3.9.05: L.A.

The drive to Santa Barbara yesterday was from hell. After arriving at LAX and getting a hybrid car I decided (unwisely it seems) to take Pacific Coast Highway as it's right by the airport and is scenic and hooks up to 101 pretty soon. It was bumper to bumper — moving about a foot a minute and no way out... 2+ hours to go less than 6 miles!! What do people who live here do? Suffer, I guess. Is it some kind of weird cosmic payback for having an exclusive house on the beach? ...maybe there was a mud slide or something? I finally bailed out and took Topanga canyon over the pass to the 101 and made it to the auditorium at 8:15 or something, just hopped out of the car and onto the stage — the audience never knew.

3.8.05: San Francisco

Did the PowerPoint talk in Berkeley for an audience of IT legends and academics. I was terrified. The guys that originally turned PowerPoint into a program were there, what were THEY gonna think? Well, couldn't THEY just get up to talk about their invention? The rest of the room was other IT illuminati and U Cal academics on computer science etc. They could call me out and denounce me!

Some friends came by which made me feel more comfortable. Some of the Extra-Action Marching Band came by too — there was a "reception" in the faculty club — a charming Meerbeck building on campus with fireplaces and a massive moose head looming over the dining area.

(I'm writing this in the airport, my flight is delayed, the businessman behind me is saying "isn't that the worst slide you've ever seen?" as he holds up a printout of a PowerPoint slide — a triangle with words in it. Gloria Steinem is sitting on the next row of seats in leather trousers talking on her mobile phone)

My talk goes fine. I can relax, they're laughing. Bob Gaskins, Denis Austin and Peter Norvig were there. Bob declined to be introduced — so I stuck with the picture of the concertina that usually stands in for him, which always gets a laugh anyway. He did tell me afterwards that he liked the PowerPoint as theater idea, which was a relief. I mean, there is a lot of hatred for this program out there, and a lot of people laugh at the mere mention of bullet points, so he must feel kind of vulnerable.

I finished reading Bob Dylan's book. It's beautifully written, though I think it should probably be filed under fiction. I always thought his persona, which early on was that of a young Woody Guthrie, was just that, a persona. It worked as a way of delivering those songs, so who cares? ...and he partly, but only partly, abandoned it later. But this book is, in my opinion, pretty much written from the point of view of that imaginary guy. What a conceit! It's a brilliant literary idea, but I hope people take it with a grain of salt... and humor. It's as if Mr. Rogers wrote his autobiography and continued to talk the way he does in the TV show. Some of the writing, the language and the metaphors that this character comes up with are brilliant. Moving and unexpected. For example, he describes rappers and "serious, throwing horses off cliffs" (Call me skeptical, but a Jewish guy from Minnesota talking and writing like a backwoods hick/poet, huh? What's that about?)

3.5.05: Seattle

Went to see a show of contemporary Chinese art at the museum here. Mostly photos of performances and some videos. Almost all of them had to do with Chinese history, especially the last century, when everything seemed to get thrown into a washing machine.

Lots of references to change, memory, tradition, globalization and capitalism. And lots of artists, especially the men, in various states of undress. I was reminded of the late 20th century art of Eastern Europe, which, as with this stuff, featured a lot of artists using their bodies as the canvas or subject. Commentators claimed that Eastern European body art took place partly because under an oppressive regime the body became something that "belonged" to the individual. They also claimed that lacking art materials the body was a cheap and handy focus and subject. Maybe some of this Chinese work developed under similar circumstances — much of it was done in the 90s.

Nice to see so many Chinese folks checking it out — seems they're curious what's going on in the motherland — and how the artists' responses to history and the present matches with the visitors' own impressions and information. It's as much an Op-Ed piece as an art exhibit. A way of asking, what do they think about this? ...and what do I think about this?

