Samuelle

Shit Happens Notes on Awkwardness – Amy Sillman

”I know we are no longer making things for the Beaux-Arts, for truth, beauty or elevation” All I can say about this quote is Fuck Yes!!!

In French, awkwardness translates to ‘’maladresse’ but to me, they mean different things. 

To me ‘’maladresse’’ translates to clumsy. Clumsiness involves an action whereas awkwardness is moody and doesn’t necessarily involve an action the way clumsiness does. But both involve a certain amount of vulnerability. Clumsy people are clumsy for many reasons, maybe they are tired, maybe they drank too much, maybe they’ve been clumsy since they were a kid, or maybe they should wear glasses… 

When I speak French, I use the word ‘awkward’ all the time and so do my friends. I never use the word ‘maladresse’. 

I found out about the Great Auk recently while walking my dog on the Great Auk Trail in Guelph. Here is what I found out:

The Great Auk was a flightless bird that once existed in great numbers off Canada’s East Coast. He was a great swimmer that travelled vast distances underwater in search of fish. On land, however, this bird was slow and awkward. His inability to fly and his clumsiness on land were distinctive features of his. He also did not fear humans which sealed its fate when Europeans arrived on the coast in the 17^th and 18^th Century. They hunted the Great Auk mercilessly and killed its last one in 1852. The Great Auk is the first known case of an entire species being wiped out after the advent of Europeans colonization. While walking this trail, I began the trail feeling sad for this beautiful clumsy instinct bird.

As I walked, I thought of feminicides, Witch hunts, and of all the women throughout capitalist history with great wisdom who got silenced and killed mercilessly just for being women. Like the Great Auk, women were exploited and abused. As I was walking, I asked myself why I was associating the Great Auk and women? Like the Great Auk, I began to imagine all the swollen tummies of pregnant women of the 17th century walking slowly and awkwardly like the Great Auk… As Silvia Federici puts it: ‘’Women, in capitalist development, have suffered a double process of mechanization. Besides being subjected to the discipline of work, paid and unpaid, in plantations, factories, and homes, they have been expropriated from their bodies and turned into sexual objects and breeding machines’’(Federici, 14). I think the only reason why women were ever kept alive throughout capitalism is because women bare children…

Like the great Auk, my art practice is clumsy, slow and awkward. I know how to swim and I dive in new waters and often surprise myself. I’ve always made my art before I have any clear idea of what I am doing. The process is what I’m after. In University context, I’ve often ashamed of my intuitive process. To me, this way of working requires a certain amount of vulnerability and willingness to make mistakes and fail. Sillman writes how artists ”try to surprise” themselves and how ”it’s hard to do”. I think that Awkwardness is a great way to surprise yourself and others.

As Thomas mentioned during his presentation, ‘Awkward’ was first introduced in the English dictionary by John Ayto in his dictionary of Words of Origin in the 1300s in Scotland and northern England, where it meant ‘’turned the wrong direction’’. 

In my art practice, I always feel like I’ve gotten lost or that I turned in the wrong direction… What have I done? What the hell am I doing? is how I often feel when I show my work to people and realize what I’ve done.

The word ‘Awkward’ comes from a combination of the Middle English adjective ‘’awk’’ (the wrong way round, backhand) and the directional suffix ‘ward’). 

The meaning of ‘Awkward’ as an adjective appeared in the 16th Century when ‘awkward’ also mean ‘’not straightforward’’, ‘’backhanded’’. 

The first adjectival citation of Awkward appeared in the Scottish translation of Virgil’s Aneneid sometime before 1522 : 

the grief-strike Dido beholds the departing Aeneas with acquart luke (with a sideway glance).

A sideway glance… what a clear image. Dido was the first woman to embody awkwardness in the English language.

In the Aeneid by Virgil, Dido is represented from the vantage point of a 3rd person, removed (Dido is the ruler of a kingdom and she wages war).  She betrays the memory of her deceased husband and her duty as a widow, and by doing so, she delays the illustrious founder of Rome from his destined path.  In this story, Dido commits suicide because she stepped above the appropriate position of a woman. It makes so much sense how in the English language, ‘awkward’ also had to imply that this sideway glance was induced by a lover departing (who also kills herself because she stepped above the appropriate position of a woman).

