Remodelling Interpretation after the "Encounter-Event"

"Crystal of Resistance", Thomas Hirschhorn, Biennale 2011

Writing as both an artist and an analyst-theorist, Bracha L. Ettinger declares that it is the destiny of artworks to be interpreted. She formulates the inevitable connection between subjectivity, initially the artist’s, and the Symbolic, the field of meaning, in ways which at first echo Julia Kristeva’s notion of art as the semiotic transgression of the Symbolic order. But Ettinger goes further.

Artists continually introduce into culture all sorts of Trojan horses from the margins of their consciousness; in that way, the limits of the Symbolic are transgressed all the time by art. It is quite possible that many work-products carry subjective traces of their creators, but the specificity of works of art is that their materiality cannot be detached from ideas, perceptions, emotions, consciousness cultural meanings, etc, and that being interpreted and reinterpreted is their cultural destiny. This is one of the reasons why works of art are symbologenic.5

Ettinger presents art as a kind of gift, packaged in its own materialities that are at once spurs to perceptions, feelings and thoughts as well as connections with existing cultural meanings. This gift is also an event, inviting and inciting the receptive culture to work with it. The concept of the event is central to Ettinger’s theoretical shifting of psychoanalysis from a focus on the object to the significance of a shared trans-subjective occurrence. The event initiates the foreseen that has resonance beyond the individual subject. Event in general parlance involves both a gathering and an occasion and the word, used of art, reminds us of both the interaction between different sites and moments of subjectivity and the shared experience, of the gathering of reciprocal responses. Interpretation, then, is not the exhaustive definition of what art is and where it comes from but is instead an engagement to work with it as a gift-event, that in doing something, brings about change in the culture itself: it generates new meaning.

The point of interpretation, therefore, is not a fixing of meanings to artists, forms, iconographies or practices as occurs in the dreadful recurrent phrase ‘this work is about…’. It is a work of analysis that aims to enlarge the text of culture through the co-creation with the working of art of otherness which sustains plurality, and preserves some hope that there are domains yet to be known.

-Griselda Pollock, Tate Papers

Lovely.

Ji-Young Lee, I'll be Back, 2010


I wonder why I lied to myself that I had never been here and was totally ignorant of this place- in fact, it's just like anywhere else here- only the feeling is stronger and incomprehension deeper

I give you a pear that was given me- would that it were a pair, but nature is penurious.

Louise Bourgeois- The Damned, the Posessed and the Beloved (The Steilneset memorial), 2007-2010
"a flaming chair surrounded by a ring of seven oval mirrors-each distorted mirror reflecting the flame differently" in Vardø, Norway

Best departing email ever

Hey Valerie. I'm long gone. Outta here. Vaya con Dios. Arrivederci baby. M.I.A.

I was sorry to have missed you at the party. You can keep the book if you want. Let me know what I owe and I can send you a check. And remember, if faced with a choice to go or not to go, always go. Unless it's a headless horseman offering you the ride. Then think about it.

Take care,
Ben

The brain has over a trillion neurons and every neuron has 10,000 dendrites.

Why haven't I made art in over 16 months?

I asked a co-worker the other day (he's a writer) whether he found words to always be sufficient. He said yes. Then I asked him if he's ever had a writer's block- the long term kind. He said no, because if he can't think of what to write, then he writes about how he can't think of what to write. Then I felt kind of like punching him in the face, but that was a fleeting second, haha..I find it fascinating that he's never experienced a sort of block. And I also completely disagree, I actually don't believe that words or images are always enough. Usually they are, but in rare moments of life I find them to be infuriatingly insufficient. For example, I was babysitting Giulia and Arianna today (prof's kids) and Giulia and I were talking about what little 7 month old Arianna must think about all day. We like to put her in this ridiculous contraption that supports a baby standing up but it also has wheels and toys all around the perimeter. It looks like a baby UFO on crack with all the bright-colored toys. She likes this one mirror in particular which is a bright purple color with hearts all over it. Today I was watching her really closely and I thought of two things: (1) I wonder if she's had her Lacan cross-over yet and (2) I saw her baby eyes look at the saturated purple and then look over at me in my bright purple T-shirt a moment later, making a sort of optical connection. This somehow almost compelled me to start bawling. I told her, Yeah, that's purple. Welcome to the world, baby. Then I thought about what it would be like to draw that moment...impossible. See what I mean?

Sour mood

THINGS THAT ANNOY ME SOMETIMES:

1. talking about how shitty the economy is
2. people who come to museums with the intention of hating everything and making that agenda VERY transparent and loud
3. disingenuous people who only want to be friends with you to keep you in networking proximity
4. Natalie Portman
5. the hipster impasse attitude trend
6. participation drivel ie people who supplement every comment in class with a personal anecdote

Sarte was right; hell is other people :(

Dear Mom

I really miss having someone rooting for me. Most of the time I really can't do it for myself. Somehow I find this extremely selfish.

Most of these days I don't feel 22, I feel 100.

