Enthusiasms

Week 13

I have a very clear dichotomy in my mind between “out there” and “in here”. Right now, for instance, I’m clearly not “out there” in the world. I’m sitting at my computer, mind focused on abstract symbols, not engaged with the concrete world. On one level, this is obviously a lie. As always, I’m located in concrete spacetime right now. I’ll always be flesh and blood. I’m not, and can’t ever become truly virtual. In a way, this distinction is simply false. But in another way, it feels very true: engaging with something virtual or institutionalized feels completely different from engaging with something raw and concrete and out there.

Richard Long, Dusty Boots Line, Sahara, 1988.

Richard Long’s art is located out there in the world. A land art pioneer, his works are structures made from natural materials and simple human actitivities, like A Line Made By Walking (1967). It’s really, really pretentious and also totally not: it’s just a line on the ground made by repeatedly walking back and forth, see? Beautiful, simple, and without any particular symbolism or high-strung concepts. Other works are a little more conceptual but equally simple: Long simply walks, and the walk, documented through photographs, maps, and so on, is the art. His work, he says, “is completely physical and personal. I’ve walked or climbed to the place of each sculpture. I’ve made it with my hands (or feet) and energy at that time.”

But Long also makes indoors installations from natural materials. This is where the question of out there in the world versus in here, in the institution and the abstraction, comes into play. Long again: “the landscape, the walking, is at the heart of my work and informs the indoor works. But the art world is usually received ‘indoors’ and I do have a desire to present real work in public time and space, as opposed to photos, maps and texts, which are by definition ‘second hand’ works.” Does putting up walls and calling something a museum of art make it “in here” instead of “out there” in the world? When I was at the Hamburger Bahnhof last week, they were still mounting the Richard Long exhibition that opened on March 26. Since the exhibition wasn’t open yet, I could only look from afar, but I wasn’t really impressed. It might be that these sculptures are more powerful when viewed close up, but I think that when all is said and done, they simply aren’t suited to the gallery context. These are artworks of the world and best experienced in the world, rather than in an art institution, which, while technically “in the world”, does its best to give off an air of authority, institution and abstraction that destroys what makes this kind of work great.

Another example of art that is by definition out there is Richard David Nash’s decade-long cultivation of a circle of trees, The Ash Dome. Nash keeps the location secret: unless we somehow, by sheer luck, stumble upon it, we must settle for experiencing it through second hand works. But I have a hard time imagining anything more wonderful than serendipitously stumbling upon something like this.

While some things are just too damn physical to work in a gallery space, others fare poorly for the opposite reason: they’re too abstract. Also at the Hamburger Bahnhof was an exhibition by Cory Arcangel. Cory’s art consists of stuff like hacked NES cartridges — “I am a hacker in the traditional definition of someone who glues together ugly code and not a programmer” — and mashups of YouTube vids of piano-playing cats. (Above, a gif of a hacked Super Mario where everything but the clouds was erased.) The cleverest part of the exhibition was a playable Guitar Hero clone with only one song. The song had no notes, and anyone who played it was doomed to a 0 % score.

This is the sort of thing that impresses me more when I see it on the internet than when I see it in a gallery space.

What would you do if you knew you were going to die? I don’t know about you, but I’d want to see more of the world before I left it. That’s what artists Stian Ådlandsvik and Lutz-Rainer Müller decided to do for their subject in You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk, except their subject was not a person but a house scheduled for demolition. Lacking the resources to send a complete house on a journey around the world, they built a scale model of the house and sent it instead; the model’s purpose, in the artists’ words, was to function as a voodoo doll. Roughly packaged, it was badly damaged on the trip to Bergen, Norway via Beijing, Sydney, New York City and Paris. The entire second floor was gone, interior and exterior cracked and dented. Upon the model’s return, the house was given corresponding damages.

