Teju Cole: Golden Apple of the Sun and the Impact of the Everyday

What is something that you would classify as neither ‘interesting’ nor ‘boring’?

When do you experience it?

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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?

Bleuts

Aftersun Still

Blue is the warmest colour still

I heeded your recommendation and opted for a digital version of the write up. I apologize for any potential headache my previous submission may have caused. I even downloaded an Image to PDF app in an effort to make it more readable. But I digress, I will transition to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.  

I found a free audio version of Bluets read by Maggie Nelson herself. It was amazing dog walking material. I read The Art of Cruelty a few years back and found it somewhat disturbing but really enjoyable. She is very insightful and the connections she makes are like catnip to me. Sometimes they’re not even connections, but more of a blunt statement of truth or a small nugget wisdom proverb. I still recall a line (not verbatim) from that book that goes: misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic. Another lie reads: so long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world’s most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn’t even begin to engage art’s most exciting provinces. This last one has stuck with me, although I can’t really resolve it in a satisfying way. Maybe that’s why I like her writing and her combination of bluntness, poetry, and wisdom that stimulates the affective realm of my brain in a way I can’t shake. Bluets was similar but was much more poetic, more sexual, and at times more depressing. It felt more personal than The Art of Cruelty and that lent itself to the audio version better. Some quotes that struck a chord are posted below: 

199. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.   

How do you respond to that? I feel trying to unpack that logically makes no sense, though if you’ve lost a family member, or even split ways with a loved one it just makes sense intuitively.  

It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. 

I consider myself to be withdrawn or withheld, which people have told me is strange for a Sagittarius. But I am not truly a person of solitude; I lean very heavily on people I am close with. I must agree with Nelson about the problem of loneliness. Loneliness has an implied rejection to it. Loneliness isn’t by choice. I assume one does not choose to be lonely and instead, loneliness is put upon you. Solitude has reverence; it takes willpower and is a choice made and followed through by those with strength. Solitude is something I cannot do.  

Bluets felt like a stream of consciousness, an affective exploration of the colour blue. Nelson seemingly unpacks the associations of the colour – loneliness and loss, but also longing. Like in Charlotte Wells Aftersun, how the blue of the ocean and the sky became like a hazy memory between father and daughter. 

Unmonumental: 

mon·u·ment 

/ˈmänyəmənt/ 

noun 

• a statue, building, or other structure erected to commemorate a famous or notable person or event. 
• “a simple stone monument marked the nearby crash site” 

I have always wanted to start off a text with a definition. My past English teachers insisted it is too cliché and it’s at the detriment of what follows. This feels like a safe place to try it out. It doesn’t feel great, and I am happy I have gotten it out of my system. 

I think this text does a good job providing a quick/brief historical survey of some of the broad points from the recent history of sculpture. Sculpture is a quick way to my heart and I genuinely enjoy many of its basic elements: surface, form, volume, approach to gravity. Also this text covers a host of artists I admire and look to, such as Cady Noland, David Hammon, Rachel Harrison, etc. From what I can gather, both from the reading and the subsequent conversation, is that the monumental in relation to art has to do with a few qualities: size, mass, material/object choice, content, ideology, and special/object relations. While these are not all the essential qualities, they are the qualities that stand out to me as patterns across the article’s images.  

Another pattern comes through in the haphazard compilation of objects. The approach to craftsmanship has transitioned from a master carpenter or caster to one who sorts through garbage and considers the relations between and among these objects. Rachel Harrison, for example, seems to want to combine objects that baffle the viewer as we try to connect relationships, often leaving us with the conclusion that finding that thread may be futile. And is that her goal? I personally think so.  

“It is as though in an age of hyper-visibility many artists have felt the need to define a private, at times obscure space where complexity is not suppressed and where things are free to be senseless without being forced immediately into catchy slogan”.  

I find my own approach to art making, as well as social existence, is to retain some level of secrecy. I avoid social media platforms, not so much as a political statement, but because it is truly the simplest way I can withhold parts about myself within the digital world. I find this difficult while at school, where we are often asked to divulge so much information, whether it be our biography or artistic decisions we make. Still, the most enjoyable aspect of this program has been the connections made with peers. So on the one hand, relationships require openness and transparency to develop, especially considering the short time frame of the MFA. Yet simultaneously I have an urge to retract and resist relationships that are highly mediated through digital technologies. 

HYPER OBJECTS

For the presentation notes I decided to upload my script. It is a more succinct renidtion of my presentation notes, which in all honesty I cannot seem to locate:

This article is kind of an expose of Timothy Morton themselves. Morton is a hot commodity it seems as of late. I was first exposed to the idea of Hyper objects in my undergrad as there was, maybe still is? An interest in the larger branch of philosophy called Object Oriented Ontology. This has an even larger branch which I will touch on later. But Morton is an interesting character. They seem to blend hard philosophical theory with touches of Affect theory. Their prose is beautiful and flowery, and their ideas are contemporary and dense. That said this article does a good job providing context for Morton and their work.  

Maybe talk briefly about Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology as the over all branch of Morton’s theories: 

Speculative realism is a reaction against Correlationism, which is the idea that we can only know things as they are for us – as they appear to our cognitive faculties – rather than what those things are in-themselves, apart from human perception. 

That is, one can take correlationism to be the idea that humans are special among all other things that exist – after all, everything else has to accommodate itself to human cognitive faculties or else disappear from the bounds of our world. 

Human inquiry has always tried to get at things as they really are, and the idea that we can only know things as they appear to us means that no matter how many times we lick the ontological Tootsie-Pop, we’ll never get to the center of it. 

So a motivating factor for speculative realists from what I can gather is to fight against this notion of correlationism.  

That is, speculative realists seem argue that (somehow) we can know things as they are apart from human perception, and thus can speculate about the reality of those things. 

Explain Hyper objects: ADHD 
Now we move to this idea of Hyper objects, which is Mortons fight in trying to working around this notion of correlationism. Hyper objects are hard to understand 

“The problem with hyperobjects is that you cannot experience one, not completely. You also can’t NOT experience one (the classic double negative). They bump into you, or you bump into them; they bug you, but they are also so massive and complex that you can never fully comprehend what’s bugging you. This oscillation between experiencing and not experiencing cannot be resolved. It’s just the way hyperobjects are.” 

• Un evenly distributed 

• So vast that the human mind has difficulty grasping it 

• As a result our reactions to it are illogical as we are unable to use facts/data/science in a meaningful way 

Explicitly connected to the current climate crisis, hyperobjects have ‘already had a significant impact on human social and psychic space’ and are ‘directly responsible for what [Morton] calls the end of the world’. 

These are very interesting ideas and it is no wonder that people from outside side of achedemia and Philosophy have been interested.  

 

• Olafur Eliasson (Olafor Elee-ason) – Big Installation artist – THE WEATHER PROJECT, 2003 
• Bjork is very interested in the idea of Hyper Objects 
• Dan Boeckner talks about (something) one of his albums off of Hyper Objects 
• The operators – Radiant Dawn 
• Jeff VanderMeer and Dan talk about hyper obejcts in a podcast 
• Jeff calls them (atributes of a hyper object): 

• Timothy Morton teaches or Taught at Rice college where there is a conversation between ecologists and philosphers 

To wrap up this article, I am going to highlight some other key points or even some quotes that I thought were interesting and either shed more light on Morton’s ideas or feedback into the conversation we are going to have. 

