 |
| MAIN | SEARCH / ARCHIVES / NOTES | RSS |
« October 2005 |
Main
| December 2005 »
Went to some galleries yesterday. Saw some shows I really liked and of course some that were merely baffling. Luhring Augustine had a nice show of artist-designed chess boards — something that’s been done for centuries and all too often the pieces end up being the artist’s signature style in miniature. These are that, but wackier and a bit larger than what I expected. Both Maira Kalman and Tracy Emin have done embroidered text pieces (in separate galleries) — and to my mind they are both pretty hilarious and moving.
But the biggest surprise was at the blue chip Andrea Rosen and Gagosian galleries. They both have wonderful big sprawling museum-type shows (Mike Kelly and a collection of art + text) but have added a new element to the Chelsea gallery scene — black guards.
The majority of visitors to all these galleries are white, so the fact that the guards are mostly black is significant. Usually a gallery has an attractive young woman (in a black dress) manning the entrance desk and maybe a young intern or art student in another room, often reading a book or typing aimlessly at a keyboard and ignoring visitors. Either of these can be expected to answer knowledgably questions about the current show — sometimes dismissively and sometimes charmingly, depending. These new guards are different — they are in suits and ties, they wander to and fro and have no activities to keep them occupied other than watching the visitors while pretending to not watch the visitors. My guess is that they don’t know or care too much about the shows — that they know this is the type of stuff upscale white folks swoon over, and it’s worth a lot of money, but it sure seems of dubious worth on the surface. Try selling this Mike Kelly log somewhere else? Not likely. To be honest I felt like a stupid white man some of the time in this context. Not altogether pleasant. But powerful.
OK, on the face of it, this is a totally unfounded and racist assumption — and to be truly honest there are still racist assumptions and traps I fall into. I really can't justifty this assumption except by saying that the guards didn't LOOK like they were very interested in the artwork, and not because of what their heritage is, which would be silly.
The presence of these uniformed bodies slowly gliding here and there cannot be separated from the experience of the shows. I would go so far as to say their presence is a big part of these shows, like it or not. Not a part of the shows anticipated by the artists, I suspect, but in some ways more powerful and resonant than the work on display. Whoops.
It makes the galleries seem like a cross between an uptown museum and Tiffany’s. We’re used to museum guards protecting stuff from inquisitive children and thieves — but none of the stuff on exhibit in museums is for sale. In Tiffany’s we accept the guards because everyone knows that gold and diamonds are like currency — their value is apparent to anyone, anywhere, anytime — unlike the primitive scribbles and smears of contemporary art. Tiffany’s is also not expected to be a forum for ideas — which museums present themselves as. Galleries seek to partake of a portion of that aura and luster while still being basically a shop. The museum helps bestow credence and worth on the items in these shops — and one hand washes the other. But now we've got a situation that is neither one nor the other.
My suspicion is that the decision to have these guards as part of these shows was accidental. As both of these shows are sprawling and filled with many many very valuable items, some displayed behind dividing walls and within easy reach, the insurance companies who cover the galleries must have said, “we cannot insure you for these works unless you have guards, as well as your usual security cameras. No, sorry, art students and interns will not do, you must hire the guards from a registered security agency.” And this is the result, an unwitting collaboration between the artists and the insurance companies that creates a strange unsettling feeling in the visitor that a lot of art strives for but rarely achieves.
An unused NYC subway station at City Hall (see images of secret cities in the movies referenced in previous post):
From The Straight Dope: The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City details Toth's early-90s encounters with several dozen of what she estimated at the time to be 5,000 homeless people living beneath the streets of New York, mostly in subway and railroad tunnels. Particularly large populations inhabit (or inhabited, anyway) the multilevel labyrinths beneath Grand Central and Penn stations. In a few cases, sizable communities have coalesced, some allegedly numbering 200 people or more, complete with "mayors," elaborate social structures, even electricity. Toth describes one enclave deep under Grand Central with showers using hot water from a leaky steam pipe, cooking and laundry facilities, and an exercise room. The community has a teacher, a nurse, and scampering children. "Runners" return frequently to the surface to scavenge food and such, but others--the real "mole people" — routinely go for a week or more without seeing the light of day.
The remains of the underground cities of Cappadocia (Turkey):
The underground resistance in the film “Metropolis”:
The lair of the Phantom of the Opera in the Paris sewers:
Originally a harvest festival, then reassigned in the U.S. to celebrate the Native Americans' gifting of food to the colonial religious fanatics. If they’d only known, they’d have poisoned that turkey. Still is a harvest festival underneath it all, I guess. Malu and I take the train to my sister’s in DC.
