Input week of September 9, 2019

“100 Things About Writing A Novel” by Alexander Chee (Yale Review)

“What 100 People, Real and Fake, Believe about Dolores” by Ben Greeman, [McSweeneys, 10/20/2000]

An Interview with Peter Doig, by Joush Jelly-Schapiro, [The Believer Mag, 3/1/2012]

Doig’s FilmClub

The harder they come

Whether French film-makers (Renoir and others) would have been painters if born 50 years earlier or Internet designers if 50 years later

The Ends of Art according to Beuys, by Eric Michaud/Rosalind Krauss , [October, Vol. 45 (Summer 1988]

Beuys is a voice and intended to overcome the silence of Duchamp

E.g.

The disturbing element in Beuys’s work is not to be found in his drawings, which have their place in public and private collections throughout the world, nor his “performances,” which have their place within the Fluxus movement and within a general investigation of the limits of art. It lies rather, I believe, in the flood of pronouncements testifying to the privilege that he gave, throughout his lifetime, to spoken over plastic language. It is this constant inundation of his ‘works’ by words – both his own and those of others – this frantic proselytizing in which he exhausted himself up to the time of his death. But it is also – and in the very same impulse that led him to repeat what he thought was Christ’s teaching – this constant wish to ‘clarify the task that the Germans have to accomplish in this world,’ this insistence on the ‘duty of the German people,’ above all to deploy this ‘resurrective force’ tha t was to lead to the transformation of the social body by man-turned-artist.

October, at 38-39.

Other themes:

Duchamp is counterproductive because he shows that all objects can be art, but failed to go further and show that all humans are necessarily artists

Beuys’s notion of Gestaltung – the putting into form – is an end, and it will, he claims, “bring about the resurrection of meaning that Duchamp’s silence had buried.”

But the close of the essay shows inherent problems with Beuys Gestaltung and notion of Germany as place to revivify Christianity: if each person is an artist by virtue of the social activity – the putting into form –, then collectively a culture is engaging in the productive and transformative task of social sculpture. Of creating a new form of life. And the risk is that the end of achieving Gestaltung will make (other) people means – that it becomes a feedback loop of subjugation in which real mean and the real world, which become reduced to be the mere instruments of its exercise, mere putty in the work of social sculpture. Which, it being Germany and all, should be cause for concern.

Aside: Beuys founded the Green Party in Germany, if that is a mitigating weight on the totalizing talk of Germanic “duty” and “self-becoming” (and it might not be).

“What Makes Indians Laugh” Surrealism, Ritual, and Return in StevenPazzie and Joseph Beuys by Claudia Mesch, [Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 6:1(2012)]

A View Beyond the Personal by Ange Mlinko, NY Review of Books, 5/23/2019 [Review of John Koethe’s Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016]

HMS Bounty by Rachel Kushner, Yale Review (January 2018)

It’s said that capitalism relies on a system of selling something you don’t own to someone who doesn’t want it. Which is identical to how a Lacanian defines love. The lover makes a gift of his banality as if it were a wonder. He pretends to offer something more than his banality, a piece of the world that reflects his love and that he does not, in reality, possess. In both cases, love and futures, you force something you don’t own onto someone who does not want it.

Capital requires the confidence that you can do business with time. Alan Badiou says the revolution to come seems impossible only if you swallow the lie that the present is not. Once you see how impossible life already is, then the possibility of a real true actual emancipatory horizon comes into view. Got it?

[ . . . .]

In the Doge’s Palace in Venice there is a room that was once the largest indoor gathering place in all of Europe. Capacity was two thousand important men. The doges ruled Venice for six hundred years. There were 120 of them. The term of service was life. Around the upper edges of this grand salon, on all four walls, are painted portraits of all the doges. All the doges, that is, but one, a single Venetian doge who is represented by no portrait but instead a black banner, and under the banner text in Latin that reads, Here is the space reserved for Marino Faliero, decapitated for crimes.

Faliero was doge for only one year. One year of six hundred. One doge of 120. And yet: anyone who has ever been in the great salon of Venice, once the largest gathering indoor space in all of Europe; in fact, anyone asked to name a Venetian doge, a single one, any doge, will name Marino Faliero. Or at the very least, a person, when asked, will say, “The one whose memory they tried to erase. That’s the one I recall.”

[I have been in this big room, twice, and I remember the black banner, but not the man who – having been subject to erasure – became infamous and known]

Philosopher-Poets: John Koethe and Kevin Hart by Paul Kane [Raritan, Summer 2001]

Koethe’s poems typically chronicle what it is like to be experiencing life the way he does, rather than presenting the events themselves, which remain offstage and largely unavailable to us as readers. There is an intimate distancing at work whereby we get to know the poet’s experience without ever getting to know what happens to him. This makes Koethe a poet of the ambiguous antecedent . . . .

From ON BALANCE BY ADAM PHILLIPS:

The Authenticity Issue (114-15)

In her memoir Room for Doubt, the American writer Wendy Lesser has a chapter about living in Berlin; and her sense of what contemporary Berlin is like prompts invidious comparison with New York. There is, she has a sense, a “richly reflected innocence” about contemporary Berlin,

a zeal for the new that is both premised on appreciation of and wariness about the old. We have nothing like it in America. Every fw years New York ( and then the rest of the country) goes into a tortured soul-search and decides that we are all too ironic, that irony must now be thrown out so that something more – more what? more childlike? more authentic? more credulous? – something fresher and newer, at any rate, can be ushered in. But you cannot will such reforms.

The antidote for irony, and its sppposedly enerveating effect is, in Lesser’s telling list, something more childlike, more authentic, more credulous; reminiscent of Clare, and Banville in a different way, when the word ‘authenticity’ is used, it conveys something about immediacy. Irony is, as we say, a distance regulator and there is something that we nostalgic Romantics feel estranged from and want to get back to or closer to: the childlike, the authentic, states of credulity. The authentic in this list represents the retreat of skepticism, doubt, even reflection. It is trustworthy, and we can entrust ourselves to it. It allows us to yield rather than requiring our vigilance. If we can be more childlike, authentic and credulous, it is assumed, something fresher and newer can be ushered in, as though irony is our defense against the new, a kind of character armour, and if we could shrug it off, we could be more vulnerable, more receptive, capable of exchange and not ambitious for insulation.

READING, AND UNCLEAR IF I AM CONFUSED BY IT:

Form Follows Flow: A Material-driven Computational Workflow for Digital Fabrication of Large-Scale Hierarchically Structured Objects, by Laia Mogas-Soldevila, Jorge Duro-Royo, Neri Oxman

Design for the Modern Prometheus: Towards an Integrated Biodesign Workflow by Sunanda Sharma (M.S. Thesis, MIT, Media Arts and Sciences)

DORMANT READING

Whistler, life for art’s sake, Daniel Sutherland (no progress made at all)

The Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan (no progress made at all)

Zen and Japanese Culture, D.T. Suzuki [Purchased Kawaza Museum in Oct. 2018, been “reading” Since then]

Swann’s Way (Davis) (no progress made at all)

. . . . . more . . . OR . . . . i suppose, less, worse, what have you.