Morton says “Reality is real, and right there to experience—but it also escapes complete knowability. One must confront reality with the full realization that you’ll always be missing something in the confrontation.” 

Art can fill this gap of trying to contextualize, visualize, or make known this gap of what Morton is saying is missing between this real and this unknowability. 

Morton refers to hyperobjects as “Strange strangers”—things that are “knowable yet uncanny.” THEY therefore call on us to shift away from trying to master objects and toward learning to respect them in their elusiveness, including the objects that are scary, ugly, artificial, harmful, and disturbing. 

The article gives the example of oil:  “nature at its most elemental; black ooze from the depths of the earth. And yet oil is also the stuff of cars, plastic, the Industrial Revolution; it collapses any distinction between nature and not-nature.” 

Everyday we are “surrounded by oil and its byproducts—the ooze itself, and the infrastructure that transports it, refines it, holds it, and consumes it—and yet, Morton says, we could never really see the hyperobject of capital-“O” Oil: it shapes our lives but is too big to see.”   
Morton argues that by removing the full scope of these objects from our visibility, it allows us to avoid responsibility for their effects.  

 

Relating this to a non-ecological phenomena, it makes me think of the film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes which reveals how the prison is so often kept out of sight and yet there are these community economies that deeply revolve around the prison industry, providing jobs to entire towns while disproportionately incarcerating the population that supports them. But the average person doesn’t see this; its strange and unknowable and allows the general public to disavow any complicity in the prison industrial complex. I think that’s very akin to what Morton was trying to say about oil or hyper objects. 
 
 

 

Critique: Andreas Malm – The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World 

Malm writes that Morton “believes that global warming is a ‘hyperobject’ endowed with agency, and that oil itself is ‘a vastly distributed agent with dark designs of its own’.” However, Malm critiques this perspective and argues “The only sensible thing to do now is to put a stop to the extension of agency. In this warming world, that honour belongs exclusively to those humans who extract, buy, sell and combust fossil fuels, and to those who uphold this circuit, and to those who have committed these acts over the past two centuries: causing the climate system to spin out of control. […] Popular talk of the warming earth as ‘agent of history’ should be discontinued. The dichotomy between human agency and non-human nonagency underpins the whole of climate science”    (Agency: the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power) 
 

The end.

Notes on Unmonumental: The object of the 21st Century

This paper seems to reduce sculpture and its history entirely to the realm of the monument without considering the function of the monument outside of material terms, and without considering the function of sculpture historically in non-material terms. In these conditions, all sculptures become monuments, and all monuments become sculptures. I fail to recognize how this is true and especially in a contemporary context. I understand that this is my personal opinion and that it ultimately comes down to definitions of art. 

I would argue that the statues, especially the ones that have been recently torn down all around the world, are not inherently art. I can understand that technically, their materiality utilizes sculptural processes, and I understand they may have been considered a work of art when they were first erected, however, I believe they have outlasted their artistic lifespan and have now transitioned into the realm of artifact. It is my opinion that all art eventually goes through this process at varying degrees and that most monuments are created as a kind of artifact, to begin with.

Reducing all large-scale sculpture as monumental is equivalent to saying that all foam-carved theater props are considered art. I am resistant to the idea that all things that utilize sculptural techniques are considered within the artistic field of sculpture because implying this seriously undermines the value and function of art generally, and sculpture as an artistic field is and has always been more than the technical application of materials.  

In a world where we are constantly being bombarded by garbage of every kind, from all directions, it makes sense that art would also reflect this, however, I would like to argue that the amount of trash in the world right now is a kind of monument of our time, and the impermanent nature of the work in the text reflects a troubling material relationship we have with the world. I am always happy to witness a contemporary sculptural work with great care and consideration taken both technically and conceptually. I not only believe there is still space for this kind of sculptural work in our contemporary context, but I also consider building something to last in our current cultural climate itself as an act of resistance.

Notes on Awkwardness By Amy Sillman 

The term awkwardness implies a sort of friction, and when experienced, it emphasizes the nature of our assumptions and what is considered appropriate and comfortable. Awkwardness is a tension that acts against dominant modes of perception which can surface in various forms, and has the ability to outline and expose these dominant tendencies. In this article, Awkwardness is used as a term to describe ideas about art that goes beyond the usual clumsiness experienced in daily life. It points towards a larger investigation of the process of creating work and a questioning of what it is we are actually looking for, both formally and conceptually. I relate more to the conceptual process.

There are several metaphors used in this article that reference the digestive processes of the body, the distribution of nutrients, and the transfer of energy, which all correspond metaphorically to the practice of art-making. I believe that the most sincere artists who produce work, do so because they are possessed by an inherent curiosity about the world, and art-making becomes an essential tool of exploration. This practice of curiosity is in itself, from my experience, at most times, an extremely awkward situation. 

To exist in a reality necessarily founded on basic and collective assumptions, there is comfort in the ability to anticipate the future. There is a required trust that your leg will support your body with every step you take if you are to walk freely and without hesitation. My artistic practice, when it is at its best wanders into these uncomfortable spaces where it becomes impossible to anticipate outcomes, and on a day to day, when immersed in a project, it is unlikely that I will have a clear sense of what kind of work is required. This state of being is incredibly stressful, unpredictable, and awkward in the classical sense, but it is also incredibly exhilarating, generative, highly intuitive, and requires a great degree of attentiveness. 

The article describes a zone that is conventionally uncomfortable, yet “feels right” creating a place for art. This is an interesting place because it suggests a realm of infinite possibility, yet it is still intrinsically bound to our psychological and material world. A state of awkwardness can only be awkward if it stands in contrast to the dominant perspective. It is this combination of the potential limitlessness situated within limitations that for me characterizes the work of art.  

How Should Art Reckon with Climate Change

By Zoë Lescaze

1/9 – 2006, very recent popularization of climate change as an issue. Impact of Al Gore film on popularization of climate change? I remember watching as kid in school, marked by the drama of the storytelling. Wasn’t he in front of an audience (~live action, they react? Maybe my own memory reaction).

1/9 – rise of climate ‘conscious’ art production, maybe due to extreme politics maybe extreme weather. Climate ‘conscious’ vs. climate ‘addressing’? Connotations of the more active latter term?

1/9 – Stephanie Smith concerned that imbibing art productions with surface level ethical value, i.e. climate ‘conscious’ makes it easy for us to say that the issue is being addressed. Re. holocaust monument/anti-monument. Climate conscious art productions can take the place/act as a stand-in for our own consciousnesses, making it easy to forget the necessity of seeking meaningful change. The art productions stand in place of meaningful change, while enacting none of it. 

2/9 – “alarmist works that function as little more than propaganda.” Value of changing ideology re. propaganda? Does it work, does it invest in later change. Maybe no. 

