Linguistic Underpinnings

As a follow-up to my entry about truth-serum, I’m posting a link to Radiolab’s segment on Deception. Radiolab is very similar to Cabinet magazine, in that they launch into segments devoted to not so simple themes like laughter, mortality, and memories and propreoception.

I first met Marc Fischer at an art opening in Chicago. One of my friends pointed him out to me as someone I should definitely talk to. Besides being a part of the Chicago based collective Temporary Services, he was working on a project called Public Collectors, in which he shows and shares collections that places like the Smithsonian Institute are probably over looking. A visit to Marc’s site is well worth the time: http://www.publiccollectors.org/

I was interested in Marc’s work because my own project, the Mobile Museum, has the same mission. I believe the Mobile Museum leans more towards an identity that alternates between a sort of typical collection housing museum and a gallery-type show space. (more about the Mobile Museum is available at www.mobilemusem.org)

Marc’s project is specifically about sharing collections that cross all areas of interest and bringing them into a setting that creates a new format for examining them. This new format is that of the museum context, specifically the art museum context. The identity of the collector becomes more fluid as well. In Marc’s project, I found my self thinking of the collectors as artists and poets too, albeit strange object or image poets.

Public Collectors features Fischer’s own collection of records as well. The description on his collection page reads:

“Would you like to see or hear something on this list?”
“Contact: marc [at] publiccollectors [dot] org Let me know what you are interested in or curious about. I’ll give you my phone number and we can set up a meeting time that is mutually convenient.

You can then come on over and listen to the record(s) you want to hear. Headphones will be provided if desired. My tolerant neighbors will not mind if we crank up the stereo.

Never used a turntable before? It’s okay. I’ll show you how.

Records are not for sale.”

Other collections include stolen bibles, Do Not Disturb signs, face painting options in Mexico city, and documentations of things left behind when a man’s son comes to visit and then leaves with his mother (a bit melancholy, but striking in its own way).

Fischer’s project is of interest to me, as is his overall practice because of the way in which he searches for a means to accredit the work an individual has chosen to undertake. Fisher’s Public Collectors rewards and acknowledges accomplishments in a fashion that encourages me to ask, “Why are certain institutions the only ones who can hand out degrees and create rituals of legitimacy?”

Fischer also encourages a sort of encounter between collector and viewer that will entail a more intimate experience than the museum offers. The name of the game here is specificity, authenticity, and perhaps most importantly, the suggestion that a straightforward and sincere presentation of someone’s life’s work is a valuable cultural contribution, existing in its own right in a manner that makes critique in relation to a typical philanthropically powered museum irrelevant.

“Collectors can accommodate viewers at whatever location is most comfortable or convenient for them. If their collection is portable or can be viewed in a location other than the collector’s home, this would still be an appropriate way to participate in the project.”

The underlying sentiment here is one that the parties involved in an exchange of information and experience are those most appropriate to judge its quality. A critique of the perhaps class-specific tastes of museums is brought up too:

“…there are many types of cultural artifacts that public libraries, museums and other institutions and archives either do not collect or do not make freely accessible. Public Collectors asks individuals that have had the luxury to amass, organize, and inventory these materials to help reverse this lack by making their collections public.”

Here, the tables are turned in way that is crucial to understanding the Public Collectors Project. Museums promote themselves as centers of comprehensive cultural and historical wealth. Often times, the museum is even an extension of a particular individual or group of individual’s effluence and education, neglecting to represent other races, classes, and genders in any sufficient way.

I acknowledge the merit of many collections and visit museums frequently myself- however I also sit on the bus and have conversations with the guy who wants too go but can’t really afford it. His position is one of experiencing a lack of means to access information, and also, a inability to connect his own personal story and understanding to others beyond his immediate social circle.

All too easily, vast amounts of information are accumulated and lost because there is not a space or means to record the accomplishments of the middle and lower class. These groups find themselves in positions where acquiring an education and climbing social or economic ladders are necessary for quality of life. These groups are perhaps most likely to both offer relevant information as well as benefit from the wisdom of others like themselves, to improve their understanding of the world and how it works.

Fischer’s work is hopefully one of many efforts to gather up the revelations and insights of the common collectors, who driven by curiosity create street-level records of cultural phenomena traditional museums might overlook.

Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself.

-Walt Whitman

The mind and its relationship to the body have been a steady under-current in my art practice. Recently, I’ve thought about it more. It comes up in the labor of my art-making process and presentation. I try to be physically present now when I show works, and in the (at times passively) performative presentation of my work labor becomes a medium.

The relationship between ideology-the mind, and physical action-the body can be descriptors of class, wealth and power struggles. The subjects of my work often include subtle commentary on the meaning and impact of art in various public and private spaces. Context changes interpretation, and the interpretation of space is necessarily political when it involves the body.

Wealth for me is often associated with an ability to choose whether or not to include the body in one’s labor, and also can be evident in the ability or inability of a person to care for themselves- i.e. being in safe places, having healthcare, being able to eat well and maintain health. Obviously, the lower class is often slotted into labor in which their minds are only useful to the extent that they insure the repetition of some physical task. Because of the power struggles that take place in physical spaces, these are the spaces in which we have conversations concerning freedom and oppression.

