A very literal piece that exemplified ideas of ontology was the piece by Alex Hubbard titled “Annotated Plan for an Evacuation” in which he continuously changes the image of the car for the view of the camera which is installed to face and record the side of the vehicle.  The nonsensical purposefulness in his actions reads as an important mission.  His actions are quick, inattentive and have the feeling of desperation rather than the methodological practice that defines so much of the rest of the exhibition.  Yet the way he nullifies a previous action by instigating a new one interestingly illustrates a sudo-ontology that mocks the thoughtfulness of rest of the biennial. The piece seems to exemplify the desperation of the contemporary art climate with respect to the lack of a critical approach  to making contemporary work.  It goes further by suggesting an endless set of possibilities in which the actions of the artist cease to matter and the end is the same as the beginning, simply a different shape and color.

Speaking literally of the blurring of beginning and end, I was particularly taken with Kerry Tribe’s looped 16mm film installation entitled “HM”. This was one of the most impressively impeccable biennial pieces I have seen. The beginning and end of this film cease to exist, which is satisfying for a mid-museum viewing audience.  The film is approximately 18 minutes of running time, which normally I would argue is much too long for a video installation in a group exhibition of this size, but the subject matter was poignant and the longer I watched the more I became enchanted with the relevance of the installation. (I use installation here to describe the use of the two projectors looping the same film with a 20 second delay between them.)  The piece is autonomous in its current state and sets itself apart from the rest of the show by using an unfamiliar subject to construct an ontological system founded in conceptualism.  However, where this piece so elegantly extends beyond “One and Three Chairs” is in the experience of the viewer.  The piece is humane and relevant to anyone. The story of HM is important and we feel remorse and curiosity. As humans we experience the phenomenon of the clip we just saw reappearing twenty seconds later in the second projected frame while we continue to try to watch the story divulge in the first.  The artist took advantage of all opportunities spanning the eighteen minutes with occasions of synchronicity wherein each projected frame and all correlating sounds would coalesce into one moment.

The piece I have mentally awarded for most interesting recorded humanism was Sharon Hays’ “Parole”.  With a lot to unpack in terms of historical references, I am somewhat hesitant to recognize the piece as purely humanist.  Yet, obviously, the work considers the relevance of social unrest taking place over one-hundred years ago to what takes place today.  The piece feels somewhat clumsy with regard to the installation.  The looped video travels at different speeds throughout the four surrounding screens which keeps the viewer nicely aware of the confusion.  Yet, the confusion seems to be a side product as it doesn’t bring the viewer further into the subject matter.  Installation aside, there were moments in the film, interactions between actors and participants, that were incredibly well choreographed.  An androgynous red head with soft brown eyes holds a microphone to the mouth of someone reading Anna Rüling’s 1904 speech and stares intensely at the reader’s face.  As the reading goes on, the gaze becomes more intense and almost pained until we, the audience behind the camera, feel that the tension must break, there must be a release somewhere.  But there is never  release.  The sequence goes on into the next scene and we turn away to look at a different screen, now emitting the predominant voice.

Whitney Webpage:

http://www.whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial

Reading this article was difficult in it’s length…(not more than the equivalent of a page or so), but once I was wrapped up in the irony of that I was able to continue without frustration.

I have been wondering lately what my problem is when sitting down to finish something becomes incredibly difficult.  Just getting into the mind frame to get something finished is a task in itself (writing this blog entry is a grueling process that feels wasteful and inefficient).