2/9 – Library of Water, Roni Horn. Collecting artifacts, the stuff, and bringing it into the exhibition space. Medium is the message etc. Her non-climate addressing intentionality. Glacier graveyard. Or opposite cryo-storage (whatever it’s called), thawing glaciers in contained environments in order to one day freeze them again, instead of freezing people to one day thaw and give them new life in the science fiction future.

2/9 – ‘the resulting works are not demands for immediate action but ones that expand our psychological capacity to act.” Right, investing in future action through foregrounding what is going on. Does Lescaze then believe in these tactics? As she says, the scale has changed compared to the AIDS crisis. The forces at work are even less visible, take place over time-scales larger than our regular imaginative abilities… what works can invoke this time scale? Thing to look for. Think nuclear storage and communicating radiation danger into deep future.

4/9 – Falls of the Kaaterskill. Painting, ‘untouched beauty’ etc. made timeless by the addition of indigenous figure. Painter subtracted the tourist viewing platform. Commodification of lands into views. Tourist views made to be out of time. But they are manufactured.

5/9 – emergence of art addressing pollution and development, 2nd half 20th century.

5/9 – Liminal Lacrimosa, Mary Mattingly. Expression of glacial (in the sense of actually relating particularly to glaciers instead of broadly expressing very large slow moving time scale) in concrete forms through drips and tear catching urns of Rome (why Rome?). What does it mean to be glacial? 

5/9 – regionalization of climate change belief. Climate change as existing in public knowledge or belief based on politics, convenience to existing lifestyle and identity formed/entangled with that lifestyle (maybe not lifestyle, maybe economy. Lifestyle is a recent invention).

5/9 – “collaboration between strangers” as necessary to effectively combat climate change.

5/9 – artists seeking ways to reduce climate impact. Shipping via sea instead of air. Action fostered through shame?

6/9 – impossible contraction, irreconcilable difference between art world and climate action because of the extreme overindulgence of high art collectors and consumers. True, but they’re thankfully not the whole picture. 

6/9 – art fairs as comically over-consumptive. A parody of the works they present? 

6/9 – wait a minute. We’re talking about galleries and collectors here when we talk about shipping. This has nothing to do with the work being made. New Yorker might take for granted the high art market and collectors as the de-facto art world but I do not. Talking about art and talking about collectors are two different things. 

7/9 – have a good look at Robert Adams’ “New West” photo series, 1974.

7/9 – ok ok, museums and their corporate sponsors.

7/9 – individual billionaire sponsors, their immoral actions, and their positions on boards and trusts of museums and galleries. They are apparently actively contributing to taste-making in the arts sector. People watch what these institutions put out. 

8/9 – Lescaze calls for greater outrage towards the sponsors and board members whose corporations are actively contributing to the climate crisis. Agreed. The list she expounds is terrible. But, does this have specifically to do with the creation of works at our level on the Canadian side? To what extent are we able to make work freely while relatively outside of the direct sponsorship of these people? I’m not sure. The internet definitely spreads the influencing power of these institutions. 

9/9 – John Cage slowest possible organ work. Expressing long time scale, forcing us to relate to those a long way down the road from us. Placing a possible future out of a doubt of future at all. An expression of belief that there will be a future, or a challenge to make sure that there is one? A reason added to make sure there is one?

9/9 – for the museum guy, it (the organ) forces a notion of hope, imposes a notion of hope.

Summary/Response: 

The function of artworks to create public consciousness, or to take the place of public consciousness around climate issues. AND, one possible route to expressing climate crisis, i.e. expressions of climate change time-scale that impart a notion of responsibility towards the future.

Though the article jumps between the production of artworks, their expressive and consciousness making capacities, and the world of collectors (seemingly to rightfully point out the terrible people and their corporations that still hold too much sway over boards of galleries and museums), the main function of the article is to map out one possible route of making meaningful additions through artwork to addressing the climate crisis. 

While simplistic works that mirror the crisis by representing forest fires and floods can easily and only replace meaningful reflection on the crisis (in the way of some monuments to things that we would rather not think about), works that express a timescale and necessary cooperation with future unborn generations may actually create a climate-conscious responsibility in the viewer/caretaker. John Cage’s “Organ/ASLSP,” while not specifically presenting the climate crisis or what it looks like, is a work that can only be realized through collaboration with future generations because of its time scale. Maintenance and chord changes of the organ must be undertaken by people of the future. Therefore there must be a future, and therefore we in the present must reflect on how our input influences the possibility or impossibility of that future, whether it will be there at all. Forced collaboration with the future is one way of activating a present caretaking of the conditions that will make that future possible.

 

Dowsing for Remediation with Alana Bartol

By Valérie Frappier

1/3 – Alana asks how we as white settler relate to the land. Especially in ways that are reciprocal. What does she mean by this, reciprocal in the sense that we relate to the land the land relates to us? I.e. how the land changes us and we change the land? Her and I are looking for the same thing insofar as looking for ways in which we relate to the land. I am looking for images and texts which manifest the ways/roots we did not realize held such deep sway in creating our fundamentally extractive relation to the land. Is Alana seeking actual artierlative methods of relating to the land, i.e. non extractive ones?

1/3 – for her dowsing is a reciprocal (as it we both benefit?) act with the land, undoes ways of owning land, the classically western thought projected onto land. LIDAR and magnetic surveys are doing to, rather with working with the land. Especially western ways of acting upon land through cataloging those things we want to take out. 

1/3 – “digging beyond the narrative of compulsory extraction”

1/3 – Alana is jarred by Crowsnest pass interpretive centers as they put on display an untricial attitude towards the content which they describe. This one of the worst mining disasters in Canadian history is presented without mentioning that the mine collapse is most likely due to the creeping of tunnels too close to the surface of the mountain slope. 

1/3 – “what coal mining has meant for the land, water, and more than human species of this ecosystem while considering how this extractive legacy haunts our present.” How does it haunt our human present? I would challenge Bartol to remember the human practitioners of coal mining and other extractive processes—what happens to them? Should this even be a question in the face of the severity of the climate crisis? I might say yes.

1/3 – dowsing as a method of prospecting for coal?

1/3 – “an appropropriate muse” found in Martine de Bertereau (Baroness de Beausoleil) because she is both a pioneering woman (pioneer feminist, feminist pioneer), while also a pioneer of mining. This is appropriate because Bartol has profited from the same capitalism that has been born out of extraction. Contradictions between the feminist and the prospector. Good and evil? The settler (pioneer) and capitalist go hand in hand (a place to challenge her perspective here?).

2/3 – Bartol selects the witch, through de Bertereau (because of her imprisonment for witchcraft), as an embodiment of both capitalism and our ability to find a connection with the earth. A double pronged symbol/muse. “How we fall prey to system of power (the “bad witch”), yet how we also have the ability to heal by rebuilding our connection to the natural world (the “good witch”).

2/3 – “the paradox of our present, clutching to exploitative processes we know have killed and contaminated us.”

2/3 – Bartol collects core samples and rocks from these places. I actually had coal from crowsnest also. How to we as artists use these materials in our work to call to attention the imperative of change away from extractive processes? How do we collect these objects when the impulse to collect and museum-ify objects is a specifically colonial one? Do we create a reciprocal relationship to land when we collect the refuse of extraction to communicate the depth and pervasiveness of our extractive mindset at work, so that we might change it? 

