Author: james rouvelle

in her speech last night sarah palin mentioned that:
hockey moms are pitbulls with lipstick.
she, apparently, is a hockey mom.
“dick cheney is the pitbull of the republican party.”
sarah palin is dick cheney with lipstick.
that’s the way she sounded to me.

the crowd responded passionately to her, in particular near the end when she said something about dealing with the terrorists and how her opponents were concerned with reading them their rights.

in class yesterday we talked about interaction, and how interaction is a relationship of mutual influence. we also talked about operative knowledge, which we defined as awareness to the degrees to which, within an interaction, you are influencing something AND how it is influencing you.

with the republicans leaning heavily on the pathos, heroism, and indignation they associate with McCain’s imprisonment and torture, i thought it strikingly short-sighted to suggest that not playing by rules designed to at least minimally acknowledge a prisoner’s humanity by making him aware of his rights while being held captive is somehow ok if we do it.

in general i found palin’s well written and well performed speech to successfully reach and stimulate my inner caveman.

it occurred to me that much of the rhetoric of the Right seems designed to resonate with that violent, uneducated, short-sighted, frightened cave dweller persona that lives in many of us, and then match that stupid thing with a candidate who seems to preach those very values as a code to live and govern by.

i accept my inner caveman. i prefer to have my leaders speak to, and inspire my thoughtful, empathic, productive identity.

also, at some point during her speech i actually thought i heard some people in the crowd chanting “four more years!”, maybe they were – would be a good protest chant at their appearances.

on my way into work this afternoon i boarded the train wearing a blue, striped, button-down shirt and green, cotton pants. the car i entered was crowded so i walked into another and took a seat. as i looked around i noticed that there were three people sitting in front of me with almost the same shirt that i was wearing. funny coincidence. i looked around a bit more and noticed that the car was almost full of people not only wearing a similar shirt to mine but the same type and color of pants, too!

as we entered each station some of them would get up to leave, and meet the eyes of their fellow workers and nod their heads as they left – several people met my eye only to give me a puzzled look when they realized that they didn’t recognize my face.

when i got up to leave i took another look and ended up making eye contact and nodding at a bunch of different people who seemed as puzzled as i was about this trivial but unusual event.

i’m writing this just before i start teaching and the students are filing in so that’s it for now.

thanks for sending me this, mike!

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8453814925462673894&ei=0GCjSJ2aEImSrwKx08DTDw&q=richard+serra&vt=lf[/googlevideo]
Some quotes (please watch it for yourself):

mediazation (something that has been reduced to a flat surface, a screen that allows you to partake in its own reality, and not the situation of the reality in which it exists, a frame, a box), direct experience, metaphor, the immediacy and actuality of the place and moment, this being like that, the intensity of the work as it exists in its’ place, curves: concavity, convexity – no one knows a curve until they experience it, until they walk it. the latter part of the 20th century was devoid of curves, it was the tyranny of the right angle, we are entering an era when the curve will predominate and the corner will evaporate, art evolves through misinterpretation of what came before, and to use it as their own ideological purposes, every new generation purposely misinterprets what has come before, if you are just re-articulating what has come before you are being academic and probably treading water, a lot of art that doesn’t reinvent form, it lays a new content on an old form, if you look at pop art it is just rehashed cubism with new commodities thrown in, form, to a certain degree negates value, and that remains interesting to me.