So many years ago, when I was ignorant of current events, contemporary culture and the internet, I would spend hours making and writing scenarios.  Creating things was natural and magical and the day seemed to have endless hours  in which to discover new avenues of stories.  Now, it seems that what I have is a photograph of those memories that I am continually trying to reanimate.  As James Old’s describes the “plasticity” of our brains, I belief mine has, to confirm my agreement with the article,  adopted the practice that efficiently is the best way to obtain and relay information, thus creating for myself a crippling problem in my work.  My work has never acquired an efficient, clever flavor.  The most successful pieces have always undergone long hours of reflection and reevaluation to  create a work that is thematically and theoretically rich with content.  In recent frustrations with graduate school, I disregarded understanding the value those long hours of reflection and research give to form (partly because of an academic environment that didn’t seem to encourage this).  Now, having dropped out of school, I am in an interesting position with lots of time to research and learn whatever I please, but with the added pressure of getting some kind of income and preparing to apply to new schools for the upcoming year.  The clocks are still ticking…

I wonder at what point do we really try to return to the overwhelming joy of really digesting a interesting piece of literature or theory and give ourselves ample time to reconstruct that process.

My anxieties about the failing economy and my current situation being in flux have not been significantly reduced at all by trying to get bargain buys at the grocery store.  Today, after closing a bank account to help pay for the food, I was shortchanged at King Supers when I didn’t read the fine print on the big yellow discount sign. I was savvy enough to notice that the two for one discount only applied to meet that was $4.99 or more.  Seeing that the 8% reduced fat section of these discounted meets had no packages of $4.99 or more, I picked one from the section right next door—same brand, same meet, accept the quality of the meet was only 4% reduced fat.  When I had gone through the checkout and looked at my receipt I noticed that I had indeed paid for both packages of meet at full price.  I stood there for a bit looking at my receipt and must have looked bewildered because a manager asked me if I was alright.  I explained to him my confusion and he graciously escorted me to the costumer service counter.  After explaining the situation again to the woman at costumer service she told me that the two meets were not interchangeable for the buy one get one free deal.  I told her I understood, but that there were in fact no packages of $4.99 or more that I could have bought to get the one free package anyway.  She agreed to give me a $2.50 refund and said it would be the same as getting a package free, which based on some simple subtraction I knew was false.  However, I chose not pursue the issue any longer and just settled for the $2.50 refund, in essence paying $2.50 for an extra package of meet I’m not even sure I wanted.  

I went to this man’s funeral about a month ago and intended to write about my expereince there immediately. I unexpectedly cried at his funeral. Unfortunately, emotion faded and I was too easily distracted by the next part of my life.

This will be his deserved recognition.

I stopped thinking about the war recently as it was not a part of my everyday life.  Anymore, when turning on NPR or reading the daily news I feel nothing but turned off when I hear reports of how many soldiers and Iraqis died today.  And so, I turn off the radio.  This war is not in my life.

My last relationship with a soldier in the guard instigated the most interest I’ve had in matters of the military.  I felt most informed about these matters during that time because in the soldier’s mind, the US is the greatest nation and must be protected.  Combining his intimate knowledge of the war and my own more liberal views of politics opened my mind to the particulars civilians never talk about over dinner, mainly because they just don’t know.  The sustained ignorance is what I’ve become fed up with.

In my opinion, it’s rare to talk to someone who has enough knowledge and experience in these matters to speak truthfully.  I continue to hear the same ill-informed arguments about Bush and Iraq and directions the US is taking, and it has caused me to turn my interested ear toward things not involved in this discussion.  My home in Boulder is so far from the Capital.  They make decisions and vote on agendas while I plant flowers and think about art.  And farther away, on the other side of the earth, there is a war…

My ignorance is made bearable by convincing myself that my purpose is not to understand the intricacies of politics and war.  My only effect in discussing these matters is propagating my own ignorant point of view.  In the great Nation of America, I am a single person living and thinking in a suburb of the capital of the world.  My suburb is too far removed, however, to attain any sort of reality in reference to our country’s current global political situation.