Here is Dido before she kills herself…

Western culture has this pervasive way of categorizing women as either good or bad which makes me sick to my stomach. An example is how women are depicted in the Film Noir movies. Noir movies emerged during the second world war in 1941 and was used as a propaganda tool to keep women from becoming independent workers.

Due to husbands being away at war, women were increasingly gaining independence as many women began working (and enjoying it). In Noir movies, a woman is either portrayed as the wife or the femme fatale. These movies were implicitly created to show how ‘’bad’’ the independent femme fatale was. At the end of each movie, after a man has had an adventure with the femme fatale, he always returns to the wife a.k.a patriarch. This return, towards patriarchy and the ‘’good’’ was a way of making the liberated woman into the enemy.

I think that Sillman’s take on Contemporary Art is refreshing as it moves away from constricting binaries in favour of bleak monumental art and virtuosity. I’m all for embracing awkwardness, shame and vulnerability.

Chromophobia David Bachelor

I’ve always loved colours and have often been told that I overdo them. This is because when I am in contact with colours, I feel possessed and I want to see them all, all at once, everywhere. They seduce me and I can’t help myself but splurge. In one of her talks on Colour, Amy Sillman compares painters to drug addicts. A painter can spend 90$ on a single tiny tube of paint… Why is it so addictive?

I had never heard of Chromophobia until I read this book and was eye-opening to read this as I’ve often felt ashamed of my use of colours. This reading helped me understand where this shame came from. I now see my use of colour as a resistance against this ”purging of colour”. It has allowed me to erase all of the teachers who told me to tone it down… I won’t!!!

Colour and its association with the senses and the primitive maintain an uncivilized status. They are ”a core of resistance to cultural domestication”. Chromophobia is ‘’this loathing of colour, this gear of corruption through colour’’(Bachelor, 22) This ‘’purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological’’.

Chromophobic culture is similar to the history of ‘aesthetics’. Originally, the word ‘aesthetics’ derived from the Greek ‘’aisthetikos’’ meant a sense of perception sensitivity of the body’s sensations. Throughout Western Art history, the relationship between Aesthetics and bodily sensations was ruptured. The German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten was the first to use the term aesthetics in its modern sense. In 1735, he developed aesthetics as the study of good and bad “taste”, thus good and bad art, linking good taste with beauty. By trying to develop an idea of good and bad taste, he also in turned generated philosophical debate around this new meaning of aesthetics. Aesthetics  became lifeless and like  a doll, who’s orifices are closed, art was removed from the body’s senses. Like chromophobia, by disassociating ‘aesthetics’ from the body, they categorized the abject, the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological as ”bad” art. Like color who was been devalued and diminished in Western Art, the way we think of ‘aesthetics’ is problematic.

Mishkos Kenomagwen The Teaching of Grass 

What are the wrong questions?

Wrong questions in science as Kenomagwen writes, are only wrong because they were never included in Western science. 

There are pre-established norms in academia, especially in science about what a theoretical framework is. Asking a felt question, one that comes from the heart is important. It’s easy to ask the wrong questions out of being afraid of not fitting within a certain framework.

Drawing on ancient indigenous knowledge, Laurie provides a new way of approaching science. This new way is very old and has been dismissed as ‘real science’ by western thinkers/academics. As Kenomagwen writes, ‘’There is a barrier of language and meaning between science and traditional knowledge, different ways of knowing, different ways of communicating’’. 

This project was a way for Laurie ‘’ to write a thesis that would ‘’mean something to someone’’ instead of just sitting on the shelf’’(158). Like Laurie, I also think a lot of the academic thesis rot on shelves because they are so boring to read.

She wanted to conduct this study because sweetgrass is ‘’disappearing from its historic locales, so the basket makers had a request for the botanists: to see if the different ways of harvesting might be the cause of Sweetgrass’s leaving.’’