2/3 – review Grassy Mountain Coal project. Was it approved? I believe not. Or still in talks? Could we say that Bartol’s works had any sway over the decisions of local townspeople in Crowsnest? That’s a whole other question. The extent to which post-extractive works are made available to those who live at points and sites of extraction. For whom are these works made? Who actually gets to see them? In what discourse do they actually get taken up? (Think of the satellite images of the tar sands that are purchased and hung in oil exec. offices.)

2/3 – open pit coal mining in the Rockies, the removal of 1976 legislation that banned mining on the eastern slopes of the Rockies (the most visible slopes), and this article failing to mention that very particular fact about that ordinance (the view, the tourist view). Bartol’s exhibition was at the University of Lethbridge–where is this exactly? Also the linking from the exhibition to the webpages of activist, indigenous and community groups, their significant role in the fight.

2/3 – Grassy Mountain was eventually disapproved, the 1976 legislation was put back in place. But that doesn’t mean coal mining doesn’t happen, it’s just kept invisible.

2/3 – inviting visitors to the museum to take packets of native plant seeds to spread over the grassy mountain site. But also remediation being facilitated by non-native plants, i.e. mullein that can actually take heavy metals out of the ground (what happens then when the plant dies? They go straight back into the earth?) Does this point to another layer of irony, we the settlers, the mullein remove the contaminants in the name of remediation, but does it do anything? Can we accomplish anything through our acts of remediation while we thrive on the refuse of extraction—or is the land back (back to native plants) ultimately the better route (land back).

Artworks to look at: orphan well adoption agency—the roles of satire and fiction. The witches hands alongside collected objects/artifacts. 

Teju Cole collates musings on the everyday and an exploration of image context and space in his new book

by ALICE ZOO

3 – Impassable distance in time. The ability of photography to capture a specific time, stamped in the photo or in the metadata of the digital image (or also in our minds as viewers—all photos are a snapshot of time). Tying a photo of anything taken at the same moment as a collective change, occasion, thereby tying the things together.

3 – Diverting attention away from something that he didn’t want to occupy his mind, US elections. The project was first disseminated through instagram (the project is the instagram?). Cole posted every day. The routine attention he gave to this project kept his mind off the election that he didn’t want to think about. The kitchen just happened to be there? Why the kitchen? Why the fruit? Is it specifically the ‘everydayness’ that the kitchen represents? Or other histories?pasts being brought into play here?

4 – “nothing will be moved… the operation of chance” is deciding where the objects are in the room etc. Right but so what? The photograph mediates always, the compositions are dictated more by the angle and framing than by the arrangement of the objects. Nothing random here. Cooking with this project in mind also makes you bring out the nice dinnerware, the ugly old cookpots—whatever is your fancy, there’s an aestheticization at work.

6 – Invoking our imaginative force. The pictures don’t show much, Zoo says they ask us to imagine the cooking, the ‘what else is going on,’ which is what still life can do so well. Still life suggests the wider context, the wider ‘life’ going on around the still objects, the moments and movements that were necessary to land them in the places they now sit. 

8 – ‘de-skilling’ the photographs. Coles pulls away from skill to try to clear the path to emotional access. A more direct connection or appeal to emotion when the images aren’t complicated by skill?

8 – The many ‘yous.’ Cole addresses us through many ‘yous’ in the accompanying essay. Do his yous mirror the ones we imagine at work in the kitchen?

9 – Inwardness as openness. Cole cooking for himself during pandemic-instituted isolation became a way to relate, even offer to the outward, inaccessible kitchens of others. A mirroring of activity to create imagined proximity?

13 – ‘Aliveness in a period of time.’ The inevitable interpolation of life among still life. The clutter of life here evoked through a list of medical reports and symptoms of Cole’s illness while making the project. I guess a simple document of a moment? Radical everydayness as a counter to the monumentality of the elections and the pandemic? Asserting the everyday as a humanizing, relatable force?

13 – Documentation of everydayness creates a calendar of points of contact. As a reader Zoo states that we can ask how Cole’s body is now, where the pots are now, how everything has moved and shifted since the photos were taken. These are actual pots, maybe in his kitchen still, maybe the thrift store, maybe broken. The transience of objects and their fates. Look at them go. Wonder where they are. Archeology. What we can know from a broken pot.

16 – Mass adoption and success of photography. Cole is interested in challenging the easy capture of content through photography. Make the compositions weird, make the content not obvious. A good antidote to the deluge of advertising photography, the very pointed stuff trying to tell us things. 

Timothy Morton’s Hyper-Pandemic

By Morgan Meis

2 – 2013. Morton proposed the hyper-object as the next decider of human life. These hyper-objects are the collective plastic in the ocean, all the carbon in the atmosphere, all the radioactive nuclear waste. According to Morton, these hyper-objects will decide the course of future human lives. I agree? We have to adapt to dealing with them, grappling with their destructive force (as the hyper-objects grow, even as we can’t always measure them, as they loom over us, getting bigger) as the consequences of their existence ripples across our lives. Poisonous things, venom spreading through veins.

2 – Hyperobjects are “massively distributed in time and space.” Time, evoking the fact that they have been made and are growing along in time, hopefully one day shrinking in time also. If we can scrub some carbon out of the atmosphere, will carbon lose its status as a hyperobject? What about other materials that we don’t consider as actively beneficial or poisonous? All the magmatic rock collected on earth. I guess everything has a force. Cultural baggage to all the blades of grass on earth.

2 – ‘fourteen million tons.’ A numbers game. These objects can be measured in mass, but the magnitude of millions of tons is beyond representation or imagination to us. 

2 – Longevity. This stuff will outlive us by many many years. The impossible slowness of nuclear half-lives. That’s a part of the hyper status. 

3 – Ecology as fusion, openness, interpolation of many things… alright entangled. 

4 – Jeans T-shirts Mazda 3 and they. The banalness. A disappearing act. Me too.

4 – Flipping the script and planet of the apes. Nearing climate disaster Morton evokes the weirdness of things, rather than the sublime (like the sublime), to strike awe in us. Awe here is generative of respect, not tame-ability. 

5 – Weird sentences and the awe they inspire. A healthy amount of mystery goes a long way to make people wonder. Making people wonder can generate their respect, and also their disgust. Some things need to be qualified, other things can be poetry.

5 – Cats as transgressors of agrarian private land divide. Borders. We let them go where they want. For Morton this evokes the nature we still wish to be a part of. Let it wander about. Representational of the freedom we wish we had? To move around unimpeded by fences. Even our between yard infrastructure is not prohibitory to cats. They can always jump the fence. Climb stuff. We never wanted to make anti-cat-movement infrastructure, or cats can always get past it anyway?

6 – Ecology everywhere. We live in cities mostly now. Never get out enough to the woods etc. To live ecologically we should see the interrelatedness of all the critters in the city and the materials they thrive on and against.

7 – Oil as transgressor of the boundary between nature and not nature. Comes from the earth but is of industry and plastic. 

8 – O.O.O. , Object Oriented Ontology. Philosophy concerned with all the vastness of stuff colliding and reacting, compressing and spreading. All too big to see at once, always slipping away through time? Everything all at once is way too much to know. This strikes awe. Holy cow there’s so much in a given second. Object oriented ontology as evocative of the terror of time getting away? Car tires on pavement. Waves crashing mid Atlantic. Wow. 

