April 28, 2004
Reading
Time is tight for everyone involved in Ordinary Aura, but I wondered if we should create something of a shared reading list... not too much, just right. This is already happening with links and comments, but should we formalize it? My reason for asking is that it might be just one more way to get 7 different people into the same conversation.
"Parker's Back" has already been brought up.
Any other "horror"/faithless works that end up, by virtue of contrast, being about faith?
Job 38 is also one that I like in relation to our work. CT
I should be grading...
I have been itching to put up some visual thoughts for feedback and the following are a few. Basically, I have a zip disk full of pics that may or may not be relevant...
I do hope we can start sharing our current work with one another so that we can see where each of the participants are coming from... look for overlap, look for things the artists themsleves may not notice.
The three or so photos I uploaded are paintings made thinking about this show.
I tried to include two great shots of a peter halley installation where he describes wanting to make an architectural environment out of two-dimensionial elements and I can relate to that. I will try again to get those to you.
I'll talk more about my thougts related to the project and this work specifically at another time (I really do need to get some grading done for classes tomorrow), but one topic I want to broach now is about the paintings and drawings that will be part of this very large exhibition:
I have been working in a series of paintings on canvas and works on paper using the very standard size of 18" x 24". I love the way that this lends itself to a grid system to accomodate the variety of paintings I am making... abstractions based on printbars, pipctures of birds, paintings of harmonand wolpa's old ditto invitation to a potluck, the lineage of Jesus Christ clutterd with paint spills and ephemera...
I do believe that the space at UICA warrants large works. I mean LARGE works. BUt, I wondered if you other painters would consider agreeing on this standard size to contribute to a massive gang of paintings. I envision filling huge expanses of the walls with many many many options of paintings... a choose your own adventure.
Blogging really does encourage rambling, I now understand... sending my words into the ether (net)... Watson, can you come here...
some quotes
Here are some quotes I've found lately, and also a couple of links to some interesting projects. The quotes are all reactions to Newton's vision of a mechanical universe, and our own place in it.
Engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened. - Blaise Pascal
I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye, any more than I would question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it & not with it. - William Blake
Thinking is more interesting than knowing but less interesting than looking. - Goethe
Access - an installation mimicking surveillance
Communimage - a collaborative image-building project, in process since 1999
April 27, 2004
April 26, 2004
Flannery O'Connor/Mystery and Manners
From the O'Connor essay Writing Short Stories
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.
From the O'Connor essay Novelist and Believer
This is an unlimited God and one who has revealed himself specifically.
(both from Mystery and Manners)
unanswerable questions/religion
I think Seth's most recent entry brings up several important subjects. I am only going to touch on one now--
1. religion as being experienced as something which demands facing a lot of questions that don't generally have answers. This certainly resonates with an earlier email I sent in response to Kevin Hamilton's last, as unanswerable questions certainly can play with the believer's unbelief. And yet, unanswerable questions wrecking havoc on belief seems to be just about where the endlessly shifting mystery of religion/Christianity keeps me hooked--somehow I understand Seth's description of distributed systems through this lens. I just finished Flannery O'Connor's story Parker's Back (on something of an O'Connor kick as of late/I know I keep quoting her) this morning. The horror of that story in a way is in the character of Sarah Ruth--her unwavering/unquestioning belief has petrified her being to the point that she is able to eviscerate her husband's body and maybe his own burgeoning belief.
April 25, 2004
status
hey everyone
thanks for making the blog. I'll look forward to getting on it later. just to let everyone know, I'll be back in the conversation in a couple weeks - deadlines galore right now for versionfest in chicago, and then some curatorial stuff here. school's almost over, I'll try not use up all my words in the final crits.
April 24, 2004
just blog stuff
By the way, I'm also the person who set up this blog, which I'm glad to have done even if I end up not being a part of the exhibition. In the interest of saving space, I used the "extended entry" feature on the New Entry page to put most of the longer posts on a followup page, so that this index page wouldn't get to be impossibly long. In each case, the first paragraph of the post is shown on the first page.
