Final Crit

At the end of its constructed I knew there would be conflict with the physicality and the social aspect of the environment. In my theorizing, they exist in the same space of consideration but the weight of the piece was being fought for by the two. There were bridges made between elements in the environment, and between the list, the performer, and the participants, but not as clearly between those systems.

I wanted an embodiment of the tension between real and fictitious. A space that embodies the feeling of the categories, but together is arbitrarily placed.

The swamp was clearly not a swamp; this fictitious claim of containment in a manmade vessel is constructed and accepted in conversation such as the placement of the participants in their taxonomies.

There’s inundation of concept when both the borges and the swamp exist together, but there’s absence when only one exists. The swamp feels static and passive without an activating behavior, and list seems contextless without an environment. I’m unsure how to resolve this.

One idea for idealization is to immensely lengthen the experience of existing and interacting in the space. More time, more context, more possibility in the space might allow for a less rushed understanding. The process for receiving a classification is lengthened. Perhaps strangers can come into the space, spend time with the host, and be assigned a category through their interactions. People may come and go as they please, but hopefully relationships will be forged during the time passed.

I’m so grateful for the response from my peers. It was wonderful to hear how so many bonded with their classification through their perceptions of self, or projection of such at least. Bella described to me how she thought I knew a secret about her. This idea connects to the considerations of language that went into making the piece. The words themselves are strewn together, removed from their surroundings, but are sliced and reconstructed and loosely applied to whatever they will stick to. Language can function like this. I barely know any of my classmates. It’s only the way they speak, their posture, their facial expressions which inform me enough to pull judgment from somewhere.

Every one began asking why I gave them their cards and I wasn’t prepared to give an articulated reasoning. I have reasoning, certainly, but never pieced together the words or examples in my head.

Roya explained how each person related to their category and how intuitively she understood why they made sense.

It’s heartwarming to see Carrie unravel and react. She thinks and feels viscerally, deriving great joy from existing, experiencing others exist, and observing feeling.

Anyways, enough gushing about my classmates whom I do not know very well at all.

The swamp without the list causes physical engagement to overwhelm consideration of intellectual challenge? People want to experience it and this becomes the piece. This is a problem with “interactive” art. i.e. Olafur elliason’s weather project. Necessary non-activity.

I want to continue with the exploration of language as a means of environmental/social abstraction. Or abstraction of language as a means of social understanding or inversion of such.

I had a good time making this.

Final

The conversation regarding teaching and understanding abstraction/abstracted thoughts shaped the arc of my thinking for my final.

I am creating an environment/performance in which to explore the nature of representation, particularly in language. Kubler’s Shape of Time heavily influenced my interest in the replication of sound in my last piece. I’m now expanding the direction of the work to consider replication of thing into an image, representation of a thing in physical space and in language, and the lingual blur between fact and fiction. I’m interested in the conversation that has developed (in our class) of language and its intrinsic inability to create precise definitions and exact comprehension, but it’s success even through ambiguity.

Images/representations are criticized for inability to produce interaction and experience, but what new iteration of experience is created in image culture?

experience of a thing vs. an image

experience of a representation of a thing

 

The space:

I’m creating a swamp as a small community space. In the center there is a small wooden pool of water, algae, plants. It’s an agreeable temperature. Participants can hang their feet in the water if they please. This iteration sits somewhere between an image and representation of a “swamp,” out of context, but with descriptive similarities. Perhaps images and representations are the same.

There’s a ladder to the window. I’ll open the blinds. This is the “true” sky. On the wall there is a large projection of a changing skyscape. How do these experiences change especially when observing something so physically inaccessible?

The performance:

Jorge Luis Borges wrote an essay called “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” in which he criticizes John Wilkins concept of a “universal language,” where Wilkins proposes a system of more or less objective language holding exact meaning in the word itself.

“Wilkins’s system decomposes the entire universe of “things and notions” into successively smaller divisions and subdivisions, assigning at each step of this decomposition a syllable, consonant, or vowel. Wilkins intended for these conceptual building blocks to be recombined to represent anything on earth or in heaven. The basic example Borges gives is “de, which means an element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a part of the element of fire, a flame.”

Borges sees this as a fundamental impossibility.

“it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures.”

In this essay, Borges describes a translated Chinese list that seeks to describe all animals. It’s later revealed that this is entirely fictional and that he lied about finding this translation. He is suggesting that regardless of the attempted universality, language is, in a way, an arbitrary manner of socially organizing the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge

I am not positing this as correct or incorrect, just as a curious thought. I want to assign my classmates into these categories. During their time in the passive environment dealing with the same questions, I’ll give them their category, based on how I perceive them.