At first, no one took her proposal seriously. The dean ‘’looked over the glasses that has slid down his nose, fixing Laurie with a pointed stare and directing a sidelong glance toward me. ‘’Anyone knows harvesting a plant will damage the population. You’re wasting your time. And I’m afraid I don’t find this whole traditional knowledge thing very convincing’’.

As Kenomagwen writes, ’’this was nearly a rite of passage for women scientists- the condescension, the verbal smackdown from academic authorities, especially if you had the audacity to ground your work in the observations of old women who had probably not finished high school, and talked to plants to boot.’’

One professor ‘’shuffled through the proposal pages and pushed them aside dismissively. I don’t see anything new here for science, he said. There’s not even a theoretical framework’’.

Although the professor says that he doesn’t ‘’see anything new here for science’’, Laurie’s approach to writing a thesis is in fact a novel way of approaching academia altogether.

It’s overwhelming to think of all of the indigenous knowledge who have been lost because it wasn’t considered real knowledge.

Presentation notes

How to do nothing Chapter 1: The Case for Nothing

How to do nothing was written by Jenny Odell and published in April 2019 (A year before the pandemic).

– Odell is a multidisciplinary artist from Oakland California

– She wrote this book not long after Trumps inauguration

Her work involves acts of close observation, whether it’s birdwatching, collecting screen shots, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce.

She is compelled by the ways in which attention (or lack thereof) leads to consequential shifts in perception at the level of the everyday.

– To her, we live in a world where engineered satisfaction is the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience.

In this book, she wants to trace a series of movements:

dropping out, not dissimilar from ‘’dropping out’’ of the 1960s;
A term popularized by Timothy Leary in 1966.

He was an American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs.
Leary believed that LSD showed potential for therapeutic use in psychiatry.
He took LSD and developed a philosophy of mind expansion and personal truth through LSD. Nixon named him “The Most Dangerous Man in America”. Mostly because he is very convincing and what he is proposing is a giant blow to the establishment and great potential for upsetting society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTCxINKT7l4

2) she wants to trace a lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us

3) a movement downward into place.

– She states that unless we are vigilant, the current design of much of our technology will block us every step of the way, deliberately creating false targets for self-reflection, curiosity, and a desire to belong to a community.

Quote from the introduction

’’Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimize, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily. We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands’’

‘’Much of what give’s one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the ‘’off time’’ that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.

1877 Robert Louis Stevenson
Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer.

– He is best known for works such as Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and A Child’s Garden of Verses.

– Stevenson called busyness a ‘’symptom of deficient vitality’’
– He observed ‘’a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scary conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation’’.

– Seneca, stoic roman philosopher in ‘’The shortness of life’’ describes the horror of looking back to see that life has slipped between our fingers.

– Odell compares it to spending an hour of our life on a social platform like Facebook.

– ‘’In an endless cycle where communication is sounded and time is money, there are few moments to slip away and fewer ways to find each other’’

– I think this is interesting to artist as in a way, that’s what a lot of artists are doing – finding the moment to slip away and find each other.

– The surrealist painter, Giorgio de Chirico foresaw a narrowing horizon for activities as ‘’unproductive’’ as observation. He wrote:

’’Given how poorly art survives in a system that only values the Botton line, the stakes are cultural as well. What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest-destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is the impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious. ‘’

So What is ‘’Nothing’’?

– The ‘’nothing’’ she proposes is only nothing from the point of view of capitalist productivity explains the irony of a book called How to do nothing and is a plan of action.

– The point of doing nothing isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.

– Her argument is anticapitalist, especially concerning technologies that encourage a capitalist perception of time, place, self and community.

– She is not anti-technology but opposed to the way that corporate platforms buy and sell our attention, as well as to designs and uses of technology that enshrine a narrow definition of productivity and ignore the local, the carnal, and the poetic.

– She is concerned about the effects of current social media on expression – including the right to express oneself – and its deliberately addictive features.

– To her, doing nothing in the sense of productivity and stopping to listen entails an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change.

