Sanderson - "Brainpark" and "Haesje van Cleyburgh"

Sanderson, A. “Brainpark” and “Haesje van Cleyburgh” from Brainpark, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006, pp. 9-16.

“I copied out quotes, mainly.” [1]

In the short personal essay, “Brainpark”, New Zealand writer Anna Sanderson separates work from non-work, though these categories are not mutually exclusive. Work is the dominant category in the text, “different kinds of work”, but the discussion of work rarely describes what the writer had to do or how she felt about this, but instead focuses upon anecdotes, observations and other people’s stories (Brainpark, 9). For example, when she does “teaching work” we hear a description of the Brainpark environment, an unexplained anecdote about her boss, Herman, kissing the top of her head, and the stories her students supply about how they used to be provided for by the company (10).

Her “own work”, which she does in her flat and then at the library, involves not getting much done (10).

Not getting much done is something that we all do; it can be productive. Like Sanderson, I too, find myself copying out quotes, tens of quotes, without an immediate understanding of how they will become useful. But inevitably they do, they return of their own accord and start to add together. One reason for artists to read theoretical material regularly is to engage with this process, a process which is different from that of actively searching for specific material, but no less valuable.

“As long as you keep looking, she keeps forming and re-forming.”[2]

Sanderson’s second text “Haesje van Cleyburgh” interested me in relation to how I have been thinking about painting. I have been looking at the possibility of a work of art inviting interpretation even as it denies such a possibility, and I am questioning what value can be found in a dynamic such as this.[3] I feel that the simplicity of Sanderson’s economical writing style hides an elusive, complex, and difficult component that “keeps forming and re-forming” as one attempts to ‘lock it down’. This, shall we say, poetical quality, shares with the type of painting I am looking at, both a demand of the viewer/reader and a denial. Vija Celmins (10) says, in attempting to describe her own paintings - “Hard to talk about it; its sort of difficult to figure out how to make a painting interesting.” I like this quotation because of the weight behind its apparent simplicity. Some things are hard to talk about. Some cannot (and should not) be mastered, but as long as you keep looking (or reading), thoughts will be allowed to form and re-form.

Works Cited

Celmins, V. interview with Robert Gober in Vija Celmins, London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2004.

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[1] Sanderson, “Brainpark”, p.12

[2] Sanderson, “Haesje van Cleyburgh”, p.16

[3] One text that has been useful in this area is Tim Dean’s discussion of anti-hermeneutics, “Art as Symptom: Zizek and the ethics of psychoanalytic criticism” (2002).

Sholette - "Disciplining the Avant-Garde"

Sholette, G. “Disciplining the Avant-Garde: The United States versus The Critical Art Ensemble”, CIRCA: Contemporary Visual Culture in Ireland 112, Summer 2005, pp.50-59.

Artist and writer, David Sholette’s essay “Disciplining the Avant-Garde: The United States versus The Critical Art Ensemble” draws attention to the complexities involved in the startling U.S. prosecution of a member of the art collective Critical Art Ensemble, Steven Kurtz. This particular case is only one of a larger network of attempts by the government to suppress and intimidate scientists, academics and artists who are experimental, critical and politically engaged (Sholette, 13).

In the text “When Thought Becomes Crime” (2005) the art collective respond to the criminal accusations the U.S. Justice Department have leveled against them. The text identifies that the arrest of one of their members shows the government “has made thinking into a crime: a citizen can be arrested without having committed any act of terror, or without having done anything illegal at all”. One reason for the perseverance of the prosecution, despite a lack of evidence of criminal activity, is that the collective poses a challenge to authority because of their use of an ‘amateur’ position. An amateur can be critical of an institution because they are outside of that institution; they become a problem to the institution when they start to communicate to an audience.