I'm also working on the interface a bit; I've made adding links to the sidebar as eay as it'll ever be, and I can explain to people how to do it if they want to add links.
some thoughts from Seth
Chris has proposed me as another potential collaborator in the Ordinary Aura exhibition, and suggested that I post here to explain my interests, in art in general, in Christianity in art, and in the project I have in mind for this exhibiton (if I get to be a part of it). Here, then, I go.
A bit of brief background on me: I started out as a writer, went to grad film school, and at the end of grad school became interested in (then-nascent) Web art. I did that for a while, and worked as a commercial web developer. This year I’ve returned to academia, teaching digital design at UNCG. I should say also up front that religiously, I’m a skeptic. To me, this is a technical term I use to distinguish my position from agnosticism. An agnostic might assert that we can’t know anything, and leave it at that; I think that this position of unknowingness in which we find ourselves, or in which I find myself, demands a constant and rigorous asking of questions. Asking questions is meaningless is you think that they can’t be answered; thus the largest part of my religious attitude is the attempt to be open to finding meaning in phenomena, without sacrificing any intellectual rigor or honesty. This is why this show seems like such a vital and fascinating project to me.
A big part of my interest in Web art and design has always been in the idea of distributed systems, that is, a structure that has no coherent physical existence but consists of a group of distinct parts acting in concert to produce the illusion of a single experience. As a filmmaker, I was very much a single author; I was interested in absolute control over the final work. Collaboration with other artists -- designers, actors -- seemed like a distraction. Thus the enforced lack of control over the end experience that happens in Web art became an interesting challenge to my own way of working. From hypertextual narrative work I quickly became interested in randomization as part of the artistic process.
This arose also out of my structural interest in how meaning arises in text; how the juxtaposition of individual concepts gives rise to new context and new associations. One of my earliest online projects, which seems not to be online any more, was based on Noam Chomsky’s famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." His idea was to create a sentence that had grammar but no meaning. To me, this is a failed experiment; the fact that these individual concepts fit together into a single structure forces them to acquire meaning, if only a subjective, poetic meaning that exists only in the mind of the reader, only for as long as they’re reading the sentence. My project used animated gifs (then cutting-edge technology) to make each word of that sentence cycle around between a series of five words, making a total of twenty-five words appearing five at a time in a sort of text-based magic square. The idea was to create a random assembly of five-word sentences, some containing grammar, some not, some sparking meaning, some not. This led to other dynamic hypertextual experiments, such as this one, and if you visit this brief portfolio, the projects "postcard" and "poor frances" in particular. These projects use various amounts of interactivity and randomization, in combination with my own supposed authorship.
So my interest as an artist and writer has been in the process of acquiring meaning. My main idea is that meaning isn’t transmitted by the artist, so much as derived from the project by the viewer. At this point, of course, this is a pretty old-fashioned reader-response type of theory, but really being engaged with it demands facing a lot of questions that don’t generally have answers. This is my attitude towards religion at this point.
I’ve been going on for a while, so let me come to the point with the project I’ve been thinking about lately. This would be an exercise in communal authorship, remote experience, and the discovery of meaning in received materials. This gets at another recent development in my thinking about religion; for most of my life I’ve thought about faith as a personal struggle between me and the universe, but lately I’ve been thinking more about communication between people as being central to the experience of religion. Let me explain what I mean.
I’ve been thinking lately about physical space and presence, since everything I do is virtual. However the technical aspects of this project demand that it be Web-based, so I’m imagining a Web-based project projected large on a wall. What you’d be seeing would be not just the site’s interface, but the site being actively navigated in real time by some other user, so that you’re confronted by, or trapped in, somebody else’s experience of the project. As for the project itself, it would be a series of anonymously authored text pieces, each springing from the last. The project might start with a single piece of text, a desription of a mundane experience or a series of events. A user could choose to add something to the project, in which case he or she could click to create a new text panel or text group. This panel would inherit some randomly selected words from the first text; these would be the words the user would have to work with to write their own piece. Then another user could choose to add a panel, springing either from the original text, or from the recently created panel. The ultimate effect is that of a constantly expanding labyrinth of text, anonymously authored by a distributed group, visitable on the Web but also presented within the gallery space as a single, undeniable experience.