– Doing nothing is a kind of reprogramming device as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully. On this level, the practice of doing nothing has several tools to offer us when it comes to resisting the attention economy.

Commercial Social Media

Commercial Social Media is the financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy and distraction.
It is the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live.

– She writes this book in San Francisco and notes how there’s this mix between technology companies and nature.

Sandhill Road

The Epicenter of Venture Capital
– This stretch of roadway serves as the home to firms that have funded some of the largest tech companies in the market. Considered the “Wall Street of the West Coast,” Sand Hill Road is where ambitious founders have connected with funding partners for decades.
Slide 10 Facebook Campus
Facebook’s campus feels almost like a city, where staff commute in on private buses and can access free laundry, meals and snacks.

-In her intro, she begins by describing the hills overlooking Oakland where she currently lives.
– She names the trees surrounding her

Jack London Tree
– Jack London was a writer. He spent his short life—he died at forty— In his writing, which ranged from realist novels to memoirs and science fiction, he became a psychologist and economist of extremity. He was particularly fascinated by the idea of freezing and starving to death. He chose settings where life is hard to sustain—the Arctic, the urban ghetto, the sea, a plague-razed future—and where heroes must defy the odds.

‘’Old Survivor’’ or also called ‘’the Grandfather’’
Too weird and too difficult to proceed easily to the sawmill

– Symbol of a tree that shoes resistance

-The legendary status of this tree has to do not only with his age and unlikely survival. But it’s a mysterious location.

-When you spot Old Survivor, you still can’t get that close because it sits on a steep rocky slope whose ascent would require a serious scramble.
That’s one reason why it survived logging the other reason has to do with its twisted share and its height; ninety-three feet, a runt compared to other old-growth redwoods.
In other words, Old survivor survived largely by appearing useless to loggers

Chapter 1

-Begins with ‘’Wakes up and looks at phone’’ ‘’let’s see what fresh horrors await me on the fresh horror device

The Context in which her book is written after the 2016 election
The constant connection and the difficulty of maintaining any kind of silence or interiority was already problem but after the 2016 election it seemed to take new dimensions.

– After the election, she started noticing how we assault ourselves with news and she is not saying that the solution is to stop listening to the news completely but that we could use a moment to examine the relationship between attention span and the speed of information exchange.

-When she wrote the book, the Ghost ship fire on Oakland has just happened which

Took the lives of many artists and community-minded people on the first floor of a 31st Avenue warehouse in Fruitvale.
Residents of Satya Yuga art collective awoke to a haze of thick smoke and a fast-moving blaze. Some tried to extinguish the growing inferno with water bottles and a fire extinguisher. It was no use.
The intense fire gobbled up a wooden staircase, trapping dozens of people attending an electronic dance party upstairs.

-She grounds her book in a specific space: Rose garden amphitheater built in the 1930s and was specifically chosen because of the natural bowl shape of the land. The space feel physically and acoustically enclosed, remarkably spectate from everything around it.

– Almost got turned into condos in the 70s it took concerned efforts from residents to prevent that from happening

‘’the garden encompassed everything she wanted to cover

– the practice of doing nothing
– the architecture of nothing
the importance of public space
an ethics of care and maintenance

-It’s an Attention holding architecture. She’s observed that everyone moves slows and stop to smell the roses

-Labyrinths operate similarly ‘’enabling a dense infolding of attention’’

– She began going to the garden everyday
– Felt like a survival tactic to do’, nothing ‘ in the garden

– Odell is drawn to these kinds of spaces – libraries, small museums, gardens, columbaria- because of the way they unfold secret and multifarious perspectives even within a fairly small area.

– This unfolding of spatializing or visual doesn’t need to be visual.

Deep listening by Pauline Oliveros

The goal and the reward of deep listening was a heightened sense of receptivity and a reversal of our usual cultural training, which teaches us to quickly analyze and judge more than to simply observe.

To Oliveros, Listening is an inherently empathetic act, requiring receptivity to the intentions of others and the natural world

 investigated new ways to focus attention on music including her concepts of “deep listening” and “sonic awareness”, drawing on metaphors from cybernetics.

