details and refinement. You’ll write a public-facing text to communicate your skills and interests, and to document successes and failures in pursuit of your thesis.

Variations VII, John Cage, David Tudor,Gordon Mumma (foreground), Caroline Brown, Merce Cunningham, Barbara Dilley (background), 1965

Our year long aim is to plan and realize an installation to engage audience interaction beyond formal appreciation. We’ll tackle that through considering exhibition design; critical design, cinema, theatre, natural history and science museum displays throughout history and of the future, directly after spring break.

Highline restoration, diller scofidio and renfro, 2009 and ongoing

So, while the program fosters independent development of a unique program, it is founded on a collaborative and experimental approach. This image of the high line offers a good metaphor for my thinking about writing and research. These projects engage the balance between independent and collaborative study; the relationship between familiar and unfamiliar, and possibilities for highly considered and thought-provoking integrations.

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title unknown, Funda Susamoğlu, date unknown

My goal here is to probelmatize the display of design and technology for public-facing exhibition. And in my roundabout way, to introduce a series of considerations for those interested in engaging audience interactions with things not limited to their formal physical attributes and received identities.

I suggest that when we think of “exhibition” too often we think of a series of pictures and plinths throughout a starkly white cube lit by fluorescents, with the fewest apertures for natural light possible. This is interesting, especially given the history of exhibition and display design, longer reminiscent of classical museums as might include the medieval castles and cathedrals in Europe (however still, by now largely distinct from this root).

The Modern exhibition is designed to decontextualize objects onto a neutrally striving background of white planes. Derived in part of botanic collections, its objects are reified, meaning they are meant to represent or illustrate an iconic or perfect example of some much broader category.  In fine art in particular sculptures and paintings are supposed to represent larger collections, or moments from the survey of a particular, individual artist’s career. Provenance is a large determinant of what belongs with what, therefore also helping to determine the major thematic interpretations and movements we can take as given.

This type of exhibition is of course quite common. The white cube continues to encapsulate most popular imaginings of what an art exhibition should be, or entail. And again, this is true even though the history of exhibitions began with some very different approaches. A swift overview of that history often begins with the Crystal Palace exhibition in London at the turn of the last century; the palpable origin of the delicious South Kensington, Victoria & Albert Museum. There, surviving interiors designed by Arts and Crafts artists resonate with the kaleidoscopic industrial age revisionings of medieval cities founded on eclectic, entrepreneurial collabs and workshops. For these, the underlying rhetoric supposed that with machine manufacture, entire communities could share in the production of luxuries.[i]  At any rate, this richly ornamented sensorium is quite distant from the modern exhibition scene.

Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, detail, c 1884

The logic of acquiring knowledge through the display of objects can be explored also through Pitt Rivers anthropological museum in Oxford. This 125 year old Lieutenant’s collection of 20,000 items from “other” (ie. not including present readers’ assumed and obvious, normative, status quo identity as) cultures, is naively, and strategically, arranged to show a progression from savage improvisation and pagan religion, to European technical works of art and Christianity. Fascinating stuff that is all still intact as it was, except when on loan . And just one fabulous example for the richness possible in reflexive consideration of what it means to arrange things.

The Mineral Gallery, Natural History Museum London, 1881

The photographer Richard Barnes shows the context-dependent approach of 19^th Century Natural History and Science museums are based on hierarchical evolutions and other more fantastic examples of a comparative approach to knowing (not to mention rampant collectionism). Equally evocative is this image of the London Natural History Museum mineral gallery, which, like Pitt Rivers is apparently still installed as it was in 1881. These all offer impossibly cool demonstration of spatial taxonomy of knowledge, they are materialist encyclopedias, the interwebs (albeit an incredibly rationalist perspective) expressed in architecture.

The Salon of 1852, Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Gray, 1852

Even salons, cousin to today’s shows, are far from our current habit, their deep red ochre walls virtually covered with framed pictures―windows onto other worlds. All kinds of normative hierarchies construed for expressing the value of a work so that connoisseurship could be earned through the identification of a particular and known artists’ mastery of technique (and a less important work recognized for being skied, out of eye level). Natural light was considered requisite to proper appreciation.

Closer to our white cube were the exhibitions developed by artists not invited to the salons—the impressionists, surrealists and other rejects—making the white cube itself a strategic rejection and thus the beginning of contemporary cultures of negation still.

