Art on the Go

". . . because biennial curating , trust me, is not a big deal.  It's a skill set.  Like art criticism, it's a support system in the service of contemporary art, which is not that big a deal, either.  Contemporary art is a goody bag of  what's fashionable tonight, local 'cultural production' auditioning to become history.  You can argue for it but you cannot argue from it, since contemporary art lacks the sustained track record that invests art with historical authority." - Dave Hickey from July/August's Art in America

I read this article today, early, and it reconfirmed some things for me.  However, I think so many things that today's belief that is reconfirmed will be tomorrow debunked.  Doesn't matter though, today I will live by this principle and it will guide my actions, and today looks like an art making day, so the quote will serve me well.

I am an art teacher, and as of next semester, a philosophy teacher as well.  I am taking the summer not to make extra money, but to think and relax and paint and study and get a little preparation work done for next semester.  I go into my art classroom two or three times a week to get a handle on the printmaking materials.  I studied printmaking at a local small museum last week and let my normal themes of light and smoke and clouds to guide my imagery for the experimental print.  Today I will go in and print it.  Since we have textile ink I thought I would pick up a cheap t shirt and have a go at printing my image on a t shirt as well.  It is part experiment but given the above quote and my belief that contemporary post modern art should transcend boundaries of the painting plane and gallery, printing on a t shirt is also a way of forcing contemporary art to exist in the real world.  Jenny Holzer did this with her t shirt that I reproduced above.  I have a good friend who is a tattoo artist and he makes a similar comment about tattoos.  They are personal art, art for the person who has them and no one else.  A tattoo cannot be bought or sold, it is forever with the wearer as a decoration for others to enjoy and as a piece of art the wearer can enjoy whenever the mood strikes him or her.  A tattoo is a work of art that cannot possible be present in the gallery (well it can and I had an idea for this once), a tattoo embodies a principle of post modern art.  I noticed that even tattoo magazines are calling people who are series about having tattoos collectors.

Since contemporary art is striving to become history, but it cannot because history is long and the contemporary period is short, let us not worry about the art we make.  Just make it and put it in as many places as you can, let history decide if its worth remembering.  It won't really matter to us by the time history has decided, at the very least we'll be too old to care.

Truth is LIghtweight

Knowledge is light, or is like light, it helps you to see things more clearly. I have been reading the TOK materials in preparation for my course that I am teaching this fall and have decided that to begin with I will write a little bit for myself in order to get my thoughts together.
I was thinking about simplicity and how in some circumstances I would need to simplify things so that sixteen year olds would be able to understand it. However, I question whether or not this would be a corruption of the original. The author didn’t intend for people to understand in simple terms, they wrote so that they would be best understood in their terms.
I like this question, it entertains me because it is a subject that I try to live. Simple is good. Be direct, be understood, make it efficient and get the point across so that many can understand what is being said. My painting is like that, it takes a form, it simplifies it, it abstracts it because in the abstraction we can see a truer form, we no longer question the idea of what it is, we appreciate the object for its color and lines and shapes and we lose the attachment to it being sunlight or leaves or the moon or what have you.
Recently I was visiting my parents in the USA and I was struck with the amount of stuff they had lying about their homes. My mother was more akin to the useful situation, the stuff littering the table tops and shelves were functional; a can for cat treats and dog treats for example. Even the walls, over-filled with photographs, are functional because her husband is photographer. Nonetheless there are thousands of things everywhere. My father’s house was even more intense albeit slightly different. His house contains even more bric-a-brac but it is largely decorative. Things for looking at and filling up shelves. A teddy bear that has different costumes which him and his wife change with the seasons. Photos, posters, sculptures all designed for entertainment of one form or another. Both of them are intense gardeners and their small plot of land requires constant attention. Good thing both of them work part time, it allow for the daily necessities of taking care of the land and house. Just now while reflecting on it I am wondering who keeps up with the dusting. The end result is a fine view, especially in regards to their lawn and flower beds, it blooms from late February to November.
But for some reason I am put off by all of this. When I first met my wife I was similar to my parents and being profoundly interested in art history and stories and culture and what not, my apartment was equally as cluttered as my parents’ houses. China was a dream come true for me with its dirt markets and antiques: Really the antiques are all fake but who cares, I am not collecting for value I am collecting for pleasure and entertainment. And I picked up loads of things of all shapes and sizes. When my girlfriend (now my wife) moved in she was very anti-clutter though she said little, until we decided upon moving from my apartment to one we shared, and then the hatchet came down cutting away loads of great stuff I had collected. I resisted and fought and whined and cried but over time I cam to see something very valuable about anti-stuff. It’s clean, it’s easy and the true essence of a room is revealed, kind of. I could never be in a totally sterile anti-stuff sort of place. I place out one things or two and the lack of other things calls attention to those that are out. A small tableau of a Guan Yin statue and two Tara figures (female Buddhas to put it simply). I still have a minor collection of things but it rotates around the house. I find this preferable because when everything is out, then you notice nothing (unless you’ve been smoking marijuana) but when things change and there is only a thing or two about, then you appreciate those things while they are in your presence , knowing that they won’t be there forever and it may be a full year before I look upon them again. I was studying Japanese Tea Houses and I came upon a story of a tea master that cut down all the flowers from all the trees and shrubs around the tea house so that the visitor would notice the lone flower in a vase on the table.
This is what I am thinking about when it comes to presenting material for the Theory of Knowledge course. How can I cut away the flowers so that my students are seeing the one lone flower in the vase and appreciating it for what it is. From teaching English I have had this problem, there is so much that needs to be understood in a given article that the casual English learner will miss the point due to the effort it takes to understand the article. There is a point of view exercise that is not entirely formulated in my head but I can make work. In a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal there is an article about the recent unrest in western China along with an Op-Ed piece from the leader of one of the organizations. I need now to find a Chinese point of view article to complete the circle. Then break the students into groups each reading one aspect of the piece and reporting to the class what is going on. The students can see the difference and also realize it is a point of view question. The real question is how to do this simply.
Knowledge is like this, philosophers are either vague or very thick. “The one comes from the void and the two comes from the one” we understand yet we cannot pinpoint what it means. Or “We may and must, therefore, consider all the trials heretofore made as not having taken place for establishing metaphysics dogmatically - for what in one or other in them is analytical, namely mere autonomy of conceptions which dwell in our reason a priori, is not at all an end but simply a preliminary . . . “ and so on which we understand while we read it but are pains to explain it five minutes later. Both of these methods don’t create a knowledge of literature, they create a knowledge of understanding. We know because at some point it was exposed to us and the idea stays deeply embedded in our thinking and influences our decision making, though we may not be able to locate where the thinking came from.
How do we make this simple and clear and direct and understandable at the same time? I believe this is what my life has been about really, why I am so quiet, and rarely go on and on about philosophical issues, even though I love to. I limit myself to certain subjects. Also I am tired of talking about the same old shit and my quietness may be interpreted as shyness or ignorance or social ineptness, which it all probably is. I walk the life, not talk the life. But that is no longer acceptable because now it is my job to teach it, to embody it and get my students to understand in a few words and inspire them to write many. When I sort it out, I will let you know.