Cybernetics is concerned with feedback processes such as steering however they are embodied, including in ecological, technological, biological, cognitive, and social systems, and in the context of practical activities such as designing, learning, managing, conversation, and the practice of cybernetics itself.
Cybernetics’ transdisciplinary character has meant that it intersects with a number of other fields, leading to it having both wide influence and diverse interpretations.

– Gilles Deleuze wrote this in 1985 but still relevant

– ‘’nothing’’ is not a luxury or waste of time rather its a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech.

Press play to video of Black Crowned Night Heron

Bird watching
To her, stopping to listen is like a labyrinthine quality of attention-holding architecture like the rose garden

‘’a cross between a penguin and Paul Giamatti’’ says her bf

to her, bird sounds are life languages and she finds comfort in watching them

– Sometimes inventor and Famous observer

– Called himself a ‘’poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist naturalist etc. etc.,’’

He had an accident which confined him to a darkened room for six weeks during which he was unsure if he would ever see again.

He determined that life was too brief and uncertain and time too precious and that he would devote the rest of his life to a study of the process’’
When he regained his vision, he reevaluated his priorities

– She writes, ’’Most people have, or have known someone who has, gone through period of ‘’removal’’ that fundamentally changed their attitude to the world they returned to.

‘’Sometimes it is occasioned by something terrible, like illness or loss, and sometimes it’s voluntary, but regardless, that pause in time is necessary for change.’’

Privilege of time.

In 1886 in U.S , the Federation of organized trades and labor union requested 8 hours of rest, 8 hours of work and 8 hours of ‘what we will’

‘’Rest, thought, flowers and sunshine ‘’ These are all bodily human things.

– The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries of 8 hours of what we will.

– Under capitalism, there’s no more 8 hours leisure or education, 8 hours of what we will’’

Public spaces vs scripted spaces

– The most obvious difference between public space and others spaces is that you don’t have to buy anything of pretending want to buy to be there

-City Walk exists somewhere in between almost like a movie set where visitors can consume the supposed diversity of an urban environment while enjoying a feeling of safety that results from its actual homogeneity.

– A scripted space

– A space which excludes, directs, supervises, constructs and orchestrates use

– Spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat, since what they produce can’t be measured or exploited or even easily identified

– Just as public spaces give space to ‘’faux spaces’’ we are sold the idea of compromised leisure which is very far from ‘’what we will’’
– And results in the colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency

– Franco ‘’Bifo’’ Berardi

– Marxist theorist

– Ties the labour movement of the 80s to the rise of the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs.

he writes that:

In the past, economic risk was the business of the capitalist, the investor […] Today, though, ‘’We are all capitalists’… and therefore, we all have to take risks… The essential idea is that we should all consider like as an economic venture, as a race where there are winners and losers’’

The boundaries of 8 hours of what we will are now dissolved. We are expected to work all the time.

‘’Every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly check on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘’anything’’[…] it is simply too expensive’’

The gig economy

– Celebrates working yourself to death p.17

The gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic
She gives examples of Fizzer ad

– She then talks about ROWE – Results Work Only Environment which meant to abolish the 8h workday by letting you work whenever from wherever

– Why work sucks and how to fix-it : The results-only Revolution by the creators of ROWE

– As she points out, there’s nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning- and no one should accept this.

Groundedness requires actual ground and direct sensuous reality which is why she gives birdwatching as an example

Observing other animals allows us to feel more grounded

So she suggests #NOMO instead of FOMO

The 1st tool is Self Care as

Audre Lorde in 1980

– Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation and that an act of political welfare.

-‘’self-care’’ has now been appropriated for commercial end’’ and has been wrenched away by activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.

2nd told

– Deep Listening

‘’to hold yourself still until you can perceive what is actually there. ‘
Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.

Listening to our bodies, bodily sense

Questions:

What would ‘’back to the land’’ mean if we understood the land to be where we are right now?

Could augmented reality mean simply putting our phones down?

What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?
Do you usually have FOMO?