Went to breakfast w/David Wild and his daughter Michiko at the Swedish Cultural Center. They serve pancakes with lingonberries or strawberries with ham at a buffet in the basement one Sunday a month. Ladies in costume played accordions on a little stage while other costumed folks danced. Through the window we could see the water — the sound, maybe? — trees and houses on the opposite shore. A seaplane took off. The accordion ladies were replaced by fiddlers and an elderly woman on guitar. A woman sang but seemed not to be moving her lips — as if she were lip synching to a voice from elsewhere. The dancers did skips and leaps. A man did a handstand.

Being close to the Redmond Empire I was slightly apprehensive that the humor in my talk here might not be as apparent. People might take Microsoft products and behavior as something essential to the survival and the economic health of the region, and therefore not a laughing matter. On the way back to the venue I imagined, what if everything that got laughs previously was suddenly met with stony silence? Humor is such an undefinable inscrutable thing, what if one time it's just not there? It could vanish into thin air, couldn't it? I wonder if standup comedians go through this? No wonder so many of them are a mess.

But in the end I got pretty much the same chuckles and guffaws as elsewhere, though being a larger hall the feeling of intimacy was lessened... but they did have an overhead projector backstage that I could wheel out for some show and tell.

3.4.05: Atlanta

Arrived in Atlanta and drove past Bobby Brown Boulevard. Past a billboard with a big picture of Elton John proclaiming Bennie and OUR Jets. I'm staying in a dorm room that is part of the art college adjacent to the High Museum. Lisa, who curates the shows at the art college gallery hands me a package that contains pamphlets describing the past exhibits she's curated.

One of them is of a series of half-scale wooden sculptures of people done by a young (white) South African artist, Claudette Schreuders. They are mostly replicas of the artist's sisters, neighbors and acquaintances — stoic, passive, slightly stiff portraits, a little like folk art, that look like white person versions of West African sculptures — (this is an Ivory coast figure):

Here is one of hers:

They have a similar powerful presence, but there's a weird rupture because hers are (mostly) of white people.

The artist grew up in a Johannesburg suburb under aparthied. Lisa said the artist told a story that although she and her brother knew their system was somehow in someway bad, they were, like most others, so sheltered by the situation and the censorship that existed then that they couldn't imagine other possibilities.

Apparently it wasn't until her brother went to Europe on summer holiday and saw a U2 concert in Berlin in which everyone was shouting "Down with apartheid" and "Free Nelson Mandela" that it struck home. They didn't know who was this Nelson Mandela that had to be freed. And apartheid was, as are most situations for children, simply a given. That was the way things were.

White South Africans traveling in Europe at that time were looked down on — as if they were all tacit supporters of the apartheid system. They were certainly beneficiaries of that system, but being kids it was not always by choice, and as their eyes were opened and other things intervened things changed rapidly.

What's shocking is how a regime can limit perception. One wonders if this can still happen in the age of the internet — I suspect it can. I know the U.S. public in general is pretty ignorant and mystified by how the rest of the world perceives the U.S. Alternate versions of the past, of history and of recent events, exist all over the place. Is it all relative, is there no truth? I think there is a truth, but one that incorporates the contexts and relativism of the various parties involved. You can see things from 2 sides but still pass judgment if one side has wronged the other. Simply being able to see from someone else's point of view doesn't make one impotent.

The talk here in Atlanta goes better than the one in N.Y., I think — I get more laughs. Here the audience is mainly art school types and in N.Y. there were a lot of business folks and professionals present — so the arties were maybe less familiar with PowerPoint and it was all fairly new to them. Carol the dean of the school suggested afterwards that I might have played one of my pieces as part of my talk. Many, herself included, were unfamiliar with what exactly I do with it.

I do play them on a screen as people were taking their seats, but maybe most weren't paying attention. And in the past sometimes there would be an accompanying installation, so playing a piece would be redundant. I'll think about it. I worry that it would halt the talk's momentum, but maybe she's right, the question of what I do with it is sometimes left hanging in these situations. I also like to engage the audience, throw out ideas and questions for debate or to ponder.