The list is ambiguous and nonsensical. Such is language, and somehow it’s easy to make some sense, and garner some feeling from many words, especially when applied to the self. The reason why I pair each individual with their category could be analyzed through my own thoughts, but is likely not based in rationality.

If they are unhappy with their classification, they can trade. They should trade. In addition to abstract extraction of meaning from this list, it’s exciting for me to see how I perceive the Other vs. how they perceive themselves. They might then consider how the Other considered them in their own reflection/perception of self.

 

Response to Crit 3

***I wrote this and the last few posts a long time ago and thought they were published but I guess I was clicking “save” instead of publish 😦 Sorry

The arc of the piece took a slight but significant turn, and most participants noted the new conversation that was formed from the immediacy. The work was initially supposed to delay hours after the initial creation of noise, allowing borrowed time to be present in the atmosphere. Anxiety, distance, and distortion would be present. Here, the anxiety was nearly unnoticeable, fleeting, and overtaken by excitement of when and where the echo would occur.

This is what most comments I received were discussing. This work was a distortion of space rather than a distortion of time. There was a constant deconstruction and reconstruction of arbitrary slices of the room, rearranging them much to the participants curiosity. The collective curation and creation of a community soundscape felt exciting, but also lighthearted; I believe the word “kind” was used.

Everyone mentioned gratification; the search, the anticipation, and the instability of finding one’s own voice in the midst. One’s own voice is lost in rearrangement.

This soundscape was specific to this configuration of individuals. This iteration was described as “primitive,” “animalistic”

I do not want my work to remain in a realm of call and response interactivity. That sort of work often falls prey to sole dependence on the audience, who often turn to play rather than observation and consideration. Conversations surrounding the delay and the ownership of voice do not evaporate, but are not active in these contexts. Longer delays would reduce this immediacy that encourages play.

Many people’s perceptions seemed influenced by the title, citing a disconnection between behavior and reaction, ambiguity of memory, and ownership of memory.

“giving us a memory”

I’m interested in the building of the soundscape, and potentially the rising and crashing of this layered noise.

I am meditating again on replication as artificiality; the repeated transmission of a sound is not the sound itself. Digitization creates new bodies.

“It reminded me of a chamber”

Liz Magic Laser and Thomas Hirschhorn

Liz Magic Laser offers exaggerated transformation of authoritarian powers into mundane, everyday behaviors.

We’re all sheep.

This sort of assertion is not deprecating nor dismissive of individuality. There’s power in the oneness of the human, necessarily communality, lack of inherently hierarchical systems.

The discussion regarding Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Everyone is an intellectual” was especially pressing to me. Issues of intellectual elitism vs. the universal potency of education. This claim, while attempting to socially equate individuals, also potentially posits intellectualism as the ultimate power as well as making a dangerous claim dismissing individual obstacles.

 

Audre Lorde and Illana Harris-Babou

Reading about Lorde’s perception of the erotic immediately reminded me of the critique in Society of the Spectacle. Pornography acts as a symbol of the erotic, both casting image as representation, and remove the accessibility of the erotic for consumption in everyday life. Instead, the erotic should be considered as the allowance and experience of necessary hedonism; the enveloping pleasure of individual desire.

The erotic posited solely as sexuality relegates intensity and feeling to a forcibly hidden environment. This environment is shamed and singular.

When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse

“Use” of the Other rather than shared feeling of such.

Illana’s cooking show allowed an interestingly vicarious experience of pleasure through cooking sensations. The presentation mimicked the sensory appeal of such spectacles, with close up shots describing visceral textures/sound, but abstracted into edible amalgamations.

Project 3

I want to create a multitude of interactions centering around precariousness and hesitation, truth and distance.

For now, I want to keep form ambiguous in my own thoughts. Form is indeterminate; form does not define. Not unimportant, but specific. Unsure of how it’s should be used.

1. Perhaps a fabric-thing, a textile. Adorned so that both sides, the verso and the recto, are active, uncomfortably so. It’s unclear as to what the history of its use is and what it is to be used for now. Some kind of hammock?

2. An smooth object with a destructive tool. Participants are contextually instructed to break it but will not be told explicitly to do so. They will perhaps hesitate because of the preciousness of singularity and perfection. The weight is in the decision.