I feel like a machine, producing. I also feel like one of thousands of sheep, herded.

I am wondering when I will stop waking up and going to sleep thinking about things I am sick of thinking about.

I realized that 10 minutes changes everything. Especially 10 minutes you think you might have had. Or 10 minutes you can never have.

I am really, really homesick for a home that doesn't exist anymore.

Obama's short announcement on Bin Laden's death was appropriate-short, grave, patriotic...but NOT celebratory. I find myself deeply disillusioned and disturbed by all the footage on TV of people cheering "USA! USA!" and throwing around beach balls (?!) and apparently also high-fiving each other (NYT front page right now). When I first figured out what had happened, my gut reaction was NOT happy celebration. Yes I understand what this event means symbolically for the United States and no I do not undermine all the different "victories" that it represents. But watching people's reactions is sickeningly reminding me of the footage there was on TV back in 9/11 of people cheering on the exploded twin towers. So is this what humanity's literally come to? Cheering on death as victory? Sadly, it makes us no better than them.

Because painting:

is a game.

is the application (consciously or otherwise) of the rules of composition.

is the freezing of movement.

is the representation (or interpretation or appropriation or disputation or presentation) of objects.

is the springboard for the imagination.

is spiritual illustration.

is justification.

serves an end.

Because to paint is to give aesthetic value to flowers, women, eroticism, the daily environment, art, Dadaism, psychoanalysis and the war in Vietnam.

We are not painters.

-Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, Niele Toroni, 1969

BMPT had the right idea: Beauty is politics and beauty is a sedative.

Brendan Monroe
"We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related." -Henry Miller, Sexus

I often find that the deadly combination of independence and psycho-productivity (an ingrained consequence of social/cultural brainwashing) take a toll on my ability to realize the absolute brilliance of Henry Miller's quote from Sexus. I've had the sensation lately that a lot of my long term goals for self-work/progress have to do with a chiseling process. Instead of the idea of gaining more the older you get, I find myself in the midst of the opposite sort of phenomenon of chipping away at excess, brainwash, what I've been taught to believe about the world. I remembered randomly today that back in oh, 2nd grade or so (all the grades sort of mush together in my mind in one big abstraction called my 'youth') I was given an assignment in class where we were given a list of short sentences like, "The sky is blue" or "Grass is green", "Unicorns are real". Next to each statement, we were supposed to write "F" for Fact, "I" for Fiction. I remember this really distinctly because I got confused about what a fact exactly was- the sky is blue, but the sky can also be red, or orange...so why does the statement "The sky is blue" get irreversibly branded as "fact" with no asterisks? So we are literally taught iron binary oppositions from a really young age when our minds are arguably at their most flexible stages. Or think about the fact that when we are babies, we are put into cribs to sleep. By even a couple of years old, it is considered childish and innocuous to sleep with your parents purely because you want to, or you're scared not to. So we are taught to be independent from the cradle.

And yet we crave the other being, we crave for others to know us, we crave to be cradled in times of sadness, invigorated in times of apathy, directed in times of tangle, and validated in times of self-doubt.

To be anti-ego and rather collective is such a contradictory compulsion...it is both counter-intuitive and completely instinctive at the same time. But necessary, absolutely necessary.

Am quickly losing/have already lost faith in institutional learning

Saw this at the New Museum last Friday when I was in New York for the Armory show. It's really strange seeing Benglis's feminist work and then something like this. This shit weather's starting to get me down, I think I need a new hobby. Was talking to Nick last night about Musicology and synesthesia- I think I want to pick up learning music theory?

Yayoi Kusama was definitely a shroomhead.

What does it mean to live within your own ethics? Your most abstract and yet most direly important goal is to wake up in twenty years and be as far away as you can from the heaviness of your own conscience. Because it doesn't matter what you do or what you convince yourself to think; a conscience is ubiquitous and therefore the most fragile element with which you preserve yourself. At the end of your life, the only thing left for you to do will be to evaluate, and evaluate. And within the bigger picture, if you can shake hands with your conscience, then you are liberated. You are wholesomely yours.

Which is more exciting, complexity or simplicity?
Complexity.
Which is more sustainable and healthy, complexity or simplicity?
Obviously simplicity.

Sometimes I wish I could be really asinine and deductive. Apples or oranges and nothing the fuck else!

François Dufrêne obviously had a sense of humor and an incredible distaste for Planet Earth: http://ubu.wfmu.org/sound/dufrene_francois/catalog/Dufrene-Francois_Catalog_01-Kochel.mp3

Francesca Woodman

woke up at 9 AM feeling infernally hung over, desiccated and sore. rolled over, had an entire bottle of water without breathing, turned on chopin's waltzes, went back to bed. super glamorous first day of being 22.

when will we meet again, and where?

Apparently at Tufts we have one of those three-dimensional printers!! Read about it, pg. 77-79 in The Economist for this week. It's outrageous that technology can manufacture and "print" random shit like usable batteries but also medical implants?!

