Documentation: Learning (Week 13)

Words that we thought about:

• pity and compassion
• rights and justice
• ally
• empathy
• art-thropology 

questions raised:

• Can our bodies get closer to meaning than language?
• Do aesthetics have to be compromised?
• Can only those within the community create?
• What does “ally” mean (to you)?
• What is the relationship and contradiction that exists between big institutions and grassroots initiatives? This relationship being one of the main problems in contemporary art.
• Is Documenta exploiting the subject of its art?
• What are the ethics and privileges involved in studying communities?

Things that were said:

“Anooj contains magnitudes. Today those magnitudes are called Yousra and Louisa.”

new definitions

Curation:

Curation is the process of facilitating and creating a meeting ground of ideas, concepts, and artists around place or space ( both physical and otherwise). Thus, curation is placing things in dialogue with each other, and refiguring elements of social, political, aesthetic, and phenomenological into different kinds of conversation. Ideally, curation works outside of power hierarchies and places the audience and the art at an equilibrium to translate the message clearly to the audience members who will then go on to translate the ideas into different forms of dialogue that will spark a reconfiguration of meaning in the art as the work matures.

 

Documentation:

Documentation is the act of continuing conversations and dialogues of an experience. The actualization of ideas through mediated communication to translate experiences of the personal into experiences of the local and global. Documentation is then a power signal boost of an intuition or moment that invites others to participate. The constructions of documentation capture the world in a decisive perspective of the individual who can then advance ideas and concepts past the limitations of medium.

 

Political Engagement:

Political engagement is acting according to the understanding that there are power structures, constructs, and systems that are inescapable and inherent in consuming, thinking, and creating art, and by extension living in this world. Political engagement is then an active participation in the decisions made when having a conversation of multiple perspectives.

A response to Documenta 14

A reoccurring tension in the work of documenta 14, as well as throughout the class is this concept of performativity and symbolic action over intentionality and necessary action. Consistently art appears as a reiteration of a problem, a signifier to struggle that seems to prey off of crisis. In opposition to documenta 14 was graffiti that reads “The crisis of a commodity or the commodity of crisis?” which seems to speak to the disconnect of art from doing anything but adding noise to communities in pain. Birrell’s work serves as a kind of metonymic function of artwork being subject to it’s context in exhibition rather than intentionality, a kind of physical disconnect in what the art accomplishes and what the abstractions of a piece supposedly creates. As with Documenta 14’s conception of an organization in progress, there still exists an ambiguity and fragmentation of what art institutions do so far as creating a community of art. We speak a lot in this class of spaces and the importance of places that can create conversations and dialogues. The issue with an art institution is that it takes the place of the audience of being in dialogue with the piece rather than enunciating and articulating the artworks meaning. We have reached a kind of postmodern issuing of fragmentation of the narrative point by placing space and artwork in conflict rather than a helpful juxtaposition. The article attributes this sensation of fragmentation to miscommunication which perhaps serves as a better understanding of how the collaborations of Documenta 14 function. The focus of performative and symbolic actions that centered around non-statements. I do believe that there is something artful in what is not being said. As Derrida says there is loads of meaning and context in what is chosen to be said and not said. I think documenta’s understanding of “the best statement as no statement” is in a severe misunderstanding of the damage done by silence and the choice to not do certain things. The literal interpretation of non-choices results in a futility of sorts that drowns out symbolic resonances of unintentional monologue. What seems to be the issue with documenta 14 is a miscommunication of the voices speaking louder than others in conversation and how the pieces speak to each other and the world around it.

Anooj’s Facilitation Notes from long ago

A part of me wishes I knew the expectations of me that I know now when I was in class on Friday. It was an interesting day for me to be a co-host in class because of how low on energy I was running, and that definitely impacted my ability to make connections and to create questions that meaningfully progressed conversation, which I feel like is something I typically love to engage in. With that, I want to offer the list of free-association questions that I wrote during last week’s readings, and some questions that came while in class as well:

-What did our mothers go through?

-How do we leverage short-term possibility of exploiting for long term deconstruction?

-How does personal suffering turn into oppression for others?