So but why? Why are we left with a style of display introduced with Impressionism—about 100 years ago? Especially if in fact, the white cube emerges in critique of these previous examples, and if, in fact, we for so long have critiqued it for exactly those reasons? Why do we so often return to a context-ignorant, obsessively formalist, “neutral” environment with pretentions toward singular authorship and significant ownership? Why do we valorize the historicist, canonical, purely visualist paradigm of an etiquette based on no talking, no touching?

Raymond Loewy office exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum, 1934

The truth is, especially where concerns design―the white cube persists for just these associations with fine art and high modernism. Of course there is something extraordinarily beautiful and hopeful in the clean, hygienic, and dust free spaces promised by the International Style. Check out Raymond Lowey’s private professional displays, which embody the most insatiably popular aspects of modernism in Art Deco. Of course this is a bit of a rouse here, as this image offers a display model, a sort of period room of Lowey’s office installed in the Metropolitan Museum.

There are two additionally in/famous early design exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art: Machine Art, installed in the museum’s first home in the Rockefeller townhouse on West 53rd Street in 1934, and the Good Design exhibitions of the 1940s and 50s. These shows sought emphatically to express an organic modernism through pre-fab, mass manufacture, and formal appreciation for everyday objects including an iron, a hamper, a rake, a cheese slicer, and Tupperware—but still on this idealized grid. Design as a field is in part defined by these early exhibitions of engineered and everyday objects, as works of art.

I don’t feel I really need to include an image here to prove the persistence of the white cube but I will show two great examples of recent and on-going museological critique.

Untitled, Louise Lawler, 1950-51

An endless reflection of the museum on itself, a total abstraction.

Mining the Museum, Fred Wilson, 1992

An artists whose work can be found also in the ground floor lobby of Parsons 2 West 13^th street building.

What I’d like to emphasize eventually is that with new media in museums we have new problems, which require (and anyway are realizing everywhere) new space allowing for and encouraging performative (or embodied although this, neither, is the right word), multi-sensory, time-based, interactive (in the sense of both engaging humans and machines as well as humans with humans), and multiple-plane (meaning virtual and real; public and private). This image from the richly nutty experiments of Charlotte Mormon and Nam June Paik might sidle us toward the right direction. Another great one: has anyone been to the Janet Cardiff installation of the 40 piece motet at PS1 lately?

What we might try is a combination of approaches borrowing from the Art and Science museum; cinema, theatre, public urban planning as well as domestic, seemingly happenstance conglomerations. The following examples (some more or less rhetorical, and none to be here complicated politically), have long engaged my curiosity. That they might help in pursuing the most useful and elegant displays―in both the quietest of self-effacing responsive environments, and the most exaggerated displays of themselves.

For Toshiko Mori Architects design of the Issey Miyake SoHo flagship, the store has an urban presence―one that engages the streetscape, inviting passersby off the street. Rather than an independent “designer statement,” the boutique’s urban presence is a response to the specific character of this street corner

The bleed of light from real world to theatre created by Matter Practice for Dormatorium, Parsons exhibition of the Quay Brothers is much more appropriate for the work than would be fluorescents.

The quintessence of display experiment is artist Barbara Bloom’s work for the Vienna Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art (MAK).

And of course droog design exhibitions. Andrew Blauvelt on acid. Curiously incomplete, however seductively authoritative graphic patterns introduce strange new propositions for everyday objects.

And finally, the Adventure Science Center of Nashville, among other, much discussed designs by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, where this time the floor is engaged to provoke study of celestial patterns.

My final example comes from a project at eyebeam―this link to which I hope is a salient invitation for further discussion and/or at least a good segue.

Chinati Foundation, Donald Judd, c1979

J’écris pour me parcourir. Peindre, composer, écrire: me parcourir. Là est l’aventure d’être en vie.

Henri Michaux, Passages, 1950

Later, the signs, certain signs. Signs speak to me. I would gladly draw them, but a sign is also a stop sign. And at this juncture there is still something I desire above all else. A continuum. A murmur without end, like life itself, the thing that keeps us going…I want my markings (mes tracés) to be the very phrasing (le phrase)  of life, but supple, deformable, sinuous.