8 – Confronting reality as acknowledging that something will always be missed out of every encounter. There’s always too much. There’s always God out there in the vastness (sublime), but in this case the vastness is the objects that make up our world, not the up and away and heavenly. All right here. Playing Piano for Dad playing inthe background makes this reading very grandiose. I like it. 

8 – “there is no outside—just the entire universe of entities constantly interacting, and you are one of them. 

8 – Does the vastness here described encourage ecologically oriented action? Planet saving action? Or is the vastness pulling us, leaning us into the crash-course, the fatalist drive, the pull of self-destruction, all that’s named inevitable. 

9 – Polyurethane magic. Sick.

9 – Emotional commitment to plastic.

9 – Narrative format of this article is great. The stage setting, the humour allowed for in the in-person visit. The stuff around. The veteran submarine, the yellow sulphur pyramid.

9 – How to cultivate responsible attachment to hyper-objects? In the case of nuclear waste, Morton suggests storing it above ground and visible, so that we might care for it and be responsible. Hiding things away makes us forget, pretends to us the disappearance of their scary forces. They’re still there, only concealed. 

Notes on Queer Mycology By Patricia Kashian

Queer theory is not necessary related to just sex or human relations, but it’s an idea that all relationships are constructed socially. Social constructions may or may not serve us. 

Fungi as organisms that form symbiotic relationships between species challenge our concept of an individual. 

Entire groups of fungi are asexual: multiple reproductive structures of different types within one body. How to organize/categorize them?

How does queer theory enhance scientific knowledge system?

The illusiveness of the scientific goal to be objective. Embrace transparency and the idea that we are deeply intertwined with life with culture and subjectivity.

Mycophobia  (gross/dangerous/do not touch)

Mushrooms are associated with death and decay. Fungi are uniquely implicated in death. Mushrooms are seen as perverse agents of disruption – fundamentally different (LGBTQ experience)

Formation of capitalism – mycophobia – commodifying organisms

Mushrooms are hard to cultivate (untamable creatures!), cannot be controlled or dominated. Fungi is a disruptive pathogen in monoculture (a capitalist tactic of control) to isolate organism from their natural ecologies to maximize their output. However, fungi thrive in monoculture environment (wheat) becoming antithesis for progressive agriculture production. 

Fungi – uncontrollable (underworld). 

People fear what they cannot control. 

Academia – an exclusive environment, where social science is investigated through a particular cultural lens. (western colonial perspective/homogenous understanding of the world)

Classist ideas like Lichens “as peasants of the plants”. (Queer, women, ppl of colour not worthy of being in the space)

Weeds – immigrants (Lou Ferguson)

Science as an equal opportunity. An investigative, methodological tool for everyone, regardless of their institutional domain, class, gender, race etc.

Scientists are to reflect on their power privileges and responsibilities that come with those. 

Scientists need to be in touch with “subjective elements of the work”.

Capitalism attaches incentives to inquiry, drawing people away form integrity. 

Institutional Capitalist Science.

Traditional ecological knowledge – culturally embedded. 

Science and believes can coexist. 

Pseudoscience – investigations without integrity in pursuit of money. 

Fungi are understudied. It’s ok top advocate for conservation of their habitat based on emotional arguments. 

How fungus migration is effected by climate change?

Amanita – considered non-native, but as fungi mostly live in mycelium state under ground, it is unknown if they are not present in the soil in other habitats. 

Conditions that make the mycelium fruit matter.

Fungi are rarely listed as endangered and threatened species. 

Extractive consumerism – deeply linked to consumerism in capitalist culture – engaging with the land through extraction of resources. 

What is the impact of large-scale foraging? Largely unknown (but can be predicted…)

Ethics of care!

How denying things as they are in confining them to limited categories of understanding we assist in their extinction.

Most species of fungi have not been named. 

Taxonomy – naming is not stamping, but including it into discourse. 

Naming as a sign of respect. (harder to harm things/bodies you now by their name)

Hard to advocate for nameless organisms that perish!

Conservation strategies to allow beings to live their lives, regardless of their “usefulness” to humans. The right to exist and flourish extended to more-than-human world. 

“Beyond human worldview as oppose as post-human” – me

Discussion Prompts:

Since mushrooms are mediators and connectors of many structures within one body,

how can a queer mycology theory help you to understand your connection to the community? What symbiotic relationships do you find integral to your practice?

Inspired by mushrooms’ innate ability to resist commodification and control, what subversive strategies do you employ in your practice or which ones would you like to incorporate in the future?

How can the motto of academic environment and science as an equal opportunity be incorporated into sharing knowledge in contemporary art practice? What responsibilities do we have as artists/researchers in accounting for our subjectivity?

Conservation strategies regardless of the organism’s usefulness: 

Think of things/beings/processes considered useless by your immediate community that you are incorporating/advocating/appreciating in your practice.

Fun one:

How the naming convention of “false” in mushrooms perpetuates our capitalist consumer philosophy of other living organisms’ usefulness to us?

What is a false painting/ false sculpture / false writing / false breakfast or false walk?

How does the grammar of “it” doesn’t serve you? 

Come up with your false names for mushrooms and start spreading the word about their unique ways of being.

GAME
HEADS OR TAILS OR DISRESPECTFUL MYCOLOGY

Guess whether the name is a real mushroom or made up one.

Come up with your own false names for mushrooms and start spreading the word about their unique ways of being. 

Notes on How to do Nothing by Jenny O’Dell

This hits home.

……..

I feel so intrinsically reverberated with the ideas and references in this book. Not to mention that the issues of attention economy are hard-felt in our immediate and global community a very acute way. I have been fighting the same battle, thinking, creating, awkwardly taking longer and walking a convoluted path as an unofficial everyday motto in search for sustainability. 

……

Public spaces are under constant capitalist pressure to be “productive”.

Unproductive public spaces are sparse and threatened like artist-run centres. 

Time treated as a commodity, too expensive to do nothing.

Groundedness requires actual ground!

Doing nothing is to hold yourself still, so you can perceive what is actually there. 

Connectivity is a rapid circulation of information among compatible units/agents. Nether of them would change throughout this process.

Sensitivity is difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between different bodies. Both entities might come away from the encounter different than they went in. 

The difference between connectivity and sensitivity is time.

……

Doing nothing is as essential as a pause between the notes. Holding space with time as a connecting tissue between the agents.

Doing nothing is awkward, introspective, reflective, attentive and at times hard. Hard because we are conditioned to productivity. However, doing nothing is not a leisure activity, as leisure can be camouflaged as productivity as well, creating the all-too-well known technique of masquerading the perpetual fresh-squeezed juice machine of value as care.  

…….

Kinship – the glue of assemblages of kin, a symbolic configuration of different kinds of beings maintained though the practice of care. 

Using technology to create a mere access to physical reality. 

Digital art about the physical world.

What does it mean to create digital worlds when the physical is in the process of being destroyed?

Groundbreaking has a sinister literal meaning. 

Survival by appearing useless. 