-What is food a symbol of to you outside of hospitality? How is food a form of resistance? A form of identity?

-Is food a memorial?

-What is the scientific chemistry of food you love? What is the interpersonal and cultural chemistry of food you love?

-How does your body feel when you eat food that reminds you of home?  How do you want others to feel when eating this food?

-When you hear food what do you see hear smell touch taste and feel?

-What does the land have to do with it?

-How does food cultivate your artistic practice?

-How does food promote chaos? For who? To what impacts?

-Is the food waste we create necessary? (Re: The celebration of 3id lkbir)

-In what way is your cooking performative?

-How has urban food trends allowed people to access culture from afar? Is this a positive thing?

-What is the difference between a meal cooked at home and the same meal made at a restaurant?

-How does affection impact taste?

-What impact does ignoring ideology have on even well thought out action?

-What is it that makes you feel welcome? What is a welcoming?

I also wanted to bring in two specific readings, one on Rasa Aesthetics and another called Slow Money which both, in very different ways, addresses food and its (and where it comes from’s) impact on performance and performativity. Hopefully I can touch base with Luisa on these things for Friday’s class.

A large takeaway from me at the beginning of class, especially throughout my continuous questioning of style, was the value of studying predecessors for the sake of avoiding repeating answering questions in ways that have been asked before. I think within style, we can also find a nonlinear representation of artist collectives and allow who we consider to be in a collective to transcend notions of time. This ties into the idea that was brought up about the amount of eyes being embedded into a painting, which is distinct to me from the concept of simply viewing a piece of art. If a memory is embedded into the fabric of a piece of art by witnessing it, are we creating a collective? I think this gets complicated when we think of the established hierarchies of style and taste and what “embedded” eyes were socialized to result in that embedding.

Hosting and facilitating felt empowering because the primary role in it is to be an active listener and responder to the goings-on around you. I would have loved to do this on a day that I perhaps had a bit more gusto in me, but am thankful for getting to be a part of the skype conversations as well as the dialogue we began class with. I felt responsible for managing confusion and did not feel like I understood parts of the conversation on individuality vs. collectivity enough to be able to manage that confusion well.

 

Talking about hospitality – Facilitator reflection

I really enjoyed our conversation around the notion of hospitality and our after-talk with Rick Lowe. Regarding hospitality, Derrida is very clear about the antinomy between the LAW of unlimited hospitality and the LAWS. He simply writes “hospitality should not be a duty, it should be a law without law”. And I ask myself: how can it be a law without law when we live in a society? Even if they are implicit, this collision will always be present.

We also explored this idea of the host and the hostess. Shouldn’t hospitality come from both sides? Why do we feel more confortable with some people than with other? What is our role in such an interchange? And also, how does the language play in hospitality? How can we be hospitable to someone else without trying to know her/him? Is there hospitality if we don’t try to engage with them? But which are the ways of knowing other people if its not through language, and through questions? Also focusing on language, why didn’t we think about hospitality in terms of a “right”, as Derrida proposes, when naming our connections during class? How do we connect rights to love?

And many of these questions and reflections came to the surface during our talk with Lowe. One of the things we usually discuss in our classes is how to engage a community while being an outsider, without being harmful and, even more, being useful. And when answering this question, he talked about “managing expectations”. This, in my view, has a lot to do with hospitality. And this also comes back to the idea of the “outsider” also being responsible for hospitality. Who is the host and who is the hostess in Lowe’s projects? Is it something that can be defined in “this or that” terms?

Documenta14

http://www.documenta14.de/en/

Project Row Houses

Within the project, I liked the idea of “positive creative presence.” The Public art projects use of experience as a fuel to engage the artists and audience as a broader dialogue in a local-national context seems like a symbiotic approach to contemporary art. Symbiotic in that the project seems to be attached to a community that is struggling in some capacity, all interaction points are under the persuasion that there must be something missing, wrong, or wounded in the community.

Palimpsest drawings exhibit

This is the exhibit I talked about today: http://www.davidnolangallery.com/artists/ciprian-muresan

 

Nietzsche on History

In case someone is interested in the text I mentioned in class about the uses of history! nietzsche_on the uses and disadvantages of history for life