3. A delayed capturing of sound. Participants’ speech or action is recorded, but played back significantly later. Similar to the Dan Graham piece where this was done with video on a one minute delay. That piece spoke greatly to the subversion of video’s immediacy as a medium. I want to speak about death of an experience and the birth of a replica. Distance and distortion created by time. Memories as replications.

The Shape of Time

Prime Object vs. Replica. Akin to the ways in which language is formed solely through analogy. Copies of words and phrases – through time and culture – are generated until a system of meaning is understood. These copies cannot, inherently, replicate the original. There is no original. The system is constructed through relative perceptions rather than objectives.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms Indeterminateness.

Reminds of Warhol’s themes of repetition and the individuality of the copy. Each copy, even when produced through means of precise replication, has a unique existence.

The dead star is an index. A trace of what was what; an effectively literal example of the immediacy of remnant. **I like this subject matter.

Our interest therefore centers upon minute portions of things’ rather than upon the whole mosaic of traits that constitutes any object.

Yet the Parthenon is built upon an archaic formula surviving into Periclean time.

Prime-ness breaks down under consideration of its individual parts of construction.

These three examples, however, are extremely special ones illustrating the phenomenon of the climactic entrant<. Such entrances occur at moments when the combinations and permutations of a game are all in evidence to the artist; at a moment when enough of the game has been played for him to behold its full potential; at a moment before he is constrained by the exhaustion of the possibilities of the game to adopt any of its extreme terminal positions.

The prime object owns itself and its compositional sequencing

The manuscript draft by the puzzle-maker is a prime object (which no one conserves); all the solutions in ~ subways and on the desks of people who “kill time” compose ( the replica-mass.

An important question arises at once. If, in a given sequence an initial prime object begins the connected series, why are the subsequent prime objects of the series not to be regarded .. replica”

This pinpoints difficult in assuming ontological origin of any aspect of a thing.

Here the “new critics” held chat the poet’s intention does not extenuate his performance, and that all criticism must be within the poem itself regardless of its historical and biographical conditions.

Wow so post structuralist.

The name of art is itself close to technical cunning.  Referencing greek origin? No differentiation between art and technology. Consider the most basic definitions of technology, and especially the “tool.”

Technical deviation has high potential to generate new sequence in an object. Organizations, sequences, arrangements form hierarchical relationships in objecthood and visual culture.

MOLD MAKING

Question the origin of the object itself.

Simulacrums exist everywhere. Take the banana for example, or any object with biology for that matter. Where its the beginning of its existence? What is a cast, of a preexisting object, besides a deviation from an existing replica. A new series of mimetic objects. A series might be made distinct by material means, processual means, formulaic means.

When error is introduced in the process of replication, one would likely continue to copy from the non-mutated version. If, then, one might generate replicas using the mutated form, and continue to do so when new variations emerge, conversations emerge surrounding integrity, principality of a thing. When do deviates disallow categorizations back into its original classification?

Axiological variation when considering the prime/replica relationship: elevation of the replica. IN DEFENSE OF THE POOR IMAGE BY HITO STEYERL. SUPER RELEVANT. Elevation by means of circulation, the commodity of the image suggested by technological accessibility.

Remnant collected on replica revealing of life and passage of time.

Repetition generates power, but of what? The actual object/concept being repeated/replicated, or the image of such? A thing cannot be copied exactly. Every physicality has differentiation. Is then, only the image, an abstracted idea of a thing, copied?

**Replication in the digital vs. the physical world

Response to Crit #2

I’ve been thinking about the outcome of our performance for the better half of the day.

I think the most effective way to describe it was “the most relevant possible failure.”

This isn’t a defense of what happened as an art piece. I feel both guilty and responsible for lacking the planning and control that was necessary for me to keep it contained as a piece. This lapse is something that I NEVER experience; I’m generally extremely (overly) wrapped up in the final presentation of the work, prioritizing it over the progression and process itself. This feeling is foreign. I hate the idea that we abandoned the audience as an engaged participant. It was entirely unintentional and non-malicious, of course. When I was done, but I should’ve taken control of the situation to reign in the boundaries of what we presented. Performance is both incredibly difficult and incredibly new for both of us and I think we struggled with the line between practiced and disingenuous.