The practical problem with this kind of project is getting people to actually add to it. I haven’t really worked out how this would work; I would love to simplify the project a bit, so that a fairly minimal amount of contribution from individual users would be all that’s required. What interests me about this project, though, is the idea of following other people’s trains of thought, of bearing witness, so to speak, to what other, unknown people are thinking.
Kevin's email
Hi all
Adam graciously invited me in on the conversation - though I have been keeping my distance from overtly connecting my work with my faith for the last couple of years, this looks like a good place to put my feet back in the water. I would say that I never really stop thinking about my faith when I think about my art, and visa versa, but by the standards of CIVA and the like, I have been steering clear of certain "christian art" conversations lately. My frustrations with CIVA and other christian art organizations is deep and recurrent, so I'll warn you up front that as long as we're talking about faith and art I'll probably keep coming back to talking in reference to what I think others are doing wrong.
1) First, a little link. If you go the website for the music group Boards of Canada (one of my favs), there's a sweet little interactive bit about jet streams...
http://boardsofcanada.com/
2) I can relate to the experience of longing after jetstreams, yet I have to say that when viewing representations of jetstreams like this one, my first associations are with disaster - if I see a jetstream in print or video I jump to thinking something must have exploded, ie. The space shuttle columbia.
3) I wonder what our enjoyment of jetstreams shares with the enjoyment of train whistles by our progenitors. There's a Nathaniel Hawthorne journal entry set near walden pond where the protagonist begins observing every detail of the immediate surroundings, getting lost in observation of the seen, the empirically verifiable details of "nature." His reverie is interrupted, however, by the whistle of a train in the distance, an unseen presence of that which is wholly absent to the eyes, touch, body and apparently contradictory to the senses. Hawthorne is enraptured by this paradox - Leo Marx says this is the essence of the american pastoral, the liminal space where americans place themselves in "nature" only to long for the urban, and revel in the paradox...
Anyway, I bring this up because I spend less time thinking about the present "shadows" or "reflections" of the eternal-divine than I do thinking more generally about all the ways in which we establish belief in the unseen distant.
4) I had this series of photographs planned around 9/11 that I scrapped. I wanted to sit outside airports and photograph every plane in the air, titling each pic after the destination of the plane. The plane in air says only "go" and yet we rarely have any information about where it goes...
5) I've been thinking a lot about everyday instances of faith in the unseen, especially in the case of long-distance communication. There's this great book from a few years back called "speaking into air" about how our uses of each new telecommunicative technology borrow from religious belief - that is, in order to understand where we are talking to when we talk through a new conduit across distance, we refer to activities like prayer, seances, or other contact with the spiritual world. I would be very interested in addressing this more directly for the UICA show.
6) It seems to me that if we're under the title ordinary AURA then we have to think about Walter Benjamin too - his idea about how modern means of reproduction cause the loss of aura in objects. I've never wholly understood this, but in the artbrain of the world if you google aura, you get benjamin, so I suppose it has to be dealt with.
7) One of the things that pushed me away from CIVA and contemporary christian art was a continual degrading of the ordinary and an overdependence on art as a means of transcending the everyday. A famous american puritan preacher (I forget which one now - maybe edwards?) wrote once of how humiliating it was for him to suddenly find that while relieving himself by the fence, a dog had joined him in the act. He had been trying to focus on God while he shat, but then the presence of the dog dragged him woefully back into the mire of the temporary. My experience of CIVA was dominated by artwork that seemed to want to forget that it shat. Was shitting part of God's curse? The Bible doesn't say it was. Isn't it possible to be content with aspects of this world (not sin of course) without seeing them as shadows of the divine? Matter is GOOD! God made it!
