Donald Barthelme on Vote

"All right lad this is what we want with you.  
Your mission is this: to go out into the world and pull down all those election posters.  
We have decided to stop voting, so pull down the posters.  
Let's get all those ugly faces off our streets and out of our elective offices.  
We are not going to vote any more, no matter how often they come around with their sound trucks and statesmanlike gestures.  
Pull down the sound trucks.  Pull down the outstretched arms.  To hell with the whole business.  




Voting has turned out to be a damned impertinence.  They never do what we want them to do anyhow.  And when they do what we don't want them to do, they don't do it well.  To hell with them.  
We are going to save up all our votes for the next twenty years and spend them all at one time.  
Maybe by that day there will be som Ravelaisian figure worth spending them on.   
And so, raw youth, with your tentative air, go out and work out will on the physical world.  
We are going to go whole hog on this program, to a certain extent, and you are our chosen instrument.  
We are not particularly proud of you, but you exist, in some rough way, and that is enough, for our purposes.  
You are sub-attractive, Boble, and so are your peers there, but  here is the money, and there is the task.  
Get going.

DON'T YOU DARE TO HAVE BREAKFAST AT THE GHERKINS

On my return day from Venice which is 3 November, I went to London for a two-day trip.
I have always had this fantasy or imagination that the bullet building should be just by the south banks.
And that was saturday morning and I was starving, just got an sandwich (meal deal) from sainsbury which is everywhere.

I got lost a little bit, and after I arrived the Gherkin. I discovered that it was not by the south bank at all.  There was only concrets buildings, office people and a bunch of construction workers in doing some drilling job.
and I was tired and hungry, so I decided to just stand there and finish my breakfast, a package of fruits and a nice ham sandwich, and try to enjoy the urban landscape.
People were smoking next to me, they are white, they are in tracksuit or office costume.

There was one black security guy in front of it, he saw me, from eating my fruit until I start to eat my sandwichs. He didn't say anything.
As I proceed to my last half bit of sandwich, a white-security guard came over to a commercial board from a cafe close by and ask me "are you alright?" and then said something else but I didn't understand.

I happened to finish my sandwich, but it raised my curiosity about why would the security guy to come and check me out. I know ever since the bombing in London tube also the international brotherhood with America might effect a certain negative emotion towards UK. But why can't people just go there and enjoy a nice meal there?

Urban view is everywhere, why do people even bother to find a green place to look at and then destroy a thousand football play field comparable size of the rainforest in Brazil? Is architecture being create as a mean to alienate people? Why is the fact that I saw a guy's arm bleeding at 10pm in Dalston and then no body cares but somebody come to see me because I ate breakfast at 10am in the morning in front of the most common space in modern society?

      London is amazing, there are so many things happen in any hour, but _______________________.

It seems like there is a moral panic which is deeply inhabit in all the citizen's mind. Constantly searching for possible target to doubt, to suspect, to accuse. But somehow the folk devil is no long so easy to spot.  They are not as The Mods or Neds has particular dress code, nor has the specific working class background.  It is a state of mind that I imagine a solider would have when they are in the war zone.  Is the moral panic, or there is actually a traumatic effect rooted in all the British white collar (if this description still appropriate)'s mind. It is a constantly subtle fear towards life.
It's an rejection towards life and freedom, is the people in London actually live under a constant?
Such as concentration camp in a bigger genre, as the fear came from the uncertainty of the future?

View from the right hand side

View from the left hand side

Donald Barthelme Snow White

The commitment from Snow White

"... and if you let me stay, I will keep house for you, I will wash, sew, sweep, cook!"

Fashion photography as ART?

Just came across this fashion brand  Herr Von Eden.


Here are their campaign for 1/2 WILD 1/2 CHILD by Daniel Josefsohn

The Study of Twin Girls

Little Adults/ Anna Skaladmann

The Shining/ Stanley Kubrick

Diane Arbus

Presentation on Posthumanist perfomativity (Notes)

Performativity: precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language (how did language come to be more trustworthy than matter? Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is figured as passive and immutable?) to determine what is real.  Performativity is also a contestation of he unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve.

>>> To question the correspondence between descriptions and reality (eg: do they mirror nature or culture?) Does language accurately represent its referent?  (Representationalism has received challenge from feminists, poststructuralists, postcolonial critics, and queer theorists.)

Joseph Rouse : a representationalist understanding of knowledge gets in the way of understanding the nature of the relationship between power and knowledge. Scientific knowledge in its multi representational form mediates our access to the material world; where the referent is questionable whether scientific knowledge represents things in the world as they really are (Nature) or “objects” that are the product of social activities (culture)

He questioned Cartesian on the presumption that we can know what we mean is actually a contingent fact of history and not a logical necessity.