An art professor, for example, will probably not tell students that art school is a pyramid scheme into which they will pour a lot of capital, feed the higher-ups, and probably get very little if anything in return. That criticism is more likely to emerge from outside the power structure (or from disgruntled ex-students). (CAE)

In the performance by artist Tao Wells last week in the School of General Knowledge this very criticism was made. The performance took place outside Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch and also via Skype in the George Fraser Gallery, University of Auckland. The fact that it is extremely unlikely that an authority will slap Tao on the wrist for his tirade against art education in New Zealand is worth remembering. But before we pat ourselves on the back, it is also important to reflect upon the noticeable lack of protest culture in New Zealand society today. Dr Brad Jackson in his lecture on leadership at the School of General Knowledge suggested that instead of giving authority figures critique, New Zealanders prefer to complain to two or three of their colleagues. Such a relationship towards authority is unproductive and although here in New Zealand we are not living in the same climate as the States, it is in our interest to consider the ways in which effective protest can take place.

Works Cited

Critical Art Ensemble “When Thought Becomes Crime”, March 17^th 2005, http://caedefensefund.org/thoughtcrime.html

Jackson, B. “A Very Short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap talk about leadership” Tuesday Sept 30, 2008, School of General Knowledge, George Fraser Gallery, University of Auckland.

Wells, T. “Speech” Thursday Sept 25, 2008, University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts carpark, via Skype to the George Fraser Gallery, University of Auckland.

Campbell - "Horrific Blindness - Images of Death in Contemporary Media"

Cambell, D. “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media”, Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 8, No. 1. Routledge, 2004.

David Campbell, a professor of cultural and political geography, uses this essay to explore the representation of atrocity in contemporary visual culture. He proposes that rather than becoming dulled to the horror of images of death due to a proliferation of images of violence, there is a “disappearance of the dead” in contemporary media, and this absence should be questioned (Campbell, 55).

T.J. Clark, like Campbell, argues against turning away from the sight of death. Campbell (67) describes the current state of media representation of war as one of “horrific blindness”. Clark also focuses on the importance of sight; his book The Sight of Death emphasises the importance of looking, looking and looking again. The book is a diary record of the writer’s repeated visits to two Nicolas Poussin paintings in the Getty Museum. Although vastly different in subject matter to Campbell’s text, Clark’s work shares with it a notion that we must look in order to learn how to look.

When looking for a chronicle such as his in the published world, Clark could not find one. He speculates that perhaps one reason a record of repeated looking is avoided is the fear that by throwing the image back into the flow of time we might unravel some fixed, tolerable state (Clark, 8). Like Campbell, who discusses how photographs change over time and in different contexts, Clark (8) reminds us that images do not live everlastingly in a fixed state. Both writers argue that the possible excuses for not looking are not acceptable. For Clark (240), the reality is that there can be no future in a culture that does not have a daily reiteration of the affliction of the present and that it is only from the depths of horror that a new sort of socialism can emerge.

What this last point makes me think about is the difference between choosing to look at images (as Clark does) and being shown images by the media. At the present, this problem is side-stepped by the media’s self-censoring, but as Campbell (71) makes clear - avoidance in this situation is not a neutral decision, it is an injustice. We must look to learn how to look.

Works Cited

Clark, T. The Sight of Death: an experiment in art writing. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2006.

Fisher - "Towards a Metaphysics of Shit"

Fisher, J. “Towards a Metaphysics of Shit” in Documenta 11 Platform 5 The Catalog, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hajte Cantz, 2002, pp. 63-70.

Jean Fisher in "Towards a Metaphysics of Shit" looks at the possibility of resistant art practices through the notion of the trickster. The trickster is the position governed by excess – “a doubling up with laughter, repeating, proliferating, saturating, insinuating, miming and masquerading...a guerrilla war of position designed to confuse the enemy” (Fisher, 69). This position takes a lateral approach (rather than direct opposition) with which to subvert authority which is similar to Archille Bonito Oliva’s description of the ‘traitor’ in The Ideology of the Traitor: Art, Manner and Mannerism.

The Ideology of the Traitor is a book primarily about Mannerism, but in the introduction it draws a parallel between the alienation experienced by the intellectual/traitor/mannerist artist and that experienced in the late 20th century by the modern intellectual. Both periods are characterised by a shift from heroic confrontation with the world (Renaissance, Modernism) to a space of minority characterised by a “relentless nomadism” and detachment (Oliva, 18).