However, what transpired, though unfortunate, was honest, uncomfortable, and a strange validation of everything that I had said during the performance and also everything that was revealed about myself. Sophie, who is Roya’s other very close friend wrote a letter to us expressing truth and pain in what I said and the belief that this will truly change our relationship outside of the performance. She ended with repeated use of that word, “validation.” The notes that we received were mixed; half said that they felt lost as we lost control of the performance, and the other half said that it was then that they began to understand exactly what both she and I were speaking of. Some said they could listen to it for hours. That was a comforting (but also heavy) notion amidst my extreme frustration and sadness post performance. Zephyr patted me on the back afterwards. Peter thanked us twice in his notes. I got choked up. These external results, the reaction from the other is what I was searching for. Honesty, somber truth, fragility of relationships were communicated, at least to a degree, to most. Fast/slow/average formation of judgment and contemplation in the minds of the external participants is just as key of a material as we are. We might meditate on the otherness of self, the perception or denial of truth and fiction, the tangibility of community and sympathy.

Ben gave some wonderful meditations on, I think, what the piece in its best form could’ve been/maybe was.  “I (and probably everyone else) will start to analyze themselves or have the courage to be honest with each other about their relationships.”

This is what I wanted. Here was another area where the piece had two (both legitimate) goals.  I wanted reflexivity and Roya wanted introspection. I know my half fell short.

“I do wonder if one of you is more right or if you are just two different dynamics, the overthinker, the narcissist.” – No one has ever given me an epithet, haha. He spoke poignantly about roles that we play in relationships. He spoke about the tangible glimpse of emotion, allowing anger to fester and brew.

“How do you say something truthfully when you would never say it to begin with”- I asked her that often throughout the process of us planning this piece. There was a strange dynamic, one of the impossible things to communicate, where I said everything I meant, but some of which truly never bothered me to the point where I would’ve brought them up normally. It wasn’t a conversation that two people “needed to have.” It was a ulteriorly motivated conversation (for the sake of this performance) that handedly forced healing truths.

Corin’s suggestion of connectivity through costuming or other could definitely have been a more physically engaging and tangible mode to explore.

I feel an urge to share what everyone else felt because that suddenly became the most important thing to me, and crit notes became letters.

Katie said things fell away. They did. She thought Roya had heard me rehearse what I said at first but then began to realize that she hadn’t.

Carrie said thank you and that phrase means a lot right now.She said she knew us to the core now. She said we didn’t need the tea. I agree we didn’t need the tea but I’m concerned because it meant a lot to Roya and she was very upset when I left her, blaming not me, but the tea on the deviance.

She took it pretty hard, the outcome more than the words (I think). I only say this because I felt close to her after the piece, but very distant after the class. I have a significantly easier time accepting instances of failure/imperfection than she does and I was at least o-k because I believe that I learned a lot. But honestly, the word disaster did enter my mind a few times. Maybe disaster with an upside.

The strangest thing is happening now where I feel truly truly close to my classmates, most of whom I’ve only had small interactions with. And god, is that so antithetic to everything about my personality. It’s incredibly difficult for me to feel a genuine bond with an overwhelming majority of people, and I swear right now I feel the most honest gratitude for these distant, new friends.

questions and notes from “reading things”

How do I “tell” a material/object something?

How can I relinquish my own agency to allow the material theirs? To behave how it will?

Can I remove my own interference? No, but perhaps I can move any and all significance away from my initial interaction.

Make the object ask a question rather than the artist asking a question.

Nature of the material is revealed through behavior and interaction. Revealing ones nature as a form of “telling.” One way interaction does not exist. There is a continuous push and pull

How do I remove authorship without physically giving away a thing?

“In it, I proposed a way of reading sculpture as a form of embodied pedagogy—sculptures as objects from which we learn.” relationship to specific objects by Donald Judd

How does one construct an object with autonomy?

“First, an intersectional analysis of gender policing acknowledges that fear is not doled out equally, and that a person of color is already more likely to produce anxiety for a nervous white person in a bathroom.^10″ 

Yes. Not equally no fairly. Subjectivity of fear in fear culture delegitimizes its authority in decision making.

When I analyze this dynamic in this way, I am actually able to feel compassion for those who oppose the presence of transgender people in bathrooms that “match” their self-professed gender identities, because the idea that a person’s gender could be self-determined and believed by others as a matter of faith is a legitimate shift into another perceptual system literally incompatible with one rooted in biological essentialism

Naturalism is a prevalent mindset in non-progressive ideologies. I would offer, however, that instead of refuting naturalism (and even behavioralism) as law, one should perhaps assert that even IF these presumptions are true, we are advanced enough as social beings to legislate differently than biology’s narrative. This might address a wider variety of perspectives.