Henri Michaux, Signs in Action, 1987

Apparently the physicist André-Marie Ampère used the term concrétion to describe how any perception always blends with a preceding or unremembered perception. The words mélange and fusion are also used.  Similar to the way every preceding spring jumps out at you from within the happenings of the current. A walk through Washington Square, with impressions of its own imagined past and your own, now becomes every park.[i]

But so much that you couldn’t perceive or understand an experience without history, memory? The absence of precedence would work to describe the fumbling of any new situation. And history definitely enriches a place. There’s a heavy truth also, to technological determinism, as grappling with a new toy impels in children a frantic obsession for understanding. Of course we may wonder about the wild weather without the lens of things, but  we ultimately see ourselves as creators of such. (Perhaps there can be no appreciation for a stone without imagining some built path.)

The problem thus arises: what do you make when you make a thing alive? Something, “real”? (And so on, with any other objects on the gradation between cultural and natural; subject and object (as such gradations are drawn). In answer, if I can make just one broader truism for technology—we make it to make us. Aparently visitors to a 1730s  camera obscura “spoke with astonishment … of pedestrians in motion or branches moving in the wind as being more lifelike than original objects. …” Pedestrians in motion, or branches moving in the wind―“movement and time could be seen and experienced but never represented.”[ii]  And yet, there they are. A screen in a book, a radio in a city. These thoughts made drawings and buildings and design objects and interfaces. These produce our world.

As Donald Preziosi and M.H. Abrams have discussed of museums, to continue to exist they way that they are now is doubtful. In a two hundred year history our perspectival theory has encountered a diverse range of aesthetic, and etiquette, not to mention ethics protocols. Similar histories show that how we understand human subjectivity is just as malleable. Aesthetic philosophy according to some accounts moves from mimesis to expression.

The Library of Charles Dickens, Sir Samuel Luke Fildes, 1870

But what was the point of my writing this? Thinking on space and perception through the history of museums – perhaps the quintessential representative space. Abrams’ shift in perspectival metaphor, from mimesis to expression, mirror to lamp, leads to the question of what new proposals there may be.  My first inclination would be for combinations—some kind of chance kaleidoscope of predetermined elements or structures. Where else can we go?

Interaction networks also hold new profundity in metaphor. Interdisciplinary domains or fields extended into veritable ecologies of concern. Can’t forget Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, which may be the most dominant, currently, aside perhaps from, in art circles, Bourriaud’s radicant. These are also combinations, collapsed over the entire city. Always more deeply imagined, ingrained, collective conscious (see Emile Durkeim).

Is it a nationalist treatise that makes me respond the way that I do? My parents? Their parents? Some deeply written code no one has the time to read? Architects do well to consider space as a qualifying champion of self. Especially when considered as the result of actions made to shape in a certain way, collaboratively. This means structure and decoration and every other universal, of course—there is no producing it. Space, at least as we know it is a culmination of life. Lives.

Michael Maltzman says, “I am interested in the radically different scales between the space the scientists inhabit in their minds and their day-to-day experience.”[iii] How do we display the immaterial?

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A Kiss, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, c1880

A gallery is a demonstration mechanism, steps in, takes care, gives bearings, works, like a living organism.

Christine Hohenbüchler, 1994

Lately I’m reminded of the difference between photographs and non-photographs. First, in sociological critique of the art world, grown from privileging one taste for pictures over another, the pure typically above the popular, a certain ur-function over the mere function.  “A pure aesthetic is one where ‘judgment never gives the image of the object autonomy with respect to the object of the image.’“[i] Second, in the artwork of an incredible friend that could convey the image-ness of being itself, perceived. The work is on-going, and so I won’t describe it here, but might recommend a visit to Eponanonymous. And most recently at the Modernist Manhattan conference where a fascinating conversation came up around the tragic mistaking of a person for their sign, as elaborated in the works of twentieth-century New York literary avant-gardes.

The problem that stops me always is how to show clearly that the space between representation and being is nothing, and yet always gives itself so fully to meaning, necessarily. I think this is especially interesting in our time for the same reason Keller Easterling observes ours is “a world embedded with so many digital devices that the space between them consists not of dark circuitry but rather the space of the city itself. [Where] the computer has escaped the box, and ordinary objects in space are carriers of digital signals.”