The difference, it seems, between Oliva’s traitor and Fisher’s (69) description of the “tricky-carnivalesque spirit” relates to agency. Where Fisher (69) considers the position of the trickster as one of action and “reclamation of the language of agency through the transforming power of the imagination”, Oliva notes that for the traitor, representation replaces real action. The traitor is consumed by melancholia, suspicion, and ambivalence, which leads him to paralysis; he is characterised by action on the stage rather than in reality (Oliva, 37). Oliva (35) suggests the traitor is forced to oscillate between the prince and the madman, that is between authority and open excess. In this oscillation he approaches the position of the fool, the character that cannot master one pole nor the other, so retreats into language, to performance. Although, for the traitor, there is no way out of this oscillation, this position allows him to occupy a space of possibility – the traitor constructs a surreality through using the weapon of language, he “replaces life, because life cannot be lived” (Oliva, 37).

Works Cited

Oliva, A. B. The Ideology of the Traitor: Art, Manner and Mannerism, Milan: Electa, 1976.

Lury - "'Contemplating a Self-portrait as a Pharmacist': A Trade Mark Style of Doing Art and Science"

Lury, C. “‘Contemplating a Self-portrait as a Pharmacist’: A Trade Mark Style of Doing Art and Science” Theory, Culture, Society. Vol.22(1), London: Sage, pp.93-110

Celia Lury’s interest lies in the sociology of culture; in this particular essay she looks at yBa artist Damien Hirst’s self-branding in relation to what she identifies as a shift from brand names being a mark of ownership of particular products to them becoming a mark of “the organisation of a set of relations between products in time” (Lury, 94). In this text the notion of Hirst as a brand is placed within the latter concept of branding. Lury (97) suggests that the brand name “Hirst” fills the gaps between individual works or series. This idea comes out of Raymond Williams understanding of flow, in which through a discussion of television he comes to suggest that the interval no longer divides discrete programs, but is used to make a sequence into a flow – it is filled with “an advertisement, a trailer, or a broadcasting company ‘indent’” (Lury, 97).

This notion of flow is the topic of a Cat and Girl comic, ‘Hot and Cool’[1]. Grrrl berates boy for watching television with the line “Television is an endless multi-headed spew of audio and video. At least movies end” after asking “Could any medium be more passive?”. I think I agree with Grrrl, there is something a little suspect about a ceaseless hauling to the fore of images and sound with no break or puncture. The comic made me think about Lacan’s clinical practice of varying length sessions which used the end of the session to puncture routine, thus calling into question all that had gone before (Dean, 36). Instead of the session becoming incorporated into the regular flow of habit and routine, the “see you next time, pay at the door” model, or, in relation to television, the “tune in tomorrow for more” model, the end of the session challenges this stability. Tim Dean (36) suggests that such a challenge to stability serves to “introduce some space into re-existent organisations of meaning”.

This made me think about what I perceive as Hirst’s creation of a risk-free practice. I believe that through his self-branding Hirst has created a situation where he cannot puncture his own discourse. Each work or series does not allow for the opening up of space, but is a continuation – with the Hirst stamp of approval. This makes me question Lury’s (98) swift move to characterise the Hirst brand as “living-ness”. Hirst suggests that the spot paintings are “full of life” only as long as they carry the possibility of the series continuation (quoted in Lury, 96). My interest in Hirst (if any) lies in his perverse partnering of religion with capitalist culture in order to draw attention to the belief that a successful life is one in which the company/soul/community continues. But I believe that “living-ness” is also made up of pauses, ends and punctures and should not be so readily defined by a notion of success that does not account for the space these moments provide.

Works Cited:

Dean, T. “Art as Symptom: Zizek and the ethics of psychoanalytic criticism.” Diacritics 32.2 (2004): 21-41.

Gambrell, D. “Hot and Cool”, http://www.catandgirl.com, retrieved 24/9/08

[1] http://catandgirl.com/view.php?loc=594

Tze Ming Mok- "Race You There”

Tze Ming Mok, Race You There, Landfall 208, Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2004, pp. 18-26

A friend was talking to me recently about, what was for her, the trauma of childbirth. Her aversion to the experience was made up of a few factors but what stood out to me was her difficulty with the fact that, despite the drugs and hospital gowns, there was no escaping the primal ‘animal’ struggle of the event. I suspect this was traumatic because the struggle to produce life became a reminder of the potential fallibility of the human body.