“In thinking about Mark and her succulents, I am wrapping myself around the sustaining potential of relations of care with non-human things.”

Ideas for Steel, ideas for future, etc.

1. Lately I’ve been fixated with this idea of exploring things that I can’t remember. Not dates, or names, but contextless memories and temporally abstracted feelings. I would investigate the objecthood of a thing that is necessarily object-less and nearly imageless. Two experiences come to mind, one more vivid (and therefore slightly more perplexing), and one more ambiguous. While watching a video recently, the only flashback-like feeling that I’ve ever experienced struck me. It was of a woman doing bobbin lace.
   If I hadn’t watched the video there is a great chance I would’ve never recovered this memory. When I was young I would pick up long objects and place them over each other, mimicking the motions of this weaving, but I was never exposed to this practice in real life and I have absolution no recollection of how I could’ve been introduced to the image of it. There is a simultaneous heat of frustration and dream-like feeling of rediscovery when pondering something that you absolutely cannot remember. My memory is generally extremely precise, which makes this even more poignant.

   The second is a feeling of fabric that came to me while I was lying in bed year ago. It was reminiscent of something but I do not know what of. It’s a feeling of a stretchy, perhaps shiny material going over something, and when I imagine it the forms it contours are somewhat grotesque but I don’t know if that’s correct. I obviously cannot be certain, but I don’t think these memories are dejavu-esque in that they are mental constructions and might stem from an imaginative event; I believe they are tied to something very concrete from a long time ago but I cannot recall anything else.

   What do I do?

   a)  Somehow express impossibility of conjuring form from experience. Going back to the idea of anti-experience. Constructed thoughts, objects, behaviors inherently have a degree of separation from the artist. Make a thing with the essence of the forgotten movement and feeling, even if it deviates from any imagery I retain.
   b) Allow others to attempt expression of forgotten things, or bathe in absence. This would explore notions of gift-giving and hospitality that were discussed in my last critique. I’m interested in the idea of exchange through subjective means. I found a passage by Rosenquist (talking about his F-111) touching on this language today. 

   2. In the vein of continuous heat. Feelings of heat/cold bring severe, sometimes jarring awareness to the presence of one’s own body. I want to explore my body in physical space, and possibly in relation to others. I was thinking about weight, not numerically but carrying my(one’s) own weight continuously. It seems that I’m only truly happy when I’m in the air (climbing) these days; and it is only then (and when I’m very warm) when I feel aware. I’m thinking about distribution, hanging, mimesis of force, weight. Image vs. Material relationships.

   3. Two performances pieces not for this project.

   a) I’m very excited about this one. My work heavily focuses on assignation and observation of value fluctuations and exaltation. In this vein, but relating to my personal life, I have never perceived what a “true” self is.  I think I talked about this earlier. I curate my identity to a large degree, choosing what I like until it becomes instinctual. And so, within 6 days at some point in the future (it takes 66 days to form a habit), I will design my idealized, handwritten typeface and work daily to become perfectly accustomed to this manner of writing. I will attempt to mimic the writing almost perfectly until I can do it without effort. I hate my current handwriting.

   b) Roya and I have talked a couple of times now about making her cry as a potentially collaborative piece. I’ve been told how incisive I am with words countless times, and while I don’t believe it is to an abnormal degree, I acknowledge the intensity with which I speak. I have inadvertently made others cry. I’ve apologized. Often times they tell me that it’s not because of me. Many, many people tell me because that there is an enormous disparity between how I appear and how I speak. I’m small, female, Chinese, but I speak with unapologetic conviction (sometimes). I’ve been told that this upsets people because it embarrasses them, or it is too atypical. That is somewhat infuriating.
   Roya, a very very close friend allows me ultimate vulnerability. We place trust in each other with the faith that we will remain friends. Though I am on the offensive, I too am vulnerable. My perceptions and judgments of other inherently reflect back on me, as the speaker. This piece would be built on an old dialogue of audience vs. artist, the reconciliation of space between them. [Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror] The audience is no longer audience at all, and becomes inextricable from the piece itself. Here, Roya acts as my audience, but the performance has a more standard viewer element as well. Their now-colored perceptions of us as individuals are now intrinsically involved.

   p.s. I’m trying to be more personal. My work is rarely personal and I should improve my perceptual communication.
   p.p.s. I think sometimes I should just throw out my first idea no matter what. Sometimes.