Looking for an alternative way – shift to performativity.

Performativity- shifts the focus from linguistic representations to discursive practices.

Posthumanist notion of performativity – one that incorporates important material and discursive, social and scientific, human and nonhuman and natural and cultural factors.

---Performativity is linked not only to the formation of the subject but also to the production of the matter of bodies. Thus the materialization become more important that we understand the nature of this production.

With posthumanist materialist as an account of performativity, which challenges the positiong of materiality as either a given or a mere effect of human agency. (Agential realist account)Materiality is an active factor in processes of materialization. Nature isn’t a passive surface being marked by culture nor the outcome of cultural performances (mute and immutable)

Rethinking the notions of discursive practices and material pheomena and the relationship between them.

Discursive practive: not human-based activites but rather specific material (re)configurings of the world through which local determinations of boundaries, proerties and meanings are differentially enacted.

Matter is not a fixed essence, rather a substance in its intra-active becoming- not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency. 

We are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places “in” the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity.(Nirls Bohr – we are a part of that nature we seek to understand) <<< Vicki Kirby: I don’t want the human to be in Nature, as if nature is a container.

Human are specific local parts of the world’s ongoing reconfiguring.

Why practices of knowing cannot be fully claimed as human practices

Reason:1 we use nonhuman elements in our practices

2  knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part.

Practices of knowing and being are not isolatable, but rather they are mutually implicated.

According to the notion that “we do not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world; we know because we are OF the world.”  Since “knowing and being are not isolatable, but rather mutually implicated the author propose that Onto-epistem-olog combine the practices of knowing in being.

John Cage: Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living"

4’33 

DOGTOOTH (1)

     

Dogtooth presents a world in which all the information was provided by the father, where the kids (one man, two sisters) were being kept away from rest of the world, and receiving filtered information from their parents.  Start from the use of language, different definition of words were being taught, they believe that the outer world is hostile and dangerous. The only way to go out is by their dad driving cars.  

This article is not about Yorgos' shooting style or how ground breaking the film is, although it is one of the films that I appreciates the most during these years. 

With the whole control of any sort of media, the father create a parallel universe from the outer world.  They have their own dynamic, ethic, relationship within the family.  They believed in whatever their father says because he was the only resource to new knowledge and the outside world. 

Media filter

when information is overloaded, people grow lazy and tiredness to select information, or through our search engine (ex: Google, Yahoo, MSN), all the information was being calculated, those who paid for ads or being paid much attention to will appears on the first line on search engine. Our information was carefully being manipulated under the circumstance that I thought we choose to know/ we search for the information by the fact that it is out of our free will to research it, and type in the information by our hand. 

In the film, there are different new words being brought up by the stranger/ sex need provider, Christina.  She as an intruder of the world somehow create an poignent for the environ.  Children enquire truth through asking their information resource - Father/ mother. But without the possibility of questioning the fact and accept it instantly.  The duplication effect by internet is tremendous, people who read about it might produced a certain knowledge through it, being presented in discussion, by talking and information spreading, blogging, Facebook status share, and then being recognised by mass media/ 3rd objective holder.  

Different opinions are more marginalise by the amount of information which constructed by search engine and internet sharing culture (By clicking sharing botton on social media, copy and paste motion). And people were being educated into a certain kind of group, as collecting stickers (Dogtooth)  pursing an eternal goal. 

Entertainment is all related to the need to be positive and creative thinking is in the contemporary art world. Only to entertain yourself when victories happen, mission completed, or being submissive. 

Punishment 

Being different and active is prohibited.  When authority facing challenge (ex: Questioning, React, Self-reflective, doubt), they tend to perform physical harm action, to make the subject fear, hurt, unsettle, thus to stop their action and become submissive.  Punishment can be seen not only physical abuse but also mentally torture. unacceptable, frustration, exclude become another way of punish, society form itself a wall of secure, of normality.  Oddity or Queerness being condemned by media, community safety become a shield that under the shield, all the actions could be tolerated, accepted, legitimised. By different packaging strategies we can see how Marylyn Manson being portraits as a dominent reason in Columbine massacre but Gun culture still being celebrated and well accepted in the US (not necessarily adapted all Michael Moore's point of view though).

The boy believe that cat is a predator comes from outer world. ©Dogtooth

When authority's voice empowered in such way, the absolute and non self reflexive reaction will be create. Such as cats in the film become a predator, vilified by the authority and incest become acceptable. The power of topdown educational system is enormous in this sense. And the spread, shared culture is actually not only effective our community but also powerful enough to put the mass into a single pipe so we all being directed to a communal direction which causing the blind faith and through this process, pervasive value being create.