Then suddenly I knew it.  I knew with an uttermost feeling of resolution and a compulsion to lay my hand upon my heart for not having known what it was before: Blady’s waiting was the waiting of the feminine, the waiting of the feminine not just after a thousand million years of neglect to be recognized by man but a waiting that was utterly for waiting’s sake, a waiting which is not the waiting of man.  Man has his own kind of waiting, but it is a waiting imposed on him by his quest in the external world; is it more conscious in its beginning, and it develops as an instrument of will and experience and character and outer necessities.  The waiting of the feminine is there an was there always, born with the feminine, always alive in the feminine.  It was the waiting of creation itself, the waiting which is at the heart of time where out of a longing the stars are made and the child is formed and born.  How could one not have known that all the living and growing and all the light and shining things coming out of darkness at the beginning were made out of this waiting, which neither the darkness could quench nor any sun, however great burn away?  It was as if a seed that had not fallen by the wayside had found some dark, still place in the earth of human life, in the earth of the feminine being, where it could slowly uncurl and begin to reach out to where it could grow and achieve in the full light of the new-born day the flower that beckoned it in its heart.

The transition from bedtime to work time happens over coffee.  As I come into myself, I am feeling clearer and I try to recall records of literary works I have been inspired by.  With quiet around me I am left to expand into the hidden world of literary minds.

And the pattern is:

My most recent thoughts on blogging have brought to mind the memoirs of various authors.  Going through the processes of writing and rewriting, editing and rewriting, finding a publisher, publishing and printing, distributing and advertising is eliminated in the world of blogs.  The memoirs I have read have all been in bound form, found in stacks, on shelves, or in store windows.  Here, in my apartment, in the early morning I am recording whimsical notions about the world that I will post to a site from which a network of other bloggers have done the same.  Without an editor and a lack of critics I can convince myself that grammatical structures I create are the most accurate conveyance of my current musings.  I enjoy the freedom of blogging.

And from there, inevitable, I was off the radar screen of our day and back with the ancient Greece I first new as a boy. It started at a very early age, in the climate of things told and discussed naturally in our home and in the books already made available to one’s imagination, which grew deeper, higher and wider with their nourishment.

I did not think of them as ‘stories’, which the world today so dangerously regards as having only a non-true kink of truth and reality in their own right. They walked my world, these gods and heroes, these forms of life wherein animal and man, beast and god and all the natural elements of the world and time combined and played a part in the history of the human spirit, in strange and vast personified forms. They were a fact of one’s life, as they were a fact for the Greeks. They walked the streets of Athens with both the most enlightened and the least cultivated of men. They were present everywhere and there was no event in the great evolution of the classical world of which they were not the inspiration, and man their chosen instrument. The traffic between this dimension of the myth and legend and the mind of man was two-way traffic, and so great and abundant and rich and powerful that the way of the imagination was almost overcrowded and, not surprisingly, often snarled up by Gods, or inspired or inflamed heroes, hastening to do something about the symbols and the improbable purposes and impossible journeys and tasks which this two-way correspondence imposed upon them all, keeping the heavens as busy as the world below…

…Even Aristotle, whose imagination was illuminated with reason and committed to clarity of thought and shape, would say: ‘The friend of wisdom is also a friend of the myth.’ He did not hesitate to make a personal confession which even then might have been thought far from rational: ‘The lonelier I am, the more of a recluse I become, the greater is my love of myths.’

P 154

… I found myself encouraged by the way in which the horse, which in the beginning had so little to do with the feminine, had now moved over as if its allegiances had been changed and today belonged more to the world of women. Men of course still played a great role in the life of the horse, but they did so more and more professionally, like the rider who recovered so miraculously from his cancer. As far as the male was concerned the horse was part of a masculine elitism and entertainment, but in the world of the feminine he was sought out for his own sake and for the pleasure and the lift of imagination he gave, particularly to young girls, so that by the time they were adolescent and about to move on into life, they had reached that new moment of birth into themselves helped by schooling and graduating from ponies up to horses…
… I am not suggesting in all of this the kind of criticism it would imply, but trying to draw attention to the neglect of a certain pattern which is always deep in the human spirit and has access to energies of growth and renewal that only it, and no other pattern, possess, and pleading that this pattern should receive contemporary recognition. It is in this sense that I welcomed the increasing partnership between woman and horse.