Perhaps being misunderstood is not such a terrible thing after all. It could be a survival strategy. 

Resistance-in-place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot be easily appropriated by the capitalist value system.

To inhibit somewhat fuzzier or wobblier ideas:

• of maintenance as productivity
• the importance of non-verbal communication
• the mere experience of life as the highest goal

Bioregionalsm is about how life forms are interconnected. 

Citizenship in the bioregion becomes familiarity with the local ecology and commitment to stewardship. 

What economy does to the eco-system, attention economy does to our attention. 

Production destroys the soil, until nothing can grow. It extinguishes one species of thought after another, hastens the erosion of attention. 

Productivity that produces what?

Success? 

Successful in what way, for whom?

 …..

Perhaps it could be fruitful to avoid clear structures in writing as a form of resistance against capitalist, productivity oriented language in favour of walkthrough a forest kind of meandering of an essay.

…..

Choices: escape the world/politics vs remain in place but escape the framework of attention economy.  

Create space of refusal! What does it look like?

What does it take to afford refusal? – learning to redirect and enhance attention. 

Identity: not a personal brand, but an unstable, shapeshifting thing, determine by interactions with others and different kind of places. 

Meaningful ideas require incubation time and space!

Awareness as a seed of responsibility. 

Patterns of attention is how we render reality for ourselves. They have a direct influence on what we feel is possible at any given time. 

Shit happens by Amy Sillman

How form can match the feeling or a condition – of funny, homely, lonely, ill-fitting, strange, clumsy things that feel right.

The dissatisfaction with all things perceived as beautiful, curated, perfected and resolved comes from the same place as the satisfaction with all things that reflect our experience as a breathing, walking, seeping body. Humanity is a wrong word. More like “all the shit that happens all the time, everywhere, now and then” and “this is best it can do, but it happens to be the best”.

Awkward lives in that space. It feeds on our desire to be honest with ourselves, extending it outward. (Outkward?) How far? You will see. You may wish to control it, but fortunately for you, it merely controls your urges to be right. And maybe you are, but perhaps the cake of right needs one unexpected flavour that will take it from the dignified desert to a conversation starter.

the subject no longer entirely in control of the plot, representation peeled away from realness.

However, many figured this out long ago and are relentlessly pursuing the awkward for the perceived authenticity that it attracts. Those are often easy to spot as the trying-to-hard conundrums and wannabe calculations. 

The awkward is an untameable beast that is best kept wild. It will always find something to feed on.

a form that ‘feels right’ without knowing why

Awkward/honest but unbeknown. 

the process of trying to figure something out while doing it.

Awkward as backward but also against the established order. Even if that order has been established by yourself. Awkward as a trickster revealing you under the composed you.

people use ‘awkward!’ after a faux pas, a moment of tension between the ideal and the real, where what’s supposed to happen goes awry.

Recent trends for all things ugly, awkward and backwards say a few things about how we are feeling with the current order of things. The image has not evaded this trend, it may actually started it. Maybe the internet? As a place for all things clumsy and revealing, maybe less so now, then in the 90’s. Perhaps awkward is timeless.

Finding a form is building these feelings (in this case, dissatisfaction, embarrassment and doubt) into a substance.

The urge for authenticity is at its high. And so the search begins. Perhaps the most satisfying part of this search is its uncanny space of occurrence. It certainly can happen in the studio, deep into the making, but it can also resurface elsewhere. Often the event is documented (maybe even posted for the world to see), like a discovery of a new specimen and the excitement that it brings. The awkward is now firmly categorized and evaluated. 

I am tired of seeing the awkward in this sad state. I much rather see the reflection of awkward, the glimpse of a story, visually undocumented, my brain filling in the gaps. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the curated awkward in the form; there, what I see, is a documentation of an encounter with the wild beats that it is. A tense standoff where the animal wins. 

Unmonumental:
The Object in the 21st Century

Ask the Dust by Massimiliano Gioni

The disappearance of the pedestal as it gets absorbed by the sculpture itself.

Sculpture entertained more than a dangerous liaison with the realm of death: it was a substitute for life, a from of placebo.

Works that are seeping and oozing the precarious fragments of old monumentality while occupying a modest space of private proximity.

Resilient urban-trash flora growing steady against the hostile environment they are very comfortable inhabiting.

Metaphoric state of paranoia and internal conflict between acts of revolt and retreat to personal privacy.

Third world Arte povera.

Objects that “fight for your attention.” The chaos has subsided by now. The need for visual clarity is more pronounced as we are bombarded with Information and visual stimuli. 

Anti-heroic art ridicules the old canons while beheading its authority by eliminating it completely.

Against the very idea of permanence. Proclamation of fragility while emphasizing mortality and passing of time. The themes of memory and nostalgia with fragments of the stories lost in time and almost confused with its history.

A deconstructed modernism. Revised, fragmented, unclothed and presented back in its vulnerable state, private and ridden of its authoritarian status.

The tendency to retreat inside while a more private view is maximized in the attention to detail and a micro perspective.

Multi-dimensionality and layers of complexities in the literal form overlap with undertones of civilization doom and exhausted society from their own devices. Critique of the global economy that is told with a tired voice, not defeated but scratchy from repeating itself. 

While radically different in the formal terms, the grammar of minimalist sculpture is complementary to the logic governing earthworks; it aims to attain a sense of timelessness. Assertive, almost inevitable, and thus monumental. 

These works exude transitionality and uncertainty.

A lot has happened since Massimiliano Gioni wrote the piece, since the Unmonumental exhibition. Fifteen years of acceleration in the direction of the immediate crisis on a global scale. The radical shift that the works achieved from the legacy of monumental sculpture are now grown into a different kind of beast. 

The installation art today is still grappling with the historical connections it has to monumental sculpture and the ideas of permanence, but it has taken on a fundamentally different ephemeral quality. It’s painstrickenly close to disseminating into the corporeal. Not all, but its feet have been dipping in it for quite some time now. Contemplating its own reflection, it too has concluded that being timeless is more than outdated it is dangerous. The irony is that the metaverse clings uncomfortably close to the old hierarchies of the cannon, with much of the nuances seeming to evade that space. Perhaps like an enfant terrible, it is still playing with guns and horses in the wild west of the ephemera. 

A monumental scale of our current pollution problem.

Huyghe’s work is permeating the physical and digital space, effecting one another. The island has been scanned to become the environment of a live simulation. It is simultaneously an island and what that island could be in an alternate reality. A fictional narrative gives a set of rules and prompts, played out by an artificial neural network that generates unpredictable mutations in the simulation, of what is present on the island, animate or inanimate, sounds or things, such as trees, trash, animals, or humans.

Occasionally, mutations exit the simulation and manifest physically on the island where they sustain or decay, contaminating the existing reality with an unknown possibility of itself, progressively modifying the island’s appearance.

A mirror to our current relationships with physical and digital spaces. But who can do it better, the neural network or humans? Both have a capacity for pulling their blankets on themselves. A very dark, sinister scenario is looming while we play the game.

Installation art now seems to have one foot dangling over the new propositional realities and the other submerged into the depths of connectivity, our past, and an immediate monumental crisis—no pedestals can withstand such a heavy burden. 