Here an epistemological question appears : "How do we know what we know?"

Prize

Popular = prize.  the value of being accepted by majority was taught within our massive shared culture.
With tags such as "Most viewed" "Most emailed" "Most comment",  Ranking on IMDB, sale number which displayed in the shop...  We can also see in emerging numbers of talk show inviting kids whose video gots most viewing numbers to be on TV and were given prizes. (Such as Connie from Britain gots talent, Kassie on Ellen Degeneres, and recently Jake Booth on Jimmy Kimmel)

Why popularity become so important on media? is that how they shaping our value by enacting with them how they want?



Question
Is sharing culture = folk lore = story telling? 

SIESTA PINWHEEL

SOOOOOOOO. 

Curated by Stephanie Mann and Lewis den Hertog, "SIESTA PINWHEEL" happened within a painted drawer. White drawers become another white cube within the space.  Another layers being added up by the fact that viewer is not just working by, WE HAVE TO OPEN IT TO SEE THE WORK!  

Doraemon (Yes, the magic cat) decided to put a time machine in the drawer, the space has another function to fix what happened in the past, a mean to get away from reality.  Or a place where nostalgia being kept, a collective memory concern with time and space.  

Memory is a contingent stream, co-exist with our very present.  By the very action of looking into the drawer, to pull it out, interaction between give - take altered within this CO2 space.  

You can't lay down your memory by Tejo Remy© him

Dutch minimalist designer Tejo Remy put up a piles of used old drawers in NY, new york city where the cop sucks, in the name of Dada " You Can't lay down your memory" by acclaiming "a new value system based on economy, simplicity, and responsibility... celebrated ingenuity and poverty of means and elevated them to an aesthetic philosophy; idealism and moralism were the politically correct attitudes of the day (Text by MOMA) "




So, how about Siesta Pinwheel?

In order to see what is inside the drawers, we need to pay extra work to it, viewers feeling the need of being polite, the togetherness and politeness. You can't just walk away whenever you feel like to see next work. 

The relationship between audiences and objects become reciprocal. There are extra moments of an viewing experience, Curiosity being raised, the vibration between subjects and objects was reinforced. white paint defamiliar our sense towards the space, the pure, neutral feeling somehow altered by the fact that the object we all engaging with has the unspeakable communal memory.  Nostalgia became a collective action.  

This exhibition is portable, a moving exhibition, a travellers tale. when it s presented in the different spaces will certainly generates different meaning, regards to the time and space, enact with different public. Due to the time and space, the engaging public become varies so does the interaction alters which generate an ongoing conversation.  It reminds me of the Skulptur Projekt Münster, which happened within the whole city and the work of art requires actions which being motivated by curiosity, travel, a notion of destination, and discovery.  


     Somehow the notion of open call could be fearful, the communication become another curatorial concern during the process.  Incidents will happen by any kind of issues, like Alice Bradshaw & Bob Milner decided to go on holiday at the end.  But somehow the process being documented, and presented within Siesta Pinwheel, which adds up the feature of achieve, documented process of the event.

Toshio Saeki 佐伯俊男

Toshio Saeki 佐伯俊男

54th La Biennale di Venezia - Illumination [1]

Wow Venice Biennale as the Olympics in contemporary art universe, and I, finally being able to check out WAS IST DAS!?

Due to there are too, way too many exhibitions and pavilions in Venice, I'm going to use a kind of Twitter style way to have a brief view of some pavilion in Venice. But I do have some beloved one which will take up more space. So here we go. 

There are two parts of location where this exhibition happening - Giardini and Aresenale and another part called "In the city" which means countries not yet made it to the major countries.  Somehow I found it really funny about the nationalism within this Grand Art Exhibition.


Start from the one that I like the most,

Luxembourg pavilion - http://www.feipel-bechameil.lu/

Luxemburg Pavilion © Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil, "Le Cercle Fermé,"

With the twisted space and sculpture, I was draw into a fantastical world by the white colour and numberless reflections by the mirror, which extend the whole space.  The usage of white unreal white colour in a reflective space create a definitely kind of torn world which Alice might want to get out of it as soon as possible.  Be careful you might feel sick there though.

White is a strange colour besides reminding me of pure/ hospital/ or exhibition space, I also thought of wedding dress and somehow in Japan, the new-wed bride always have to be covered by a layer of white powder. On fashion I felt white on white is absolutely stunning match and only people who has strong character or fascial feature will be able to outline with personality.

Tilda Swinton as White witch 

新津保建秀 KENSHU SHINTSUBO

新津保建秀

Soundscape -