Emerging from the tunnel in New Jersey the sun is shining over the vast swampy meadowlands. I look for egrets or herons — they are often standing knee deep in the water — but they’ve gone south by now. The reeds are golden in the sun and the sky is clear blue and elevated roadways and train trestles stretch over the waterways. It’s sort of magnificent.
As we cross the Mason Dixon line the vegetation visible from the train changes. Trees are strangled by vines and covered by kudzu, there is chaotic growth, suburban houses or decrepit industry visible beyond the tangle.
Passing through Baltimore, where I grew up, there are boarded-up houses, vacant lots, charred remains of burnt buildings surrounded by rubbish, billboards for churches and for DNA testing of children’s identity. Johns Hopkins hospital looms out of the squalor. An isolated island slightly east of downtown, which I can see just beyond it. Downtown is separated from the hospital complex by a sea of run-down homes, a freeway and a massive prison complex. Eastern Europe and the Soviet Bloc come to mind. Failed industry and failed housing schemes. Band-aids on severed limbs and bleeding stumps. Sometimes no band-aids at all, the wounded city just left to fester. [Baltimore I read this weekend has five times the homicide rate of NYC. Five times!] There are lots of other cites like this. Much of DC is like this though there are large swaths of wealth and middle class enclaves housing government workers. Baltimore lost its steel industry, its shipbuilding, its port industry and shipping, much of its aerospace industry (which was in the suburbs anyway) and its middle and upper middle class (white) population. St. Louis is like this. Detroit is worse. Philadelphia has some of this infection; Wilmington also has quite a bit, as does Newark. Pittsburg is turning around, Cleveland, who knows? New Haven, Buffalo, Toledo, Gary, Youngstown. I’m not nostalgic for steel mills and coal mines, not even for GM plants — they refused to make anything but gas guzzlers for decades, hell, they’ve got it coming. Sad thing is, it’s the little guy that loses his job for the big guy’s stupidity. Would the little guy be smarter?
It’s shocking when you see this decay and devastation in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, but we’ve been taught to expect it there, we’ve been told that those societies were under the boot of the evil empire and that explains it — the will and gumption of the people was squashed, and desolation was the end result. But here the reality in front of me clashes with what I was taught — the reality I see says that there isn’t really any difference, that the end result is pretty much the same. I’m exaggerating, but from a train window we see mostly the backsides of everything. After dinner we watch Oliver Twist, the old B&W Alec Guinness version, on TV. (Directed by David Lean.) The characters are all stereotypes, cartoon versions of the high and low of London society — Alec Guinness as Fagin the Jew, with a nose appliance like a bird:
Oliver a spotless blonde innocent and the beautiful and warm-hearted Nancy (the actress was married to the director.) It’s actually beautiful in its visual simplicity — the clichéd visuals and the characters’ appearances function to compress the storytelling, which is necessary, as the movie can’t be much longer than 90 minutes. The sets are amazing — not a single right angle in the whole of central London — only when we visit the upper class suburban mansion are the lines straight and walls bright white. Some backdrops in combination with sets are perfect and stunning — receding rows of tenements back onto a canal, a tiny arched bridge in the lower foreground, over which the ruffians scamper, looming in the distance, above the twisted maze of squalid dwellings, rises the massive dome of St Paul’s. Inside Fagin’s den the doorframes are all crooked, there are timbers and beams crossing every which way, and the passageways are narrow and winding. It would make a great videogame environment. I seem to recall an early version of Hunchback of Notre Dame got a similar treatment, the Charles Laughton version. Maybe it’s the similar high-low juxtapositions at work, or maybe the evocative archetypes in the stories themselves, or maybe they had the same design direction, but that movie was equally beautiful and resonant. I know there’s an innate attraction to images of a hidden and secret world existing right along side ours — whether in the warrens of the tenements, the passageways and parapets of the cathedral or the sewers and tunnels beneath every modern metropolis.
Went to a symposium presented by WIRED and the NYPL (link to webcast) that was set up more or less as a confrontation between a man from Google, Lawrence Lessig, and an author and a lawyer representing the publishing industry. Google and others have recently initiated something called Google Book Search, a sort of meta library card catalogue that allows one to search not only via subject, title and author, but also through the contents of a book. This is possible because they have scanned these books and if you look for a subject that is mentioned in a book it will not only tell you a book on that subject but passages in other books, on other subjects, that deal with the subject you are interested in.