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Seeing a colour

Eye is a recorder, with or without will.

Vision is a liar; one cannot trust it as it always suspects your emotions. 

Sound is much more honest, except honesty is the last thing on my mind.

Words do not look like things they designate – Maurice Merleau–Ponty

Witnessing a colour change is an event. A change, a chemical reaction, a mental and physical state of being that decided to transcend outwards its hopes and dreams of becoming the other. Some colours are very persistent and, like a progression to any argument, require a heavy spoonful of reason to be swayed to the other side. So what can sustain a colour and convince it to change?

Life-long obsessions:

Fire Red – the one sometimes called tomato red or orange-red or fire-red; a moment before you know, already knowing by the feeling; a childish urgency; an attention-freak of a dancer; a deeply powerful part of yourself; an annoying fast talker; magnetic persistency with mercurial tendencies; one that got away

Warm Yellow – buttery, almost honey sun-licked self-indulgence; a buzzing energy

Terracotta Red – earthy tone that leaves a spicy residue; a copper flare; an oxidized, lived-in intense moment of connection-air and material dance

Deeply Intense Blue or Infantile-light Blue and Fire-Red combinations – like a couple that has been together for a long time

Thinking about colours happens simultaneously as I think of materials – why one and not the other? Biased opinions and feelings become physical spatial implications. Often, when I work with found materials, I honour the colour it comes to me; of course, I choose the object based on the particular texture and colour, to begin with. Needless to say, colour, its origin, change or state of being is very important to me. 

For a while, I realized I was childish enough not to like a certain colour. Akin to hating a particular type of wine. The grape has less to do with it than the caring for methods, the bottled-up feelings you were enveloped in that day or the mood of the landscape on the day of harvest. 

I am learning to recognize my hidden love for green. It was strange that for a nature lover, I never thought to include that colour in my preferences. Upon closer inspection, I realized that this love for green had been the type of relationship I take entirely for granted. Akin to an attentive lover, whose attention with time becomes an everyday occurrence, I, too, have taken my relationship with green to be a given of sorts. My attraction to it started to grow once I became painfully aware of this phenomenon. How predictable of an all-things-red colour lover. 

Colour as a state of being  

I am less interested in a singularity of a human-made object than in a system. The system of connecting the dots, the part as a whole, the interdependencies, reciprocities and incompatibilities. Art objects – a system of powerfully useful sentimentality? Politics of excessive tenderness.

Saturation – satisfaction (as one cannot absorb or take any more drop, fullness)

Colour is information, the overload of which is a dangerous path that leads to resistance. For better or worse.

Children prefer warmer colours (red), they grow older into cooler tones (blue). 

Children are violent and I am childishly addicted.

Something has to be said about cultural preferences and the implications of colour. I do recognize my love for red has partially sprouted from my culture. The deep love and problematics of it all. Where does the other part come from? Do you know where your love comes from? The first one that alters you from the inside?

When something ceases to bring you pleasure, you cannot talk the pleasure back to it. 

What is left once the pleasure leaves? A different kind of conversation. 

Gatherer, not an owner. 

Look for Jason Logan, Toronto Ink Company

Jason Logan’s approach to working with colour is less about its usefulness and more about creating a relationship with it. Discovery, questions, impossible dreams and possible connections. Everything can be a start of a colour. What do you find? What questions one has for it? What colour can be made from a rock? A car part? A nail? A piece of wood? He talks about how nothing is impossible, and a curious question can lead to something unexpected, long-lasting or ever-changing, ephemeral and fragile. Is there a colour that doesn’t change? 

Colour as poetry, contextual and political. 

Owning is about taking space, and gathering is getting to know the space. So my practice is a never-ending getting-to-know-a collection of questions.

A word.

Nonetheless – curious word. 

Synonym: Also but, although, however, still

Perhaps we could use more nonetheless and less of the notnonetheless/somethemore/manyanyway

Anton Alvares

His practice focuses on the design of systems and the creation of tools and processes for producing sculptural objects and architecture.

Blue is not a colour, it’s a state, a very convincing one. 

How much of that illusion is a cultural phenomenon and how much is it an embodied experience and its aftermath? 

When does the colour begin, and where does the reflection of colour start?

Nonetheless, within any blue, there is always a bit of red. S

Does an album of written thought perform a similar displacement or replacement of the original thought? But if the writing does displace the idea, if it extrudes it like a lump of wet clay through the hole, where does the excess go? – Chogyam Trungpa

Sometimes it goes into a sound of an utterance, wet, slinky, emotional and incoherent, raw and unedited, captured or left wild roaming the air and filling (feeling) the space around it.

Facing the monumental

The talk given by Rebecca Belmore and Wanda Nanibush discusses the works in Belmore’s exhibition, Facing the Monumental curated by Nanibush, first shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2018. In this discussion, they work their way through many of the works included in the exhibition. They talk about Belmore’s affinity and intuition for materials especially looking at how clay shows up in this exhibition. The below work is an image from the performance “Clay on Stone”. Nanibush discusses how with this exhibition they wanted to show Belmore’s more material and sculptural practice. This side of her work is less well-known than her performance practice. They tell stories about the processes and origins of the work, however, the bulk of the talk discusses the political content of the work. Belmore’s work is highly concerned with indiginous, class, racial, and environmental politics. All of these political concerns overlap in Belmore’s work, intermingeled with layers of reference to history, contemporary politics, and art. 

Belmore’s work has always stood out to me for its ability to be overtly political but not didactic. She is able to speak with a political voice but maintains an ineffability and poetics that escapes most highly political artists. I find artists who make an attempt to be politically direct often lose what makes an artwork exciting to me. That is the question, the openness to interpretation and expansive understanding. They fall into a prescriptive one-to-one translation of information into form. The Michael Murphy piece Truth to Power(below) is an example of this pitfall. Reading something like, “there are too many guns in America” or “America has a gun problem”. Belmore on the other hand while still being overtly political maintains layers of meaning and reference that give her work depth and allows us as an audience to find interest/ meaning from a wider range of vantage points. In her work Tower, one of the works in Facing the Monumental, she addresses homelessness, displacement, and gentrification. These themes are signified by many of the same strategies as Truth to Power. In both works, a found object acts as a signifier: guns to gun violence and shopping carts to homelessness. The objects are arranged in a way that also acts as a signifier: the shape of the US map for the US and a vertical stack for an apartment tower or a more general upward building. Even in this simplistic reading of Tower, the nuance is apparent in its far less direct correlation of signifier to signified, leaving more room for alternate readings. Unlike Truth to Power Belmore’s work continues to layer meaning and reference that creates room for a more expansive understanding By looking at the clay component of the work one can see how this work’s reading could shifted to dealing with violence against women. The color, shape, and orientation of the clay have a distinctly phallic shape. In Facing the Monumental, Tower was installed right next to Tarpaulin a work that is also made out of unfired clay and also deals with homelessness and displacement. The recessive and somewhat vaginal form of Tarpaulin counters the upright of the built structure of Tower. This combination could be read as a critique of systematic violence against women by highlighting the patriarchal nature of the structures that cause homelessness. What is exciting for me about these works is the fact that this is only one of many possible readings of this work. In fact, this is really just a reading that I pulled out of a hat and not one that I have felt when seeing the work. These works when shown separately can be read very differently. My personal reading of the work is much more centered around the invisibility of the humanity of the homeless, and a much looser idea of absence, presence, and dislocation. Belmore’s work allows for this breadth of understanding while maintaining its footing in a specific political issue.