The brutal reality (or beautiful reality) of our human vulnerability is glossed over daily in the western world through mediation such as television to endorse a culture fixated with signs of cleanliness, healthiness, and strength. An example of this would be the proliferation of kitchen cleaning product advertisements which zoom in to a microscopic level to find cartoons of ‘germs’ that disappear with a poof when sprayed with [insert favourite brand here]. The fact that humans excrete waste isn’t even thought about when watching a roly-poly dog play with toilet paper, nor does the primitiveness of sex take precedence over the polished image of it created by popular culture. Through the media, western culture has pushed death, like birth, into the realm of hospital gowns and drugs; our own mortality is alienated, even denied.

In Race You There Tze Ming Mok describes Chi Phung’s controversial belief that all newcomers to New Zealand could have the right to live here though “entry by treaty” (23). Phung boycotted the march held following the racial attack against her when organisers weren’t willing to engage with this issue. They were not willing because Phung had touched upon what Mok describes as the “trigger point” (23)-

She believed that the root of white aggression against non-white immigrants and foreign students was premised on white Pakeha denial that they themselves are an immigrant people. (23)

This passage was useful for highlighting the fact that racism is “not as black and white as it may seem”(23), but what it made me think about was something broader than racism, which was sparked by the word ‘denial’. Denial – of death, of the possibility of ones own demise, of ones position of strength being potentially transient – is a problematic mindset for a society. It creates an unspoken gap between where we think we are and where we actually are now.

Geoff Park - 'Theatre Country'

In ‘Theatre Country’ Geoff Park (114)suggests that the Claude glass contributed to the way of looking that led people to see the landscape as they would the stage of a play, as “picturesque”. From reading Catherine Wood’s contribution ‘ Theatre Pieces’ to the 2006 Tate Triennial catalogue my attention was drawn to the artist Dan Graham whose work ‘Performer/Audience/Mirror’ (1977) can be seen as working in opposition to the heirarchical approach to viewing that an object such as the Claude glass promotes.

Where the Claude glass creates a 'picturesque scene’ by having the viewer turn their back on nature and toward a mirror, Graham uses a mirror in his performance to bring the audience literally into the picture. In his work the performer faces the audience who, as they watch him, simultaneously see their own reflections in the mirror behind him. Throughout the performance the performer turns his back to the audience and toward their reflection (and his own) and then turns back around to face them, thus making the audience aware of their position as both an outside observer and inextricably part of a larger picture (Graham 124-125).

In his own writing Graham considers the development of stage design, drawing a link between the shift from the open amphitheatre to the enclosed Renaissance theatre and that of the emergence of the bourgeoisie in Europe. He notes that the combination of fixed seating with the baroque’s deep stage promoted a “privileged, ‘ideal’ viewing point” (Wood 150). Where the Claude glass represents “private possession” (Park 116), Graham’s work questions one person having such a position and instead gives the power (that comes from and is connected to being in a position to see) to the public body.

Through the use of a mirror the audience is able to instantaneously perceive itself as a public body (as a unity), offsetting its definition by the performer. This gives it a power within the performance equivalent to that of the performer. (Graham 125)

What both Graham’s work and Park’s text remind me of is how closely connected seeing – what we see, who see’s what, how seeing is conceptualised by language – is to power and control.1

1.I read a sentence somewhere recently that discussed the relationship between sight and power as seen in French language – voir: to see; savoir: to know; and pouvoir: to be able to. I cannot for the life of me find it again, but I thought it was worthy to include for its simple demonstration of the connection.

Works Cited:
Graham, D. Two-Way Mirror Power: selected writings by Dan Graham on his art edited by Alexander Alberro. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999, pp. 124-134.
Park, G. ‘Theatre Country’ in Theatre Country: Essays on landscape and whenua. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006, pp. 113-127.
Wood, C. ‘Theatre Pieces’ in Tate Triennial 2006 New British Art edited by Beatrix Ruf and Clarrie Wallis. London: Tate Publishing, 2006, pp. 150.