What you see in these content searches is a “snippet” — a couple of sentences as a sample of how the subject is mentioned, nothing more. Lessig defends this as “fair use” — the equivalent of quoting a line or 2 of text from a source, which in U.S. law says does not have to be paid for or licensed if only a little bit is quoted. The lawyer disagreed with this, claiming it was somehow not fair use, but he mainly reiterated the buzzwords “they are scanning the WHOLE book” and “they are COPYING the whole book”. This is true, but we who make these requests are not privy to these whole scans and copies, we only see tiny snippets. The lawsuit seems to be an equivalent to the justification for the invasion of Iraq, preemptive action — stopping someone by force because they have the capability of doing something, not because they are or will actually do it. Can I use this justification for attacking corporations and organizations that might abuse my rights in the future?
I was struck that as much information — books, websites, blogs, etc — becomes digitized and immediately catalogued, much of the world remains outside this realm. Images, for example. Sure there are images catalogued on Google and Flickr, and the latter has a more elaborate means of defining an image — as people contribute descriptions to an image, elaborating on its caption, it gets increasingly cross-referenced.
However, I sense that there’s a limit to this. Images, for example, are not just their subject, their author their date. They are personal, traumatic, shocking, dark, light, cheery, artificial, awe-inspiring, fake, large, small, ubiquitous, rare, on and on. The way they strike us is hard to define in words. But that’s where their meaning lies. Sure, words can describe the subject, and that is the way images are usually labeled and catalogued, by subject or “author”. But that’s not how they affect us. That’s not why we like them or fear them or fetishize them.
Images effect us like music; they bypass the language part of the brain that translates things into words, or even into numbers, or even into ones and zeros. They go straight to the emotional centers of our brains — what we sometimes call our hearts — and trigger strong reactions. Words do this to, but via a translator. Only poetry and lyrics, by being the closer to the aural roots of language, by being sound as well as text, manage to sometimes bypass these catalogues and filters.
Thus far, there is no way of adequately defining this stuff — usually words become the default caption, which is pretty much telling only a tiny bit of the story. A picture is worth a thousand words is maybe an understatement. Imagine if it took a thousand words to define every digitized image. Possible to expand the catalogue this much, but who would be the writers? The thing about image and music is that they are, or seem at least to be, so subjective. Your thousand words might not be my thousand words. So not matter how elaborate the Flickr definitions become they only tell a fraction of the story.
I’m no expert, but I’d guess that number and words were initially super useful in early agricultural communities (for describing ownership, taxes, yields), in early social settlements (ditto) and in the attendant military and hunting apparatus — mentally figuring the arc of a projectile or weapon and coordinating how to defend the settlement. As what became civilization became ascendant these ways of thinking took priority, and eventually all of what became called thinking was defined in these terms, in terms of number and word. Our universe became what we could catalogue.
A lot got left out. The mystery and wonder, emotions and relationships… and art and music. Look on many news websites — these latter are defined as enjoyment or entertainment — clearly relegated to something vaguely superfluous. But aren’t they what makes life worth living? Or at least partly so? The “life of the mind” is tons of fun, seriously, but it’s not all there is.
I sense that facial expressions and gesture are in the same category. They are also an extremely complicated visual “language” that we “read” from birth, and we become more fluent as time passes. But the various factorial combinations and gradations of these postures and micro expressions are so vast that cataloguing them is beyond the scope of the world of number and word. And that of the digital world.
There have been numerous attempts to catalogue these facial and body displays, in simple basic ways, and it’s become obvious that not only are there common “words” — an arched eyebrow, a grimace, a smile — but that they also reach across species as well. Apes share some of the same expressions or at least outward manifestations as people. Frogs and fish probably do not. The vast universe that is this other language communicates the emotions and inspires action, hope and desire it is intuitive, and has not really been catalogued.
The digital world may be the climax of the reign of the world viewed as word and number, but it is only touching a part of out world, our lives. I sense that the search engine for gesture, image, sound and expression is a long way off, and may require a kind of “thinking”, if we can even call it thinking, that is so vastly different that what we’ve been doing for 7 thousand plus years, that it may not be possible at all with the tools we’ve developed. I mean the technology and language and mathematics. I don’t mean we can’t discover the key to this other “language”
Our tools we’ve developed, language included, deal with the parts of our brains that have allowed us to achieve a lot, but it is not necessarily the part that most often moves us and motivates us to action, love, hatred, fear, ambition and awe. The part we know and are comfortable with seems to be the part we use to justify those actions, but it is not always the originator.
There are programs that attempt to catalogue songs sonically, based on previously appealing melodic and textural forms and structures, but even these don’t translate the results into words — they compare patterns, waveforms, arcs and frequencies. The program itself makes comparisons, but doesn’t need to name each one. You can look at two paintings or buildings and find the correspondences, but that doesn’t give you the language for naming them, or tell you why one feels scary and one feels comfortable.