8) Sometimes the quasi-gnostic tendencies of christian arts organizations, continually contrasting spirit and matter, eternal and temporary, remind me strangely of central modernist tenets. Baudelaire, for example, described modern art's task as the pursuit of the eternal, the immovable within the transient and fleeting. This sounds at first like trying to think about heaven while you fart, but then you keep reading and you find that baudelaire's favorite modern artist is basically a street fashion photographer, a coolhunter, who captures in sketch the exact cut of a man's cuff that will never happen again and yet captures the moment in perfection. How does baudelaire end up there, while gnostic-christian artists end up making pictures of angels?
I think I'll stop throwing plates in the air for now.
I really really really want to recognize that you all started this conversation first, that I'm a latecomer and a stranger and that I might not fit. SO PLEASE feel free to say if you don't think I'll fit with what you want to do. Really, I'd be happy to just be a part of the conversation for a bit.
Thanks
Kevin Hamilton
Wolpa's email
hello all this is wolpa here
i have been thinking about this show and missing a bit the flurry of early emails i have also just recently sent barbara the floor plans for the monroe gallery you can all also check those out at http://www.uica.org/applyVisualArts.html download facility floorplan pdf i will take some photos of the space tomorrow and send those out there has been talk too about a sculptural installation component at The Heartland what do you all think about it the monroe space needs to remain pretty clear of spatial objects it seems like we could all meet here a week or less early to work together
when chris was here a couple of weeks ago, he spent the whole day writing for creative capital at the very last minute, at the end of a very long day the proposal was sent chris and i talked some that day about making a book as a part of this project that perhaps in the same way as we have worked before- sending around drawings and images here are some highlights from that document geared specifically to the production of a larger off-set production
The formation of Ordinary Aura is primarily influenced by an interest in working collaboratively in a public fashion to promote dialogue with the community. A model we are building on is a previous project from 2001 called, The Circular Ruins. Involving twenty artists and writers who, through the U.S. Postal Service circulated their visual and written reflections on the short story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges. This year-long project culminated in the compilation and editing of the numerous folios into a limited edition, hand-made, artist book and in a unique installation at the Zoller Gallery at Penn State University. The exhibition is key for our current work because it successfully combined sculpture, prints, drawings, paintings and interactive elements such as a reading room and dart boards.
Typically, a catalog documents the end result of a show, but our book is integral to the process and development of the conceptual fabric of OrdinaryAura by means of collaboration and image making. Its construction will be experimental as well, pushing the boundaries of traditional catalogue design, perhaps including cut out elements, flaps or loose sheets.
i hope we can work like this regardless of grant status i hope we can make a book or edition of books i think too that the writings of benjamin are relevant especially in thinking about the book
i have been thinking about kevin's email and his concern with christian art resonated with me and recalled some things i had recently written as a part of the calvin kuiper seminar mostly in terms of pedagogy, but i am also tracing this thinking to the Hall of Horrors a recent exhibition of 12 drawings by Wolpa and Thomas i began some drawings in thinking about reformed theology, specifically reading abraham kuyper he speaks of every inch being covered by and belonging to G-d we talked in that class about creation, fall, and redemption quite intensely one day breaking down what might illustrate this model and i am thinking that this in conjunction with finding a pictoral history of horror movies in my studio, and thinking about charcoal drawing well the hall of horrors of course (the shitting dog?) the hall of horrors somehow informs the action packed! sculpture thinking about sacred and profane - telling jokes, rubber snakes, the Word, tablets/tombstones, kool-aid perhaps the sculptural form of the horror movie images, space heaters this is perhaps the hyperbole of thinking about kuyper and "cultural renewal" and thinking similarly to kevin about christian art about the gnostic virtual body about the living presence of our savior, His kingdom about the actual and the authentic self about thomas kinkade about snake grabbing the snake in Genesis 3 and coming to calvin and engaging in this totally new culture and this somehow relates to ordinary aura the ecstatic revelation in the everyday today i am looking out the window also matt poole talked with me today about the house of david baseball team i hope that this email is not too discombobulatd wolpa