"free hug"

Two days ago, I was strolling down State street, en route to the public library to pick up some books, when I was surprised to see a young man holding up a huge posterboard sign with the words “free hug” emblazoned on both sides in large letters. Intrigued, I picked up the pace and with a quickened pulse wondered whether I would request a free hug from the gentleman as I wandered past. What do you say to such a stranger offering such a strange thing? As I drew nearer, I noticed that only one person had taken the man up on his offer (a young woman in a red coat and black hat with earflaps), and that most people were avoiding eye contact and passing him by nonchalantly even though he was perched on the sidewalk at a relatively busy pedestrian intersection. He was obviously taking a great delight in people's slight discomfort stemming from his presence as evidenced by the goofy grin on his face and bemused twinkle in the eye. Just as I had made up my mind to embrace a complete stranger, and was a half-block away from this social magician of sorts, he began looking dejected and wandered a bit east of the intersection at which he had stationed himself.

Thus, I did not get to ask him about the marvelous social experiment he was performing, but I am certainly curious. Who knew someone with a sign labeled “free hug” could so thoroughly transform my day? My heart was made a bit lighter knowing that a whimsical, mischievous magic still exists in the world. But his offer of service and/or performance, brings up other questions about strangers, perceptions of Self and Other, the latent danger of intimate contact with the unknown (but its immediacy is lessened by the public nature of the space in which the act was occurring) – and this milieu of emotions is what I think people felt as they passed him, and probably why most people didn't take him up on his offer. But really, what if most people were genuine in their intentions and what if we perceived them that way as well? Maybe we could move through the world a little easier? If only!

dawn, long ago.

vacant expressions

"infinitely scalable"

Pamela Lee wrote a stunning and incisive piece in this month's issue of ArtForum about making/producing art and its global technologies (of power), referents, and implications. She mobilizes Takashi Murakami as the exemplar, par excellence, of her argument.

A brief recapitulation with interjected commentary:

Beginning with a critique of present-day art criticism, Lee chastises the field for being concerned only with “iconography and representation” to the (almost) total exclusion of the making of the piece, its means of production, and aesthetic and material connections to globalization. She exhorts a look at the “ideologies that sponsor and naturalize” the processes of art-making in order to understand what is fully at stake. Enter Takashi Murakami. The art giant and coiner of Superflat(-as-belonging-to-specifically-Japanese-aesthetic-sensibilities) is really a business. With a nod to Warhol, he has factories (entitled Kaikai Kiki) in two global (with a nod to Sassen) cities – Tokyo and New York. As Lee notes, his art work is very much a part of the global marketplace. Cuddly plush Murakami-manufactured objects and Louis Vuitton handbags are available for public consumption. His work stands as a referent of the global marketplace as well – it picks up the Superflat aesthetic already present in Japanese animation and comics, and the ideology of cuteness (kawai-i) in products/phenomena like Hello Kitty. But his work – and here's where Lee's argument gets piquant – also has a metonymic connection to the global marketplace, and this, according to Lee, has everything to do with the way his art commodities are made.

There are a few kinds of digital graphic manipulation programs. Raster programs, like Photoshop, are resolution dependent, in that, they contain a certain amount of information in each pixel of an image, and all the pixels coalesce into a bitmap. Consequently, you couldn't scale an image to gargantuan proportions, because the amount of information stays the same across scales, so the final image quality would be poor. Likewise with scaling down to the miniscule. By contrast, in vector graphics programs or Bézier programs, like Adobe Illustrator, the images are fully resolution independent, and thus, as Lee doubly underscores, infinitely scalable.

This has enormous implications. A Murakami-made image can easily be scanned and reproduced in all sizes, and projected and im/printed onto any surface. It can be compressed, expanded, enhanced, reconfigured in any imaginable way. It is fully plastic and elastic in the true adjectival meaning of those words. Lee comments: Murakami's ways of doing and making are wholly consistent with the ideology of a world market that sees itself as infinitely scalable: that is to say, without traditional concerns for scale; without fixed determinations and stable, organizing perspectives; and without a center in which a monolithic and controlling referent holds. It explodes the false dichotomy between the purely digital image removed from the human manipulative presence, and the purely human-wrought handcraft, while also both reflecting and standing in for the movements of the global market itself.

Aesthetic production, we must not forget, subscribes to ideologies and has immense political consequences.

A Small Encounter

Today was family day at the Centre D'Art, and numerous children and their parents alternately sauntered, ambled, and flew into the space to engage in a three hour frenzy of mask making and djembe drumming. Unlike many such events, I think that everyone present actually had an excellent time. The older folk as well as the youngsters could carry the required beat with ease and grace, and those under four feet tall left in an at once satisfied and anguished state – they wanted to continue making, most certainly. I was particularly struck by one small child who approached the desk shyly and began an earnest and charming conversation with the hero of this blog. Upon complimenting him on the mask he was wearing (adorned with furry pom-poms upon the brow, and a glittery array of sequins across the bridge of the nose and down onto the cheeks), the young person confessed his love of making and how he wished he could make art all the time, which naturally endeared himself to the hero's heart. With all of the eagerness of youth, the friend asked whether the hero has any siblings, to which she confessed she does not, and he replied that he has a younger brother. The two sized each other up: he was in first grade and at a height appropriate to such endeavors, and she at this point was sitting atop the stainless steel front desk, leaning dangerously over the counter and straining to hear the soft whispers of a shy voice (made a bit bolder because of the mask, she thought). He assuaged the hero's fear of condemnation by declaring it was okay that the hero is an only child, which made her feel an multitude of strong emotions in rapid relay. It's okay. The hero exchanged names with the young friend, alias Adrian, and they performed a somber handshake to solidify the friendship. All the while, Adrian was peeling off bits of glue and sparkly materials off of his small hands, and he presented a ball he had fashioned from the peeled bits to the hero, who admired it and asked if he wanted it back, to which his response was well, i'd rather that you have it if you'd like, in the sweetest voice imaginable. The hero thanked him profusely, but wanted to shout to his guardian who was a little distance away: Mother, this absolutely wonderful, completely heartbreaking child will grow into a wonderful but heartbroken adult because he will love people and places and ideas ardently and will suffer disappointments (but also the truest of joys) as a result. Take care to repair his feelings when they are hurt (and they will be hurt frequently, alas!). But instead as they conversed about pumpkins and the autumn, and a flood of older, taller people came in wanting a thousand answers and they didn't see him there, and so his questions were lost in the clamor of other voices. The hero wondered, why is it that now we can't go up to strangers and profess our love of activity and divulge secrets to them and be shy and captivating? What is it about youth that lends a necessary wonder to the world? When do most people lose that bright-eyed excitement or learn to ignore it or see other things instead? Why do we have to pretend to be self-assured and comfortable when we are anything but? To Adrian and everyone like him: keep on loving, be fearless, go well!

