Is it art or vandalism? Love or rape?

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1617642007

Exhibit A is an approximately white canvas, one panel of a triptych, which many would consider artless, even if they were willing to concede its value as conceptual art.

Exhibit B, the "after" shot, shows the same painting with a large lipstick smudge painted by artist Rindy Sam. Her modification is arguably artful; I don't know enough about painting to judge it on formal or technical grounds, but certainly one could admit her gesture of audacious intervention in a heterotopic space is consistent with the field of 20th century conceptual art.

She called this an act of love, and said she thought the artist would've understood. Perhaps she was thinking of Marcel Duchamp, who is reputed to have claimed that his painting on glass "The Bride Stripped Bare..." was improved when it was cracked as a result of being accidentally dropped in transit to an exhibition. Or of Man Ray, who, when someone took him up on the challenge implied in the title of his sculpture "Object to be Destroyed," cheerfully made another.

As far as I've been able to learn, Twombly has made no comment on this case. Sam is being punished/published by the French government (who proposes to rehabilitate her into a model citizen by means of civility classes) and sued by the owner for more than the estimated value of the painting.

I imagine, though, that that value is now a moving target. She has probably increased it significantly by drawing international attention. I certainly hadn't heard of it before yesterday, or I would have cited it in my master's thesis -- the title of the triptych, "Phaedrus" references Plato's dialogue in which Socrates decries writing as a secondary, empty form of communication that can never simulate the presence of speech. (Really, wasn't Twombly inviting this response, at least on the level of fantasy?)

I think the owner should play this up as much as he can for the next few weeks, and then sell the painting, drop the law suit, and split the profits with Sam. (Maybe that's what they'd planned all along?) And if he's so enamored of the unmodified painting, he can commission Twombly to paint him another. Should take all of 5 minutes, so how expensive can it be?

Found sound hound bounds around town; rewound ground mounds resound & astound.

There's something beautifully obsessive about HarSmedia's Found Tapes exhibit. Seeking (or happening upon) discarded bits of weathered tape lying in streets, cleaning them up, spooling them, and playing them back to hear the sound of gems dropped casually to the concrete. Tracking, describing, photographing and Google-mapping the exact locations of the discoveries.

The resulting montage is a delightful listen -- more diverse than any radio station you could dream of (containing music from all over the world, and all up and down the scale from professionally recorded performances to answering machine messages), and somehow the lo-fi quality and jarring edits only add to the fascination.

Like sweet sugar bombs for my ADHD aesthetic sensibilities.

New primary color discovered

http://www.negativland.com/squant/
Actually, this must have been discovered some time ago since the tech support page makes reference to Apple System 8.1. Anyway, once they get over the rather daunting infrastructural hurdles, this should have enormous implications for cultural production into the future.

Does matter matter?

In my Texts and Textuality class last week we attempted the exercise of spelling out a minimalist definition of text. One of the more interesting questions that came out of this discussion is whether text implies a material instantiation or record. Our guest faculty member, Dr. Richard Priebe, insisted that it requires a record – that text is something to be returned to again, by oneself or another. I appreciate his point, but I don't think the latter proposition requires the former. (I should note here that one of his primary research interests is in folklore and oral traditions, so none of the arguments I'm about to make will be new to him.)

Traditions are texts. Performances are texts. Anything that can be approximately reproduced in the memory of a reader (in the broad sense) can be interpreted, modified, reproduced, re-presented, recontextualized, etc., and therefore constitutes a text as I understand the term.

Take for example a wedding ceremony. Certainly it can be based on a written script, and deviations can occur either by explicit consensus of the participants, or by improvisation, memory lapses, etc. And certain elements may be strictly required by interests of the church, state, or family tradition. But out of the entire social spectacle, how much of it is based on a written script? The words may be, and the music may be, but the attire is not. The arrangement of witnesses around the focal couple is not, nor is their arrangement in front of the officiator. The vocal intonations and sweeping hand gestures of the officiator are a matter of performance tradition, theater, rhetoric, and oral homiletics and/or judicial gravitas. These elements are handed down by a tradition of in-person witness and, more recently, of Hollywood representations. And yet they are reproduced with striking consistency within a given cultural milieu.

Matter is crucial in such traditions in the form of the architectural setting, the decor, the attire, and most especially the performing bodies. But this congregation of matter is a momentary conduit for the text that passes through it, not in any way a storage medium. Even without the near-universal photography and videotaping that goes on at weddings (by the way I realize now that my wife and I after 7 years to the day have yet to watch our wedding video), people would reproduce weddings with striking consistency. The text is not in the tape; it is in the performance. It can be parsed, praised, and parodied without any recourse to a script or record. (Here's a good guideline: if it can be parodied, it's a text!)

This weekend I saw a strange spectacle during the US Open tennis tournament. Top contender Novak Djokovic, still winded after winning a semi-final match, was prompted by a TV interviewer to perform impersonations of other players. He did so, taking specific requests for his subjects. So it seems tennis playing style is a text but, more profoundly, our personal being-in-the-world, comprising thousands of half-conscious and frequently repeated gestures, is a text that can be recognized even when performed by another. By the way, I would link you to specific YouTube footage of the performances in question, but when I looked for them I found two additional performances of the same two parodies, also caught on video. It seems this was no spontaneous performance.