Afterwards I'm taken to the nearby home of a former photo gallerist who now has the job of overseeing the Elton John collection. What is it with Elton John and this town? Jim White and his fiancé came down from Athens, and they join us for dinner.

3.4.05: Portland, OR

NY Times:

The extinct "little people" (about 3 feet tall) from the island of Flores (see my earlier entry) have had their smaller brains analyzed against their skills — and the result has upset a central concept — that brain size equals intelligence. It turns out they were pretty damn smart, and though their brains were 1/3 the size of ours they seemed to have an awful lot figured out.

The scientist claims that their brains may have been "wired" differently, and that using different pathways and connection they could cover most of what we think of as intelligence. It's all about the connections, the network, and not about how much gray matter or anything else there is.

Seems this probably is a metaphor that be applied elsewhere.

The U.S. has tried to block — by demanding a new added amendment — a declaration of women's rights due to be released on the eve of the International Day of Women's Rights (next week.) (So much for all that freedom rhetoric.) The declaration is 10 years in the making, being left over from the Beijing conference of women's rights way back then.

NY Times:

The United States proposed adding wording noting that the declaration created neither supports "any new international human rights" nor "the right to abortion."

The American effort produced objections from every regional group at the conference, which had argued for the statement's approval without amendments. After days of lobbying, the Bush administration was virtually alone in pressing the issue, and the many advocacy groups in attendance accused the United States of injecting national political views into an international forum.

On a closely related subject, here is Mukhtar Mai:

A woman who was gang raped at the ORDERS of the local village council in Pakistan. It was a revenge/justice rape... but I think not against her, but against her husband. Her eye for an eye, sort of thing. The revenge motive turned out to be partly in error.

This happened some years ago, she's been founding schools and suffering death threats.

3.3.05: NYC / Atlanta

Reading a New Yorker piece on Cy Twombly at the airport. It has some great aphorisms — "...conviction is overrated, Mere whim will serve just as well." What the article (a review of a Whitney show) leaves out is for me some of the most obvious points — his paintings challenge you to proclaim them as bullshit.

The bullshit part — the paintings are so barely anything, so purposely meaningless and wispy that, well, some look like poorly-erased blackboards and aside from giving one a newfound appreciation for art "found" in classrooms they could be said to be almost inconsequential on purpose. Something guaranteed to piss a lot of folks off who already suspect that Modern Art is a huge piss take at the expense of the common man.

They're undeniably beautiful, unlike the macho slatherings of some other abstract art… but that could be a problem for people, too — beauty, what's it mean? What's it for?

It's offhand, casual, but effete. That probably offends people too. It's aggressive in its quiet way. A "fuck you" that is all the more jolting because it's whispered, not shouted.

I begin a speaking tour today. Well, last night actually was the first date — at NYU, in NYC — the McLuhan lecture, which is sponsored by the Canadian government (I lived briefly in Hamilton as a child, so they said maybe I'm an honorary Canadian.

The talks are PowerPoint presentations about PowerPoint. I did some of these previously, some months back, mostly at places where my PowerPoint pieces were being exhibited — SECCA in North Carolina, and Eastman House in Rochester.

I decided that, like my other art talk, which is largely about the ubiquity of advertising and marketing in our lives and in art, this one would also not be about my own work. I'd seen too many artists and designers do talks that were basically a walk through their résumés — which one could just as easily find out by reading their books or even online — so I decided to try a different approach. In this talk I decided to try and talk about PowerPoint — what it is, how it came to be and what people use it for — and the various ramifications of all that.