the dynamic and mathematical sublime

Speaking of wonder, Xefirotarch, as mentioned below, claims to be very much inspired by Kant's notion of the sublime. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant holds forth on what he describes as two distinct species of sublime: the dynamic and the mathematical. The former is terrorizing-but-awe-inspiring and deals with a “tremendous force that dwarfs our power of resistance into insignificance.” A lightning storm certainly would conjure this experiential quality of dynamic sublime, but this exists as a kind of supplement too: it at once points out that we are inconsequential in the grand majesty of seismic and cosmic reactions, but at the same time bestows a visual and psychic transcendence upon us. The mathematical sublime is that which produces pleasure, albeit a negative pleasure, and inspires wonder. It spurs on the imagination – apparently “the mind is alternately attracted and repelled by the object.” I like this subtle distinction on Kant's part (hear that? good job, Immanuel!) and am certainly curious to find out more, and explore the feeling of wonder, and the mathematical sublime in future installation work (questions: what is wonder? why does that feeling arise in us? how come children seem to contain a more robust sense of wonder than adults? does it stem from things unknown or majestic? is it primarily about the imagination? does it have to be large scale, or can you experience an intimate and tiny feeling of wonder, or an overwhelming one based on a small scenario? can wonder really ever be shared, or is it about the individual and the object of wonder, even when others are present? how is the feeling of wonder communicated (it is something almost beyond language, but a common and very much palpable experience)?).

Xefirotarch

I stumbled upon quite an intriguing art and architecture exhibit at the Art Institute a few weeks ago. It was a showcase of work by Xefirotarch, a San Francisco-based art team/design brigade/architecture collective/brainchild of Hernan Diaz Alonso, whose fancy has been struck by biomorphic architecture. The setting was surreal, and was quite sensorily overwhelming at the time: the entire gallery space is painted a bright red, and as you descend the few stairs into this womb-space you are confronted with display cases containing structures reminiscent of vertebrate spines, of configurations of enlarged neurons, of cellular architecture. A little farther down was a pulse-quickening, equally red, structure, about the size of a car and a half, with these biological forms perched in between rounded nodes and tucked into crevices. I was struck by a thrilling feeling of dread and anticipation as I rounded a (rounded) corner where a gigantic computer-created image suggested how the interior of these architectural-sculptural forms might be negotiated and experienced. The other side displayed similar red couch-car-tables and these magical-natural models. I've wondered for a long time why it is that human-created things, especially architectural things, are filled with straight lines and edges and sharp planes, when almost nothing in nature (or anything that's not an artifact) is organized in that way. Xefirotarch asks that question in a less naïve and much more theoretically sharp manner: they're pushing the boundaries of architecture in a way that has never been tested before, although most of the practical burden rests upon the engineers, I'm sure. So far, a large-scale installation in a public park is the only one of Xefirotarch's biologically-inspired designs to be realized, and the larger-scale host bodies-as-hotels-or-living/working-spaces-etc. are so conceptually and visually challenging that I'm sure their birth is delayed by a kind of resistance based on this novelty of form and design. Stretching and stepping across the boundaries of art, architecture, biology, and formal structural conventions is something that absolutely incites the imagination and inspires wonder.

walking past, i saw this:

even when pressed, no explanation could be given. "we didn't get a round to it" was an unacceptable answer. our intuition is that it's a commentary on not only contemporary gender relations and perceptions, but also advertising and corporate marketing. material culture, if you will.

the obligatory explanation

A brief note on naming: 'found materials' conjures up a textured mishmash of delights in the mind's eye (and for the mind's tactile appendage). I like the idea of stumbling upon something that you cannot forget and cannot let go of. One moment you didn't know it was there, and the next, you must muse upon it, create with it, use the images and imaginaries it refers to. Merriam and Webster tell me that material is the 'apparatus necessary for doing or making something.' An exclamatory yes! Doing and making are acts to be engaged in forevermore, certainly. Their nemesis-antithesis, Stasis, is obscene in the way it diminishes what was once a multi-hued color palate to only ambiguous grays – or bold lines into fuzzy, unfocused shapes always at a distance, if you will excuse what can only be metaphor. And apparatus decidedly calls forth images of French philosophers and machines. Found in itself points toward a kind of finding out that has taken place, and then is attached as adjective to whatever was found, urging a kind of perpetual (but always new) finding out – about people, places, the world, ourselves, what we see, what we enjoy, what terrifies us, what inspires us toward real wonder...

...so, if these two words are brief meditations on a kind of becoming, then let us go onward!