Perhaps when I’m ninety and too frail to travel and regret all the places I didn’t go, neuroscience has progressed so far that it can send some sort of proxy in my stead, and then implant the memories on my return. I know I wouldn’t want to be this house, which got all the external scars of a round-the-world journey and none of the fun. A trip around the world could easily entail bruises, black eyes, lost wallets, broken teeth, ripped clothes, new tattoos, weird clothes, unusual spices, sweat, blood and tears, yet who would say that if someone knocked them in the head, stole their wallet, broke their teeth, ripped their clothes and dressed them in new ones, drenched them in foreign spices, spit on them and cut them and made them cry, they had thereby experienced a journey round the world?

Ukiyo-e, a term for Japanese woodblock prints, literally translates as “pictures of the floating world”. To my disappointment, this doesn’t imply fantastic imagery from cities floating in the sky or at sea; it just means a focus on the fleeting qualitity of things, their impermanence. (See: cherry blossoms.) This feeling is encapsulated by the term mono no aware, which “basically refers to a ‘pathos’ (aware) of ‘things’ (mono), deriving from their transience.” Mono no aware is, perhaps, as essential to Japanese aesthetics as shadows. But the first thing that comes to mind isn’t Japanese at all, but Guy Batey’s series the melancholy of objects. (The second thing that comes to mind is the kind of nebolous feelings Haruki Murakami’s writing inspires.) All of Batey’s work is infused with a delicate appreciation of impermanence.

Ina Devik’s portraits of children are wonderful. (See also.)

When I made my “cultural decades” scheme, I speculated that “maybe some significant metric on when the [economic] crisis is over can serve to cap off our current decade.” Which just goes to show how little foresight I, and probably all of us, have. Just a few months later, I’m thinking the Arabian revolutionary wave sounds like a great way to cap off the cultural decade that started with 9/11, in which case the date is December 18, 2010. This gives an incidental but really nice symmetry: the decade begins with an act of terrorism whose aftereffects include a Western portrayal of the entire Middle East and the Arab world as enemies of freedom; it ends with the Arab world as beacon of burgeoning democracy.

Julian Wolkenstein: “There is a myth, some say a science, suggesting people who have more symmetrical faces are considered more ‘attractive’. If you are made symmetrical, do you consider yourself more beautiful, less so, or is it just weird? Or is it you at all? Do you have a best side? What is to be said of left and right brain dominance?”

Why the other line moves faster, basic queueing theory. (via Moonbase)

Awesome stuff women did. See also Badass of the Week, which includes people like Princess Pingyang:

Since Imperial Chinese history isn’t the sort of shit you can pick up by watching Miley Cyrus smoke bowls on CNN, I’ll start at the beginning. In the year 617, the ruler of China was a completely incompetent dick-for-brains jackwagon known as Emperor Yang of Sui…

[After her father had declared rebellion against the emperor], Zhao hauled ass across China, rushing back to her family’s home province, all the while avoiding Imperial assassins and roving bandit tribes looking to do any number of ungentlemanly things to her. When she got back to her province safely, rather than chill the fuck out and wait for daddy to march his army back from the frontier, Zhao went to work being fucking awesome and hardcore. First, she sold her family’s home and most of its land, using the money to buy weapons, equipment, and enough badass shit to outfit an army of motherfuckers. Then she went to family friends and loyal retainers, and began assembling everyone she could find into an army of her own – Zhao wasn’t going to sit around like a chump, she was going to seize the capital herself if she had to, because fuck the Emperor for starting shit with her family and then having assassin douchebags try to ice her… After helping her father conquer China, Zhao was appointed a military marshal, spending the rest of her life as the Princess Pingyang and ruling over a second Golden Age in Chinese History.

In addition, there’s Women in World History, with biographies of many significant women, including another Chinese standout, Empress Wu Zetian, the only woman ever to rule as empress of China on equal footing with male emperors.

My favorite April Fool’s hoax remains the island of San Serriffe.

A tiny apartment transforms into 24 rooms. I wouldn’t want to live in an eternal golden hour, though. And no matter how efficiently this apartment uses space, it’s hard to match the Kowloon walled city for sheer density.

(Update: David Nash, not Richard. Probably mixed up his name with Richard Long, above.)