When we seek liberation do we seek it from ideas? Do we seek it from an altered relationship between thoughts and the body? Do we seek it from the body, in how we use it or don’t use it? Oppression is ultimately problematic because of what it prevents the body from doing. That is, it creates restrictions that limit the translation from a thought to an action.  Oppression is connected to the body. The constant power struggle in our society is one that involves physical spaces. Theoretical debate could be seen as the starting grounds for matters that are ultimately played out in outward, physical space.

Perhaps what I’m thinking about has to do with exposure- the exposure of the internal to the world of the external- thought to action, the ramifications and the irreconcilable conflicts that arise between the two. There is much that we think and would never say or do. We self-sensor, cooperate with social norms, and make decisions based on learned and taught understandings of logical and illogical behavior.

I think about it when I read Jean Genet, and Walt Whitman. Their writings are filled with conscious and unconscious coming into and departing from internal and external spaces. They each struggle to create a stable space between interior and exterior to navigate new passages between the two. For Genet and Whitman, the interior and exterior over lap- one represents the other, the two battle for dominance, the two lie about one another…they struggle.

For Genet, exterior spaces are submissive to interior rational. The mind flashes, like lightening, and reveals a glimpse of the exterior world. He pauses to notice reality, then carries on with a quick, and ultimately self-serving understanding  of the reality he’s glimpsed. His life is the life of the mind. His characters, criminals and prostitutes, ignore outward appearances and interpretations that would enclose them in a limiting stereotype. Their approach to identity makes them careless and dangerous, but opens a path for them to precede with their beliefs.

“Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.” -Genet

While multiple descriptions of these persons could be generated by society, the characters maintain the sort of introverted absoluteness of self that can only be justified in a vacuous world. Whether Genet and his character’s beliefs are ultimately self destructive or saintly is open for interpretation by the reader. Genet sees his criminals as desperate but insistent visionaries.  As I read, I wonder who is twisted: the deviant ,as an independent creation of the body of society, or the society which has created the deviant, and attempts to brutally cut it off a part of it’s own body.

In Our Lady of the Flowers, Genet comes and goes from the hallucination of story telling. He breaks from fantastical spaces in the mind where he is free, dangerous, and malleable, to shock the reader to the location the author truly inhabits at the time of writing. In reality, he is physically contained and can’t possibly act on his thoughts. He is in a prison cell, the floors are damp, and his bed smells.

Here, I draw a parallel from his writing to that of Walt Whitman- who travels from place to place, also a vagrant like Genet is in his youth and later, after being finally being freed from prison. Whitman absorbs the people and places he meets and projects onto them previous and potential futures. He seemingly experiences new freedoms through this sort of “body empathy”. This empathy is not limited to people, and Whitman describes in detail strong connection to the places which he travels. He imagines himself becoming more like the people he meets and the places he encounters.  He revels in the acquisition of new territory as he considers, the thoughts and bodies of others. He himself is a questionable character, coming and going like a chameleon from person and place. He feels out the perimeters of interior space as Genet does, writing also with fascination of the criminal.

For both, the unusual ways which they negotiate space seems to have an illegal, promiscuous nature. They are each aware that to break from the norm requires a trespass, and they align themselves with all sorts of other “trespassers” in the criminal world. Each writes of their concern that interior justifications cannot be resolved with exterior spaces, as long as moral reasoning and governing institutions act as the floodgates for what an individual may carry from a thought to an action. Each sees the body as a potential vessel for personal liberation.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900..

You Felons on Trial in Courts

I was looking for reviews about the Venice Biennale when I came across this little tad-bit on an art blog:

“One suggestive bracket for the project and very close to the idea of the interview which guided Żmijewski in the realization of this cycle, is Truth Serum. Althamer is asked a series of question while under sodium pentothal. Żmijewski begins with the usual prosaic issues: Where do you live? How many children do you have? (…) And at the end, a question about art: ‘What is the significance of the fact that you make sculpture, dolls, films?’ ‘It gives me joy,’ replies Althamer. ‘I like when people laugh.”

– in: Artur Żmijewski. If it happened only once it’s as if it never happened.

The quote came from what looks like a  promising but somewhat non-intuitive art blog called “New Art”.

http://new-art.blogspot.com/search/label/art%20world

…But that’s a foot note to the thought process that followed. It came to me that I’d actually like to have some reason to be given truth serum. Maybe I really wouldn’t- because it’d mean I was kidnapped or in some other inconvenient situation that I can’t imagine myself being in right now, but maybe it could be something that was recreational or cleansing.

Imagine it as something that could be a new drug trend: You and your friends get together and you all take truth serum and you all get it all out on the line. Susie tells bobby he is really an asshole. Johnny tells Bill he has always wanted to sleep with him. Brenda admits she hates her lame-o job and should quit it.  Maybe if one person was taking it alone it could be a mess- everyone else around them would have some kind of self restraint and the one truth serum taker would be at the mercy of their curiosity, but in a crowd I feel like it could be a good time.

