April 10, 2015

Porthmeor BeachBen Nicholson b. April 10, 1894

Turbulent thinkingLyn Hejinianpresented by Jerome Rothenberg

A cold wind pushes against the northward progress of the occasional pedestrian, a plastic wrapper slips past a parking meter and disappears under a red car. In Minima Moralia, Adorno remarks, ‘To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.’ But what if the truth one is in — the truth of one’s situation or of one’s entire epoch — is an untruth (a lie, a fabrication, a myth, or a lack of truth altogether; not just a figment of false consciousness but the very condition that produces it? Certainly such a truth-of-one’s-time would be an unhappiness. Adorno’s aphorism, then, with a slight adjustment (and added poignancy) would assert that to unhappiness the same applies as to untruth: one does not have it, but is in it. It’s not the wind but the sun that expands the neighborhood through which vehicles, pedestrians, pets, children, residents, bugs, birds, visitors, bacteria, move in their efforts at perfection. (....) Art historians generally seem to be better at seeing the quiddities of everyday life than literary critics, who read into depictions of it coherences that are essentially irrelevant to the everyday. Apertures expand, sprawl over the edges of a frame. Thinking generates turmoil, something entirely different from entropy, it doesn’t settle and it doesn’t resolve, unless briefly, so the thinker can take a breather. Meanwhile, in the thinking, tension builds. An excess of spirit suffuses the body, it contorts the face, which is seen to convulse, either in laughter or in grief. Some human feels it in the stomach — a tightening, reflux, pain in the solar plexus. Some cat wakes suddenly. The cat launches its mouth at its haunch, licking, nibbling (affectionately, it seems). A horse shies, bucks, veers, and drops its head to graze. Deer, reclining in a meadow, leap to their feet and flee. How do I release tension? Not very well. A glass of wine. Currently, despite my sympathy for Tolstoy’s charitable impulse, I could not readily include a policeman in any ‘prehensile web of love’ I might cast. Though we feel liberated at the conventional end of a fairy tale (‘and they lived happily ever after’), we are aware of anxiety lurking along the fraying edges of ‘ever after,’ where existence continues beyond the scope of what’s told, and perhaps beyond the scope of what can be told. Goethe’s last words were, so they say, ‘More light.’ I could imagine a variant of these: ‘More sleep.’ But those are mere words, and a translation, at that, and not even last words, as more words have followed since, including those that proclaim them ‘last.’ Mercilessly.

Le poteau indicateurAlfred Kubin b. April 10, 1877

Cartographies of the AbsoluteLandscapes of Capital

In the context of the widespread conviction that we now inhabit the Anthropocene, an epoch in which mankind has risen to the dubious stature of ‘geological agent’, some earth scientists have cut through the periodising controversy – Did the Anthropocene begin with the human discovery of fire? With the industrial revolution? – by dating the onset of man’s geological maturity with disconcerting precision: July 16, 1945, the first test-denotation of an atomic bomb. The (unconsciously) political character of periodization as an act of representation and totalization could not be more clearly illustrated. The ‘end of nature’ (as autonomous from human agency) here coincides with the ‘end of history’ (as the inability to articulate that agency as a common project of emancipation), and postmodernity receives a kind of geological imprimatur, by the same token losing its own temporal contours. ‘We’ make nature, but recognizing this we also confront our inability to make history, as natural processes inextricable from ‘our’ historical agency threaten to make and unmake the present and the future in the absence of our agency. This is the backdrop of ongoing attempts to represent in the medium of photographic landscape a world wholly made over by capital accumulation, not so much an Anthropocene as a Capitalocene, to use the term proposed by Jason W. Moore. This is a predicament arguably crystallized in the very title of a landmark exhibition from 1975, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered landscape.That show, bringing together photographic series by Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Joe Deal, and others, continues to inform a photographic vocabulary which tries to picture humanity’s footprint in the terrains, built forms, logistical infrastructures, energy complexes and sheer waste which simply are the landscape of an increasingly urbanized species – witness the work of the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, but also Thomas Struth or Mitchell Epstein. There is a rich, critical literature on New Topographics and its aftermath. What I wish to ask here is a disarmingly simple question: why are photographs of manufactured landscapes so often depopulated?

Long BranchMichael Ashkin

Long Branch: A Conversation With Michael Ashkin The Great Leap Sideways

There’s a fundamental tension through these bodies of work between rigorously systematic and unpredictable forms, which mirrors a tension between human experience and the ordering of life into repetitive grids. We have made ourselves over as ‘man’ according to the logic of the urban grid, but the disassembly of communities reveals the arbitrariness of that logic, so could you talk about the relationship in your work between the systematic and the individual, or between landscape and memory? MA: This is a great question and it gets to the heart of what I am thinking about, albeit without the rigor of an urbanist or a scholar. Your quote by Robert Park reminds me of Manfredo Tafuri’s description of the grid in American cities as a pragmatic form implemented to facilitate the efficient flow of goods in a capitalistic economy. In other words, thinking of the urban grid as an instrumental form related to the functioning of the machine. And we could relate this to Marx’s observations that the transition from tool use to machine use reveals a reversal of roles: man starts by using tools for his own purposes, but, with the advent of industrialization, finds himself put in service to the machine. With the advent of the industrial machine we find all aspects of our world, including ourselves, abstracted and instrumentalized, turned into what Heidegger calls “standing reserves.” At this point I think it would be fair to say that we all find ourselves within a global apparatus that follows this logic of the technological and economic machine. Photography is a complicit and exemplary manifestation of this instrumentalized view of world. The camera is itself an apparatus, and it imposes a particular technological treatment upon space, regarding it as a uniformly gridded container in which human action is both possible or constrained. The camera is the logical technological extension of renaissance single-point perspective (assessed by the individual eye), renaissance engineering and military axonometric projections (uniformly measurable), and imperial cartography (eminently available). This idea of space as machinic, militarized, and available is based on the larger idea of capture. Photography is part of the larger apparatus that assesses the landscape in order to colonize, grid, and exploit it. In the end, the landscape has become absorbed into the same technology that spied it out. Perhaps even more crudely, we could call the camera an instrument of real estate. To me, photography feels unavoidably like surveying.

Castagnola Ben Nicholson

Five Museums Colleen Hollisterconjunctions

Museum of Arctic Maps Plum. Cedar. In the center, trees grow. Tangle and reach, search downwards for sky. The floorboards lay out for you a puzzle. Language muddled like mud in the ears. So much in the way of anatomy and yet your walking still fails. Woods that shape the air for you. Moon a flower. Cast iron. Copper. Like you are being dragged to sea. Deep blue glass filled with willing poison. Your limbs drop off, rearrange themselves. Everything made of cork and porcelain. Rosemary. Honeysuckle. Cypress. Inside, the heart buzzing like innumerable insects. Imaginary irregular coastlines. Cliffs of dry grass. Reindeer lichen. A small room crowded with things made of metal. A drawing of the flowers in the body: blooming mess. Tiny winding streets. The most intricate doorways. Everyone has carved them. To watch the lightning means a search for light for what makes the trees jump. Once, you knew a house filled with paintings. From the ceiling beams the sky near the bears. Just see how the stars twist. How the lakes rust. Rooms full of women transformed into bees. How a small space makes you feel like you are dying. How the grass grows through the paper at your feet.