It became obvious after doing just a couple of these talks that it was going to turn in to a standup comedy routine. PowerPoint is maybe the laughing stock of computer programs and here I am using it as an art medium and calling my talk "I [heart] PowerPoint" — well, all I had to do was throw up a typical PowerPoint slide with the usual bullet points and there'd be howls of laughter. I initially thought some of it might be mildly funny, but I didn't expect it to be as full of guffaws as it turned out. I wasn't disappointed, but now I sort of had to play out this turn of events for what it was. I felt that the laughs now had to keep on coming, and I had to keep the momentum going.

I'm not by nature a vivacious speaker — I am hesitant and maybe mumble sometimes — but I find the stuff that gets thrown up on the screen is amazing, funny and resonant — it's as if I am seeing it for the first time, and sometimes I am, as I constantly add slides to it.

I haven't gotten there yet, but I wonder to myself if I could even take this beyond being self-referential, beyond being PowerPoint about PowerPoint and make it a more emotional, conceptual and universal kind of performance — because it is a performance, a form of theater, one that uses very clunky and limited technology. I haven't discovered how to do this yet, and I don’t know if it will evolve into stand up with slides or maybe something altogether different, but it does seem possible that the slides are my ventriloquist dummy, or vice versa. One of us is the straight man and the other gets the laughs.

Amid all the guffaws I do manage to make some points, some of which have been made more succinctly or in greater depth by others, and I throw as many of them out there as I can. PowerPoint as a lousy conveyer of information (Tufte's argument), PowerPoint as theater, the idea that software has a point of view (Neil Stephenson is good on this), PowerPoint presentations as essentially phatic communication, etc. Here is where the audience often stops laughing, but occasionally I add a zinger that keeps the energy up.

According to a paper on PowerPoint by Jamie O' Neil that I received recently the percentage of communication that is non-verbal is between 65-93% (he got this from a book, Communication In Our Lives that I presume explains how these figures were derived.)

I'm not surprised... in fact I'd lean towards the upper end of the percentages. Part of this might be included under phatic communication — technically, verbal utterances that are not conveying a message or information in an obvious way. "How's your mom?" "New haircut?" "Want some coffee?" This banter establishes and affirms relationships, hierarchies, class and status. Sometimes the definition of phatic is broadened to include non-verbal remarks — ums and uh-huhs — but there's more going on than just verbal sounds and words. Gesture, posture, facial expressions, clothing — and that's just the interpersonal stuff — there's also all the visual and audio stuff surrounding and enveloping every situation and meeting. The room, the lighting, the way the chairs are arranged — and in the case of media, color, design, typeface, visual references — jeez it goes on and on.

The frustrating thing is that if indeed more than half our communication is non-verbal then why haven't we got words to talk about it? O.K., there are academic terms, but for most people it’s sort of denied that this communication exists because there’s no way to talk about it. Wittgenstein's the limits of my thought are the limits of my language, or vice versa. People certainly feel it — emotionally and intuitively — and may refer to it or allude later to what they felt as opposed to what was literally said. But other than mentioning body language stuff — twitching, scratching, slouching or stretching — a lot goes unreferenced. We can't talk about music, dance or love very well, either — but they're awfully big parts of our lives.

In other forms outside of meetings and conversations this gap is even more prevalent. In ads, displays, altars, graphic design, fashion, magazines, signage, architecture, television, movies, websites, on and on we’re being addressed and coddled and seduced and terrorized and we can't talk about it because we don’t have words for it. Visual "language" is a one-way communication.

The businessman beside me on the plane is twitching. He's fallen asleep with his inch-thick contract that he'd been marking up in his lap. He's doing that head bob thing where his head droops and then he jerks awake only to fall asleep again. Ouch.

3.2.05: NYC

"They are discovering what they are saying at the same time you are" — theater director Richard Maxwell on actors. It could just as easily be said about any live performers. (I guess I'm thinking about the PowerPoint presentation I will be doing later today.) Part of the thrill, and part of the tightrope effect, is suddenly discovering a new meaning or deep feeling imbedded in something you're saying because the audience reveals it to you. You discover what you're really saying.