Interesting. To me it’s not a question of either/or, it’s a question of integrating these experiences (in Serra’s words mediazation, and the experience of things as they really are in their place and moment), and understanding a given moment as a series of realizations that are built from a sequence of understandings embodied in different logical constructions (metaphoric, direct experience, etc.). He mentions simultaneity a few times, too, btw, and I’m not so sure we have any real ability to sense a genuine simultaneity in detail. I think our, or at least my, understandings often come down to sequence(s), anyway>>

To me, any given, known moment seems to be a cubism of different, but related logical constructions, and the exciting discovery comes from acknowledging the different logics present (whether based in the mind, physically instantiated in objects, or somewhere in between), and exploring that moment via the specific, shifting light that each provides. Put another way, the experience of a given moment is derived from the interaction between different modes of understanding that reside equally between the external and internal worlds. the oscillation between expression/participation, and observation of the specific modes, and their concentration and collective sequence seems to be where the fun is. cultivating an ability to see things this way and to accurately express one’s experience in those terms strikes me as a promising practice for thinkers and mashup artists of any discipline today.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eil7HfMg5Xk[/youtube]

a performer i know shared this story with me:

he and his family moved to nyc from puerto rico when he was in the fourth grade. he was asked by his teacher to memorize and recite a poem to the class. he chose ‘little brown baby‘ – (read the comment below the poem from january 7th).

while he was memorizing the poem his family was happily watching caddy shack in the next room. he decided to recite the poem the way bill murray’s character spoke in caddy shack. he doesn’t really know why he chose to recite the poem that way.

after his recitation his teacher took him by the arm into the hall and told him that what he’d done was horrible, and to never do something like that again. she was visibly upset with him.

his teacher was caucasian, and he had frequently experienced caucasians as unwilling to express their true feelings to someone’s face – and had heard they often seemed nice but then, behind your back, would do mean things. he was amazed that she would be so honest and direct with him about how she felt.

at that moment he decided to become a performer.

…but they do not create illuminations”. so says werner herzog in the interview below.

i recall a quote from hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach:

Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiom system is involved..

the limits of formalization are interesting to me, and i’m intrigued at how dogmatic some of us seem to be about facts and their related logical structures. their real use to us is in our continued development of them, and their continued evolution with us, not in treating a currently useful arrangement of facts and logical structure as some sort of natural, invariable law.

logical structure’s (in general) mutability, development, and usefulness as a method for understanding the present as clearly as possible is an index of our intellectual evolution.

in speaking with an art student yesterday about her investigations and documentation of specific biologic structures i noticed that she seemed equally passionate about the circumstances surrounding the creation of her images: the people she met along the way, the places she visited, the impulses that lead her to focus her attention on her subject (the oldest living things on this planet), etc.

i recalled another quote from werner herzog:

the poet must not avert his eyes, you have to take a bold look at your environment and see what is around you, even the ugly things, the decadent things, even the dangerous things.

and it occurred to me that what was around her work was more than the photos she had chosen to show me, and i encouraged her to express the complex interaction of fact, impulse and gesture that the images were a part (a fact, a bit).

our experience occurs at the intersection of facts (logical constructions) and impulse. when the artist creates a gesture that contains the interaction of both of those elements in such a way that they permit an experience of what herzog describes as the poet’s gaze, the quality of that moment is aesthetic.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4i5WkkXdmc&NR=1[/youtube]

in the clip above he mentions an incident in the video below, that also contains the quote about the poet’s gaze.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ugQrfDrcq4&NR=1[/youtube]

while sitting in an artist’s studio yesterday i noticed how insulated i felt from the forest just yards away, and how pretty the woods looked through the small window cut out of the cinderblock wall, framed by all sorts of chemicals and gizmos.

last month i spent time visiting my father in massachusetts and spent a lot of time in the woods, which i loved. on the return trip i found a deer tick embedded in my leg. i’m still waiting to find out if i have lyme disease or not.

tonight, just after sunset i was looking at the sky and hills across a football field cut into the woods. the humidity began to increase, and i heard a high-pitched, rustling, patter coming toward me from the trees to the west. it was beautiful and i couldn’t figure out what it was.

a moment later i felt rain drops and realized i was hearing the rain coming toward me.

i walked under a tree for cover, saw a rail thin cat scrounging around for food, and was suddenly harassed by a squadron of mosquitoes. i headed indoors.

sitting with the artist we talked about how toxic to the environment concrete is, and how we’ve used it extensively.