I'm seriously considering forfeiting the post-graduation-get-your-life-together thing and just taking to playing chess and mah jong with those old men in park benches for a couple of years

you wonder what it is exactly about hangovers caused by whatever solid or liquid you had too much of this weekend that make you ask yourself, sometimes, "what the fuck are you doing with your life!". you wonder if it is from the pure shittiness of having everything churn around in you for unforeseeable hours ahead. or, you wonder if the world really is actually out to get you, in every possible way. but mostly you realize that it is the contrast that kills you. you felt invincible, out of your body, flying. and then suddenly you felt like scum of the earth. Being able to juxtapose those two days side by side (ie the thrill and then the hangover) it's almost scary that you can measure the contrast between the two...brain stimulation, brain death. loving the world, hating the world. vertical and moving, horizontal and inanimate. jumpy, slumpy. etc etc

Breton said a LOT of stuff in Le Manifeste du Surrélisme (read it sometime) BUT you think one of the most articulate things Breton conceptualized was what he called "convulsive beauty": you feel extraordinary happiness AND crushing anxiety. You feel a mixture of panic, joy, and terror. The difference in these kinds of contrasts and then the party-hangover thing is that Breton meant that you feel those contrasts simultaneously. You've been thinking about this a lot in the past month or so, the extremeness (for lack of better term) of feeling two or sometimes more emotions warring and colliding inside you. Mostly for you lately, for the past two months, it's been pain and hope. The most difficult thing about convulsive beauty to explain in words like this is that it almost romanticizes reality sometimes a little too much. You don't mean the kind of universal pain that makes you cry...no, you mean the kind of pain which at first is amorphous and numb, and then whose force pushes out so hard that it makes your mind and body feel like they can't sustain themselves. It's not pitiful, it's not artistic melancholy. But then simultaneously feeling a newfound hope bubble up out of nowhere-"We are creators. We too have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illuminated and everlasting road." Stride not into chaos...

It's bizarre that you haven't felt these things one after another or in rises and dips but literally, at the same time. Perhaps you've just never actually sat down and thought about simultaneity because it is so human to organize and to demarcate. But simultaneity; that's existence, isn't it?

One last thing, you thought 30 seconds ago about this piece you haven't thought about in a really long time. It's this big, red, semi-cylindrical wax object made by Anish Kapoor in Museum de Nantes in 2007. He called it "Svayambh", which is Sanskrit for that which is formed with one's own energy, self-created. Basically this thing was on a long rail that spanned a good chunk of the museum's width and would move back and forth on the rail, eroding slowly from the process. You don't exactly know what he means by it...it could be anything, really, institutional critique, some bloody history reference, etc. But really you think it's a damn good example that ties humanity and convulsive beauty together. Which is simply that life is that gigantic, red block: emotive, brutal, ever-progressing.

Listening to Flying Lotus..have you ever noticed how a lot of his stuff sounds like there's a slight, membrane film or something like that between your ears and the music?

Paint sound sculptures

Apparently, you can put high viscosity paint on top of a thin membrane you put on high power speakers, and you get shit like this. I REALLY want to try this

here's the article/really cool video: http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/11774/dentsu-paint-sound-sculptures.html

I was on par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter. I had it explode. I had it disperse itself again.

Ask me a question, any question. How old is the Universe? It is one half-second old, but the half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far. Who created it? Nobody created it. it has always been here. What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail, like this.

This is the snake which uncoiled itself long enough to offer Eve the apple, which looked like this.

What was the apple which Eve and Adam ate? It was the Creator of the Universe.

And so on. Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

-Breakfast of Champions, K. Vonnegut

"Altermodernism can be defined as that moment when it became possible for us to produce something that made sense starting from an assumed heterochrony, that is, from a vision of human history as constituted by multiple temporalities, disdaining nostalgia for the avant-garde and indeed for any era- a positive vision of chaos and complexity. It is neither a petrified kind of time advancing in loops (postmodernism) nor a linear vision of ihstory (modernism), but a positive experience of disorientation through an art-form exploring all dimensions of the present, tracing lines in all directions of time and space." -Nicolas Bourriaud

I became obsessed with him after I read this in an article in Artforum, if you ever feel like exploding read "Relational Esthetics" and/or "The Radicant". Bourriaud is absolutely, wonderfully crazy.

Picture caption: Here's one of Kusama's infinity mirror rooms at the Gagosian, ridiculous title: "Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity". Also, Sebastien Preschoux and his string/light installations.

madness is my mantra

How much time does one spend absorbing? Then how much time does one spend expelling/re-circulating?

I am precariously tightrope walking between a 70/30 ratio this week...no good.

New NYT imgs from Hubble telescope.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/01/04/science/010510_BOOK_index.html?emc=eta3

How much does a man live, after all?

How much does a man live, after all?
Does he live a thousand days, or one only?
For a week, or for several centuries?
How long does a man spend dying?
What does it mean to say 'for ever'?
-Pablo Neruda