What is the Venn diagram for image, and self?  How can we avoid framing the question in moralist and/or aesthetic formal terms, like what is Truth? (I’m thinking of the Arts & Crafts Movement and the integrity of real wood.) Things have attributes, certainly, but do attributes have form? As far as I’ve been able to think it—the meanings are cultural only. But this leaves only a profoundly relativist quagmire, indescribable here. Ha.

Given our times, I’ve heard whispers about the increased capacity for thrown selves. That this explosion of photography over the last one hundred years would then show us to be a culture in slow motion by comparison, as the metaphorical projecting of oneself is perhaps only more concrete. As if coming full circle, a self could be thrown, also as in ceramics; the persona rightly also a bottomless vessel.

Morality tends to creep back when we consider that it is impossible not to be thrown (extending the metaphor, impossible to throw a cube on the wheel.) So, there may be mis-readings, but to mistake reality for its representation should ultimately add up to the same thing anyway, if a just representation. Going back to the conference, my distinguished friends seemed to suggest that Modern Manhattan is still so fascinating for precisely these reasons. The vicious cycle of the myth of democracy—not unlike the enchanting vulnerability/power of the chorus girls and fire signs of Times Square—the line is complicated now, but only by a technologically determined desire. Doubly determined, we long to escape the body even while terrorized by its loss. Describing the beauty of a handmade print we mock the threat of mechanization; unselfconsciously, again, moralizing the immediacy of nuts and bolts.  We fail to escape the sign, even while searching incessantly for it.

Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, 1933

Schalf (Sleep), Hadassa Goldvicht, 2009

By exaggerating the formalist obsessions of their mentors, deconstructionist avant garde architects cautioned against the claustrophobia of a dream realized (a literally International Style, brilliant monotony). Interdisciplinary artworks propose like extremes and literalist interpretations of a society somehow suddenly aware of its own constructedness. In the wake of postmodernisms, many theorists talk of unhinged meanings—floating signifiers are all too banal—and our groping for spatial apprehension in virtual realms only further confirms the constitutive arbitrariness of things.

In these  projects Victorian fears of electric ghosts are echoed in our own loss of meaningful norms, values, and etiquette. And, yet, we’re left still asking how shall we behave? Given that in behaving we are sometimes now only  moving images, one day we may marvel at how unseen are our gestures: at the threshold of new modes of embodiment we pantomime kittens and string in amazement. Performance is intricately tied to behavior when we recognize the informing capacity of our completely artificial surroundings.

Kitchen Tent, St. Paul’s Camp, London. Ben Roberts, 2011

This understanding of the relationship between container and contained does not suppose a scene within a scene (mis-en-scène), but mis-en-abîme…“in which the apparatus reproduces the scene it is in.” Lorens Holm continues, “mis-en-abîme threatens the secure relationship between reality and representation upon which most mis-en-scène is predicated because what was meant to be the representation of a scene includes the scene as an integral part of its representation.[i]

Steel, oak post, office chair, Oscar Tuazon, 2011

These hypothetical experiments, groping demonstrations of surreal and critical contextual development, ask us to imagine places so self-consciously aware of their influence on identity[ii] (but more), Life?  Sure: imagine the danger of the last generation’s fantasy realized, and life into art risks not “falling into the wrong hands” but, hands-free!  The turtles all the way down of infinite regress, and there’s no one to blame, but yourself.  Aaand back to identity.

The way we live now, Brooke Alexander Gallery, 2012

Yet, some places enforce mass confusion for desiring meaning in only ever halls of mirrors; such downward spirals of self-affirmation leave only  “being at a loss for words” as the last hold-out. This is demonstrated also in activism of late, which is tongue-tied for good reason, reportedly, as preventative measure against quotation, com·mod·i·fied.

Giants Parade, John Minchillo, 2012

Other places remind us as if shouting in secret that with all the social and ecological injustices, our political economy of doubt is now making new, more calculated stabs at determining praxis, something very attractive indeed for times with no future anyway. What Other markets are there? Growth at all cost, we might struggle to reappropriate the rhetoric of ecology, however dangerously.

Let’s call it an expanded decorative arts; it begins at least with agreeing that the city is no impartial site for social engagement, but a layered nothingness of up-for-grabs, usually contradictory contingencies.[iii] Here there can be no images, even while there can be only images.