i recalled some thoughts of werner herzog regarding nature included in my best fiend:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjjnZvtwtqA[/youtube]

i wondered if our aboriginal ancestors (we all have aboriginal ancestors) experienced nature as violent, chaotic, dangerous and agonizing. it occurred to me that if they had, then the recent environmental onslaught that we call industrialized society seems to be a sort embodiment and monument to what i imagine as our ancestor’s wish for control and violence against that great uncontrollable and dominant force that sustained, tormented, toyed with, and killed them. an entire epoch in human development that could be characterized as the ‘fuck you, nature!’ phase.

having temporarily isolated ourselves from much of the chaos and difficulty of living (as opposed to vacationing) close to nature the view through our assorted windows looks pretty and maybe even more healthy and comfortable that our rooms, studios, and offices.

like a lot things we’ve distanced ourselves from we’ve romanticized it.

our built environment may even be causing us more harm, confusion and misery than that view of a tree with a squirrel in it ever could. maybe we’ve gone too far away from nature and should live closer to the earth. why not?

except that our garbage and chemicals seem to be buried everywhere, and like much of our technology the essential stuff (in this case the most nasty and toxic materials and processes) is active but often undetectable except to some select experts.

the causes and effects of our actions are on a global scale and the causes and effects are highly dispersed across space and time, and as i’ve been writing about, our ability to sense relationships and coordinations of distant events is poor to begin with. we’ve set a trap for ourselves.

one could even argue that as our technology caused us to spread further apart we began to require our technology and other intellectual constructions to keep us ‘together’. by privileging the intellectually constructed we find ourselves increasingly clumsy in regard to our instincts. perhaps our instincts, seemingly constant for at least thousands of years, provided a sort of check and balance system for our relationship with the earth. perhaps lately we’ve been blindly building (or digging) ourselves into a toxic hole of our own design.

it seems that many hazardous chemicals that we’ve put down are leached out of the earth by plants that look, feel and taste good to us.

our forays into ‘anti’ biotics may have set the stage for highly virulent, uncontrollable bacteria and viruses.

global warming?

fresh water crisis?

hmmm. nice moves, nature.

Cesar, in response to Richard’s installation, described a difference between the hypnotic and the meditative. (I’m recalling these comments from memory a few hours later):

The hypnotic requires no conscious work from the subject. To me this suggests that the hypnotic is an intellectually effortless act of complacency and submission.

The meditative requires work from whoever wishes to meditate, and suggests a process of adaptation and interaction with one’s environment that directly involves the consciousness and, by extension, the interplay between the body and environment, between environment, body, feeling, and thought.

Cesar went on to say that creating hypnotic work now, in our culture, must be handled carefully and critically.

overheard at a crit.

during the question and answer period after last week’s talk at MICA someone brought up this post (improved interface design, not instinct), and asked if i knew anything about mirroring as a technique in early education and how it had been, according to the person asking the question, minimized as a technique over the past twenty years, and how some educators are attributing certain undesirable, difficult and minimally empathic behaviors in young people to this lack empathy in the technique of their teachers.

interesting.

here’s a link describing mirroring from an educator’s point of view.

mirroring is an interactive technique of listening, imitating, and adapting, for both student and teacher that seems to foster a sense of empathy. in brief, the idea seems to be one of implementing a lesson plan by using the vocabulary of a specific student.

take a moment and think about all your gripes about our current young generation.

take another moment and think about what you’ve been attributing those behaviors to: music, drugs, popular culture, ‘the computer’, ‘the internet’, ‘technology’, many, many other factors.

in addition to the lack of mirroring, the past twenty years also featured removal of civics classes from public schools, as well as the removal of art and music whenever the budget got tight.

the person who raised this point also went on to say that educators are concerned that they’ve ‘lost’ (her word) two generations, as the current younger crew will impart their values on their own kids.

mirroring is now becoming popular again in masters of education programs.

i didn’t catch the person’s name who raised these points, but i want to thank her.