Beyond leisure, I was thinking of more practical applications : I would simply appreciate that a lecture that was given under the affects of truth serum. No bull shitting- the lecturer might be wrong,  but they believe every word of what’s being spewed out. It could go horribly wrong…or maybe not?

I have to present my thoughts on a trip to Europe next week. The trip took me to the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and the Munster Sculpture gardens. I’m more than happy to share my thoughts, but am at least big enough to admit that the way in which I categorize what I say for the purposes of cohesion and listener enjoyment might be a little confining.  I always try to think of ways to spice up a presentation that is but one of many, and in this case one from a collection of my fellow students who did the exact same thing I did. What to do? If only truth serum was an option. I checked online and it doesn’t seem to be for sale anywhere.

For more information on truth serums:

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=223http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_serum

I also found a slew of articles written post 911 when truth serum got a lot of press as a potential tool to help us fight “them terrorists”.  Here’s  a couple -one from 2001 and another from the Washington Post in  2006. I guess the debate is still on:

http://www.slate.com/id/2057471/http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/19/AR2006111900891.html

For now, I guess Whiskey will have to do.

“Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general’s sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.”

-Jean Genet

I once was browsing through the Oakland library … I had the day off and was just skimming titles. What does it mean when you go looking for a thing you don’t know you want? I do it regularly. It’s an act of fatalism, and for those who are unwilling to indulge in such practices from time to time I’d give you a little loving slap in the face.

Maybe there were a few things that attracted me to the book I ended up grabbing…

the plastic coating was yellowed and torn

the book was not too big or small- a good week’s worth of free time

the title: “Prisoner of Love”

But why am I thinking of this right now? Perhaps you are someone who’s life is like an open place. You look up and you see the area around you- you are in a field and you can see the path ahead. I would say I live in a more densely wooded area, and I like it that way. Open spaces have their own claustrophobic effect. Unexpected or anticipated actions leave room for chance- a little roulette and a little lottery dressed up in a different suit.

Envision with me, the cabin I grew up playing around in the foothills of the Smokies:

The place is a ramshackle combination of bought, borrowed, or swindled materials.It’s nestled at the fork of two hollows and a creek runs down the right side of the structure. Bats crawl into the salvaged carpet lying in the soon-to-be kitchen, and the porch out back has no railing. I convinced myself I saw a dinosaur once here. Once, a pony stepped on my foot in a hollow down below this cabin. I stifled a scream and limped for a week in silence so my mom wouldn’t keep me from walking so close to it. Our neighbors let a traveling bum stay at their house on a hill nearby- my dad called them crazy.

How would you like to fit this in with what you know now? Maybe you can more easily take the advice Richard Rorty offers, in his book “Philosophy and Social Hope”. He suggests the drive to organize and “piece together” all that’s happening in your life is a futile one. If you have decided that events and thoughts fit together in a smooth and pleasant picture way (think pictures on the front of puzzle boxes) then you might be a little bonkers. Rather, Rorty suggests, you might spend your time concentrating on a few organized and highly developed aspects of your life and come up with something that is a bit less homogenous but ultimately more agreeable to yourself and reality.

In Genet’s “Prisoner of Love”, he recounts time spent with the Fedayeen,( a fragment of the Palestinian Intifada), back in 1987 when their future was still uncertain and potential. Genet draws connections between the Palestinians and American blacks as a people lost in history, and finds himself among kindred spirits. His tone of writing waves from poetic to logical, and he mixes the Fayadeen’s stories of struggle and issolation with stories from his own past; time spent in prisons, on the streets as an orphan, in jail for theft and prostitution. He weighs his understanding and the understanding of others in acute peaks of logic. These pass. They are swept away in the rush of the present.

He recounts guerilla encampments and nighttime raids into Syria and Jordan as though they were the rendezvous of lovers. The Fedayeen seem to inhabit some ideological no-man’s land and Genet adopts the same space. He describes “distant gunfire under the stars” and how it mingles with the songs sung from one group of soldiers to another. I think “Where are we?”, as I read Genet’s writing. If a book is working it’s magic, you are in there with the author…

In his book “Our Lady of the Flowers “, (his first published book, for which he was pulled from prison by the likes of Jean Paul Sartre who couldn’t stand to let a brilliant mind be contained behind bars),Genet divulges a bit of his colliding and mingling dualism that brings together two opposing ideas throughout his life:

“There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter. “

Genet admits (sadly? his delivery is romantic, but dryly logical) that the Fayadeen, years later, will only be remembered as “…brief flashes in a world wrapped up in it’s own smartness.” The soldiers and their families are dear to him- an acute presence in front of him, and then they are dots on a horizon. They trigger memories, but they remain what they are and do not become symbols for something else. A brief flash. A whole group- a whole movement swept up in time, as the author is being swept, relaxed and aware.

I like to think of Genet in all of the places he writes from, a man falling out of time and place and still fixed in it so firmly somehow. Realistic about the present- always a bit detached from it in order to make way for the future. Letting the past become a narrated story which he is born from, but nor responsible to. Genet draws conclusions from time to time, but they remain mutable, in the end we are sure we learned something, but nothing has been decided on- everything has simply been described to us.