Shit happens by Amy Silman

1. Something that “feels right” not a pursuit of beauty, but not captured by “ugly” something that is “Awkward,” something…
   Ineffability and intuition and feeling and evocation

2. Amy Silman’s article shit happens uses the imagery of excretion and ugliness to describe an art that hates beauty but is not ugly, she calls this awkward. She says that she is “searching rather earnestly for something I[she] don’t quite know”. I see here a connection to the literary Weird, also something close to the sublime. Again not quite the sublime but it’s kin, something found in the unknown that we as artists can sink endlessly into. The Weird comes to me through this text in the overlay of the familiar and the unfamiliar. It is not a liminal space, not a space between the known and the unknown but where they overlap, It is an “awkward” unknowing of the known. Mark Fisher in the “Weird and the Eerie” talks about the Weird as being found in this friction between the known(real) and the unknown(weird) and I think that the “Feels right” that Amy Silman and her friends are looking for are also found in this overlap.
3.  

3. I wonder if Amy Silman likes horror movies or books. The visceral the excretory the funny and the “thing that is familiar and not familiar”. The Thing, a movie that is about the familiar no longer being familiar, it is also about the visceral and the excretory. Is The Thing about what it is like to be an artist? no probably not. But let’s entertain the idea. For context: creature awakened in ice, infects the population of the remote camp, can’t tell who the monster is, gore and chaos ensue, trust is broken and none escape. Maybe in no one escaping The Thing, they never find the “just right” which would mean that The Thing is not about what it is to be an artist, but what it is to fail as an artist. 
4. Kafka and abstraction, trying to figure it out while doing it. Abstract painting as Amy Silman would have us believe is a process of trying to figure out how to do it while doing it. I think that waking up as a bug one day would also require a lot of figuring out. I am neither a bug nor an abstract painter and I wonder which I would find to be more awkward. Which would I more speedily figure out? The body changes all the time, though admittedly not so drastically or inconveniently as waking up a gigantic insect. However, might my transformation from a child have prepared me in some way for my metamorphosis into an insect? In Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa’s experience of being a bug is not entirely dissimilar from some of the more severe bouts of childhood akwardness. Would some of my experiences as a child have transferable skills to be a bug?

How Should Art Reckon With Climate Change?

This article in the New York Times written By Zoë Lescaze takes on the very large question of how art is to deal with climate change. The article first addresses the need for this kind of reckoning and goes on to dismiss the didactic and alarmist ways that this has been done siting the example of an iceberg melting in a town square. Probably referring to Ice Watch, by Olafur Eliasson and geologist Minik Rosing. The installation consisted of a circle of icebergs with a circumference of twenty meters that was installed at the Place du Panthéon during a Climate Change Conference. The article goes on to say that this functions as little more than propaganda and does not address the scope of the problem of climate change. This is probably true, however, I would say that there is a need for this, as well as the more eloquent and nuanced work that the article goes on to address. There needs to be constant alarm. Staying with Eliasson’s example, while this work is unable to address the scope of an issue as huge and nebulous as climate change very few things can achieve anything approaching that. The simple shorthand of the iceberg as a signifier of climate change still has a place, we need alarms.

The article goes on to discuss the relationships between depictions of landscape and our imaginings of landscape siting the sublime romantic paintings and contrasting them with more recent depictions of industry’s encroachment into the landscape. The article also addresses the contradictions of a contemporary art world that is trying to address climate change while being very environmentally unfriendly. Art fairs and shipments are extremely wasteful and have a large carbon footprint. Also looking at the contradictions in the funding of art institutions coming from BP and other major polluters. I think that criticism of funding this is more valid as it is a much greater contradiction than the use of airfare and inefficient shipping practices. For one this isn’t even an art-specific problem it is part of our much larger complicity in the systems that are driving climate change, systems that we as individuals and even professionals cannot functionally escape. There are great reasons to be critical of art fairs and it is essential to reduce waste and carbon emissions, however, the onus must always be on the major polluters, governments, and large corporations we need to use resources to combat the organizations who are doing the vast majority of the polluting. To squabble over personal responsibility plays into the hands of the organizations changing the climate.

Ending on John Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP, a concert on an organ begun in 2001 that will run for 640 years the article leaves us with a piece of work that is better than any other that I have seen, it anchors this discussion both of art and climate change and climate change more generally in the wider context of intergenerational time. It does not need to make a specific external reference it creates a microcosm of long-term thinking and responsibility. We cannot help but think of this existential threat of climate change, it is both humbling and hopeful.  

Dowsing for Remediation

In this article, Dowsing for Remediation, with Alana Bartol, written by Valérie Frappier, the artist Describes a body of work that invesitigates the historical resource extraction in the south of the alberta rocky mountains. 

The absence of mention of the ongoing coal mining only a handful of kilometers away struck me as an unaccoutable omission. It is hard to imagine that Bartol was unaware of these gargantuan open pit mines just over the BC border. One of the issuses that I see with this omission is that the focus on closed mines and the looming spectacle of a renewal of mining in the region. This makes this seem like this is an issue of reckoning with our past, ignoring the ongoing extraction that is happening in the very next valley. They talk about sacrifice zones, my conjecture here is that the moratorium on coal mining in the alberta rocky mountains made room in the alberta public’s conscience  for the sacrifice zone in the north namely the tar sands and other open pit mines. They were able to impose tis moratorium whil not even stoping open pit mining in the region of the southern rocky mountains. Just over the alberta border in very much the same region the mining continues, separated by whatis little more than a bureaucratic line in the coal. In a sort of slight of hand the governments of BC, Alberta, and Canada were able to fain consevation while continuing destructive extraction practices. 

The content of Bartols work seems to focus largely around reclamation as she says “You can’t restore soil after you remove it. You can’t restore a mountain after you literally take the top off it. And you’re not going to restore the vegetation. You’re not going to restore all the complexity of that landscape.” I have worked in the active mines in BC doing Reclemation for years, personaly planting tens of thousands native shrubs, trees, and grasses. There is even a strong possibly that this reclamation work was happening at the same time that Bartol was in the next valley. Working in these mines(five of them) I saw this extraction first hand working everyday in the mines I heard the daily blasts and watched the trucks haul coal freshly ripped out of the ground. Bartol is right these places will not be returned to their natural state. However, i think it would important to be aware of address the ongoing work that is beeing done. The reclamation work that Teck is doing on their mine sights is at times comically pathetic, literally planting little tufts of grass on a talings pile the size of a mountain and where a mountain once stood. I think that these reclamation actions seem in a large part a way of to permit to continue destuctive extraction processes. To rehabilitate tecks reputation more than the landscape. How ever there are people who really care and who are trying to bring the landscape back to a place where it can effectively function as an ecasysem. These reclamation efforts, some of them extremely similar to bartols own, are fraught with contradiction but are also of extreme relevance to bartols work.