Paraphrasing Wittgenstein, my thoughts are limited by my language, might be only half true — there are other languages out there that we use every day, comfortably, fluently and effortlessly, but they are beyond the reach of Google and binary bits, so far.
Reading a 2-part piece by Alma Guillermoprieto in the NY Review of Books about Chavez, the president of Venezuela. (Her book Samba is a wonderful account of the yearlong process leading up to carnival at the Manguera samba school in Rio.) She begins with a pile of testimonies from ordinary (not rich) Venezuelans about what he is doing for health services, senior citizens, education, food for the poor, and Venezuelan control over Venezuela. They are all enthusiastic and thrilled at the changes and programs he has instigated. Then the article deals with his occasional suppression of both the press and some movements in the congress to limit his powers. In other words, he sometimes leans towards autocracy and maybe even dictatorship.
In 2002 a coalition of business interests, allied with the old rich and some U.S. help, attempted a coup. (From Democracy Now: Bush administration officials Elliott Abrams, who is said to have supervised the planning of the operation, and Otto Reich (ex-U.S. ambassador to Venezuela) were not only aware the coup was about to take place, but had sanctioned it and discussed it in some detail with the coup plotters at the White House, including Carmona, right down to its timing and chances of success, which were deemed to be excellent.)
Tellingly, most of the coup folks have lighter skin than Chavez and his supporters. The coup succeeded, but was overturned, a series of amazing events that were recorded in an Irish documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Naturally enough, the interests of the business community and the rich who backed the coup are not often those of the mass of Venezuelan people — the Reagan trickle-down theory was proved to be a lie there as well — and while various health ministries and social services were in place pre-Chavez, they were, like many of those in the U.S., largely for show and were mostly ineffective.
Pat Robertson recently suggested that the U.S. assassinate Chavez, and while Robertson is not the U.S. Government, the U.S. Government didn't make much of a fuss about denying these feelings from the North. This basically served to confirm what Chavez had been saying. He could use this as additional evidence to claim that the U.S. was against leaders who improve the lot of the people, and that the U.S. is only interested in the oil (Venezuela has a lot) and in making business alliances.
Guillermoprieto then poses the question, how will any opposition to Chavez succeed? The implication being that democracy will be snuffed out or suppressed as long as Chavez maintains his hold on power — like Castro.
Anyway, here's the conundrum. When an autocrat actually does improve the lot for the majority of people, but also stifles democratic institutions and the press, is he or she ever justified? We up North tend to take the hard line that it's democracy or nothing. That a “democracy” that robs the people and drives the country into bankruptcy and despair (look at the U.S.) is preferable to an autocracy that lifts up the people and nation. Leave the issue of free press and Chavez' perverse obstructions to votes and referendums aside for a minute. Let's assume that there might be some middle ground, which might not be where Chavez is headed, but assume such a thing could exist. This hypothetical government might be, at least for a while, preferable to a democracy in many cases and places. At least in pragmatic terms, though obviously not ideologically for Northerners.
In fact, I would suggest that when institutions like multinationals or the church exert the kinds of influences they do that what we refer to as democracies are often nothing of the kind. The word is evoked and tossed around to gain support for various policies, most of them business related, but as far as actually encouraging democracy, that is not what happens. And while we here in the US manage pretty damn well, imposing what we call “democracy” on other places is often merely an excuse for multinationals to slip in unfettered, which is not always in that country's best interests. The flow of globalization is not equitable — not when one side has a lot more money and military might than the other. (However, as in France, the blowback from colonization or globalization always seems to happen eventually.)
So what is the difference between the fake democracy that the U.S. promotes and the rule of autocrats? Is one always good and the other always bad? Aren't they both equally dangerous and perverse? Doesn't it then depend simply on who is benefiting from a particular system? And wouldn't true democracy in many places simply be a recipe for chaos? Can a democracy decide not to be a democracy? It happens. And being essentially a dictatorship of the most powerful and influential, what happens in a democracy when the less powerful regions decide they've had enough of being bullied, as in the U.S. Civil War when the south decided economic subservience to the north was no longer acceptable?
Many of the excuses that Chavez supporters make for him, according to Guillermoprieto, remind me of things Imelda Marcos used to say. “He [Ferdinand] wears designer suits because people enjoy seeing him dress up” — “Filipinos are for beauty, they want something to aspire to” — “His opponents are more corrupt than he is.”