During our class discussion Dr. Cornis-Pope threw out the hypothetical of an aggregation of debris on the beach. Is it a text? I'd say if someone wanders along and sees in it a contour that prompts her to envision the face of the Virgin Mary or some other signifier that registers with her then yes, it's a text. It becomes a text by her regarding it as such. She might even study it as an ephemeral abstract composition that she was fortunate to find before the rising tide gathered it up for its ongoing recombinant composition of found beach art. Now this text is made of matter, ephemeral though it is. The question in this case is not one of matter but of intention. Does designation of phenomena as text presume intentional composition?

Say the woman on the beach is a marine biologist examining the debris pile for microorganisms. Or a police detective looking for evidence of a missing person last seen sleeping on this beach. Does professional status confer textual properties on unintended aggregates?

If we follow Barthes' treatment of text, the crucial intention is not that of the text's author but that of the reader; or rather, the reader is the author of the text. The text may be transitory and unintended but remains a text in the memory of the reader. Perhaps memory constitutes a record and therefore could satisfy Dr. Priebe's requirement. Memory is notoriously transient and mutable, but it is certainly physical on the level of electrochemically charged neurons. Memory is the matrix in which forms are abstracted, connections made, patterns recognized, hypotheses tested, so perhaps in a nontrivial way Dr. Priebe and I are both right.

My minimal definition of text echoes the structuralist definition of the basis of language itself: a play of differences.

From work to play?

Commanding the field of the evening's readings on this, the first class meeting of my new doctoral program, was Roland Barthes' essay "From Work to Text." I've studied it many times before, but it's useful to reread (as if for the first time) and reconsider such a foundational text in poststructuralist thought.

In class discussion we touched on the terminological problem at the core of this essay -- one which Barthes himself acknowledges, though it is surely complicated by the translation from French: it is not possible to maintain a rigorous distinction between works and texts.

On the one hand I feel he is too eager to dismiss the word "work": I find nothing in its etymology or common usage that dictates its ascription to a static, monistic materiality. If you think of "work" from a process-oriented perspective, ditching the definite and indefinite articles and regarding it as ongoing work (as Heidegger might have said), then it comes to operate very much as text.

On the other hand I feel he is too eager to embrace the rich metaphors that drive "text." He wards off accusations of a trendy adoption of the word, but I think the problem is more crucial than that: unlike work, text, thought of in terms of those metaphors (texture, textile) suggests an inert, material thing. (In English the most common usage of "material" is in reference to textiles.) This is a rather limiting frame-work to in which to place something as dynamic as the evanescent play of differences he describes as his primary interest in this essay.

It feels obscene to throw out "work," facilely dismissed as closed, static, and monistic (i.e. a god-form), and simply replace it with another word that after all is only a noun, and one bearing a distinctly material constellation of meanings. How is this moving us closer to dynamism, process, and play?

Some commentators in the past have tried to get around this limitation by verbing "text" as "texting." I understand and appreciate the motives for this gesture, but I'm not sure it's a necessary neologism. A better alternative is already available to us: play.

Barthes uses it himself throughout this essay, as did Jacques Derrida in his groundbreaking essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Play is the term poststructuralist critics resort to when they have to explain how text works. Play cannot be thought outside of a process-oriented perspective. So why not let play play? Why make it the understudy to text?

Perhaps it is simply a problem of language translation. Certainly in English it would cause headaches if we all started referring to all manner of text as "play." Dramatis personae would stage a revolt, just as scientists have objected to the co-optation of "theory." But then "text" causes its own headaches -- say "text" to academics who have not been inculcated into poststructuralist discourse and they'll picture a dull, expensive, hardcover book filled with lots of "facts."

Under the benefits column, "play" offers a handy and ready-made antonym to "work" and nicely suggests the ludic ethos of poststructuralist critique.

Of course, this is all moot -- text is here to stay. But in these postings you may find me playing more than texting.

I just crossed a huge threshold.

I went to edit my inaugural blog. With fingers poised over the keys on the edit page, I stopped myself. I even let a glaring spelling mistake ride. This is huge for me.

My resolution for this blog is to eschew editing. Some people can edit in moderation, but I have an editing problem. So I must abstain completely.

Abstinence will make this blog even more painful, but I hope that by acclimating myself to the discomfort I will emerge a less twitchy person.

I never wanted a blog.

Not that I don't like to write. I do. It's more that I don't like having written. I like even less having published.

Under my withering gaze my writing (in the broadest sense of textual production -- including music recording, graphic desigh, etc.) has a tragically short shelf life. These words I write now seem fairly smart and interesting to me at this moment, but by tomorrow I will regret not only having posted them, but having written and thought them.

Picturing you parsing my language is torture, so please stop now. Just who do you think you are?

So why blog?

It's an assignment for school. Probably a good one for me, too. If I'm to adapt to the publish-or-perish world I had better get used to putting myself out there. But I don't have to like it.

Read on, dear tormenter.