At any rate, for once a large part of the Venezuelan population who, for decades, centuries maybe, had no hope, not a chance, of rising up, now see a possibility. They can get enough to eat and maybe even an education. If Pat Robinson succeeds a martyr will be created, and hundreds more will sprout from Chavez grave.
But is democracy — the dictatorship of the majority in its purest sense — also natural, in the Darwinian sense? Isn't it part of our nature that the majority will always inevitably strive to overpower the weaker portions of a society? Is what we call “democracy” a mirror of cruel natural processes? Is it inevitable that the poor are exploited whenever possible, and therefore are welfare systems and projects that aim to elevate and give succor to the poor always doomed to failure? Are we as vicious and ruthless as animals often seem to be?
Well, animals are not always as heartless as it sometimes seems. They seem sometimes to have an innate realization that ruthlessness is not always in the long term best interests of the species as a whole. Somehow they seem to sense that individual interests are less important that the survival of the whole group and that the skills of the geek and freak are sometimes essential, and need to be available — so they need to be allowed to breed, too. Human beings sometimes seem to forget, or conveniently ignore this — especially if they have available to them almost unlimited means of power, bureaucracy and propaganda. The temptation to let the heady ecstasy of power get the better of you is self-evident.
Checks and balances.
Learned that phrase in high school. The 3 branches of the government and the constitutionally mandated construction of a complicated system that is supposed to prevent anything or anyone from getting too powerful or out of control. It still seems valid. Animal societies have proscribed behavior, and if you step outside of it too often or get too uppity you are ostracized. Which, for social animals like ourselves, is the worst punishment imaginable.
Anyway, when those checks and balances get dismantled — freedom of the press is one of them, separation of church and state is another — then the whole house of cards gets unstable. It seems to me that you don't need to be a democracy to have this system of safeguards in place. The people's opinions can be manipulated as easily as any lobbyist can sway a congressman — so trusting in the wisdom of the people seems no safeguard in itself. So maybe this checks and balances structure might be more exportable and saleable than what the U.S. calls democracy, and actually do what “democracy” claims to do. And maybe the U.S. should try adopting it.
Last night I watched a part of a nature documentary (The Trials Of Life) that featured leaf-cutter ants. Their behavior is, to me, pretty bizarre. They carry the huge leaf bits that they have gnawed off for considerable distances, then clean them and take them into their nest, where smaller ants take the bits into the larder. The leaf bits are inoculated with a specific mold, allowed to ferment. And the spore balls are what is eaten. The leaves themselves are inedible.
Anyway, the ant specialization was the impressive part. The littlest ants, members of the same colony, are the size of grains of sand — they never ever leave the underground area tunnels. Neither, of course, does the queen, who in this case is as big as a mouse! Other ants’ sole job is to keep her clean. Others’ sole job is to catch the eggs when they ooze out of her backside and to gently take them to the nursery:
Soldier ants with huge jaws protect the colony, biting any intruder on the surface, locking their jaws and hanging on even if their bodies are separated from their heads. As with all ants, each one’s function and body and will in life is determined by what they are fed as grubs — their makeup and job is then fixed, and cannot ever be changed.
Then after watching the documentary I had the following dream:
I’m in a place with some business people. Sort of a furnished apartment, seventies style carpet and sofa. Big picture window. Unknown to my host, or at least unknown to him during our previous encounter, some of his visitors — a group who mysteriously keep to themselves and seem very single-minded — have invented a kind of “dry water”.
This is apparently a sensitive subject and a big secret, and though I can’t describe what it is, it is obviously something very special. I somehow get wind of its existence, or suss it out somehow. I tell my host of my discovery, though he doesn’t believe me. Ah, but he believes me now, now that the true nature of the visitors is becoming apparent.
These visitors also have with them some docile humanoids. Also businesslike in appearance. Given a command, these “zombies” attempt to commit suicide in sometimes preposterous ways. Awkwardly sawing at their own arms near the shoulder with a huge saw, their bodies awkwardly contorted, trying to both hold the saw and reach high up the arm. There is no blood and these serious though bizarre attempts never seem to amount to anything. But they are taken at face value and seem very serious. We are all very impressed.
For some reason this makes these compliant humanoids (they don’t speak or act on their own) feel sort of dangerous, even though we have only witnessed them attempting to harm themselves — but the message is clear.
Later, I try to sabotage the visitors by surreptitiously pulling on some sort of levers that are in the partially curtained-off bar nook of the residence(?) where we all are. The levers are near the ceiling and at first they don’t see me pulling them, one by one, as I foil their latest demonstration, but eventually they can tell that something is amiss, they look around, and they catch me — the game is up. Bad.
|
