Ordinary Aura

they've come back

Well, here we all are again, out there somewhere. I'd have some engaging wrap-up comment to make, but I'm lucky to be conscious. In lieu of saying anything, here's some cool images from this site, automatically-generated type designs:

It was a great week. Thanks, all.

they've set out

No Turning Back Now

i've pretty much got my piece figured out now. it's all about sound, but not very friendly sound I'm afraid. I've committed to this one through some last minute purchases - no going back now.

I've been thinking a lot (thus my moving around between projects) about how to get as directly as possible to my thoughts on our subject matter. Here's where I'm at. I thought I should prepare y'all for discussions next week, but also for a piece that is going to be fairly unfriendly - think about the horror stuff way back on this blog.

I keep coming back to thinking of our show as being about what I've been calling "spaces of potentiality." These holes of presence. (uh-oh, that almost sounds like a cheesy pop ballad...who was that band, "extreme"?)

It seems like we've been looking for things we can make or see that facilitate this experience, this charging of an absence with a potential for presence.

This is something I've been very interested in for a while, as in my theotherend.net project, or the stuff I've been working on with dead air, or my photos of NYC from high points in the midwest.

But I've been troubled by the way in which I keep approaching the creation of "spaces of potentiality" as primarily structural. This has been a concern of mine for awhile. I remember just getting into Found magazine and Spoerri and the celebration of found things on their own, without making stuff from them, when 9/11 happened, and suddenly some NPR guy is going through Manhattan reading WTC memos live onair that he finds blowing around the street. I couldn't say "ah, one of my aesthetic desires is sated by this thing," because it was only there because a bunch of people were murdered.

Likewise with so many of my interests. When you're as structurally stimulated as I am, I think you end up finding yourself in a lot of moral quandaries. Examined structurally, my favorite dada or fluxus artworks are in no way different from a suicide bomb in a Tel-Aviv pizza parlor. This doesn't help anything or anyone.

Likewise, in our conversations here about "absent presence" or spaces of potentiality, I kept finding myself troubled by our lack of addressing content or context, as if all such phenomena were equal.

The other thing that kept nagging at me in our conversations was that the experience of living in a space of potentiality, in which everything ordinary had an aura of potential activation and was thus transformed, sounds a lot like living in a state of potential terrorist attack, (real, imagined, or invented), or even in a state of perpetual news watching.

I then began looking through my various project ideas with these two questions:

1 - How can I make a work about spaces of potentiality without ignoring my role as the artist in an art space, and thus in some kind of power over the viewer? (gnosticism looms everywhere in our subject matter for me)

2 - How can I make an artwork that acknowledges the potentially threatening uses of the structure of "absent presence"?

SO I've got this piece now. I think it will be called BREAKING.

It's very simple. In the middle of the big room, hanging from the ceiling, is an array of loudspeakers, like the ones used for alarms, rectangular horn speakers.

Hooked up to these speakers is a single sound source (a DVD actually, cause I can program it). It works like this:

When you start the piece, you hear a second of very loud, very irritating, high-pitched noise. Then, you will here the same sound again in no less than an hour. Then the cycle repeats until we turn it off. The interval between two sounds is never more than an hour, and changes with each alarm.

Every quiet moment will be one moment closer to hearing it again, but you won't know how close you are. Yikes. I'm afraid it's almost like torture that way, though it's possible some people will never hear it. In the context of our show, I think it helps me really get to some things I've been trying to figure out.

I may monkey around with the exact sound when I get there, but I think I've pretty much got it figured out.

I'm still really interested in the use of sound for haunting and such, but I can't find a way of going that more pleasant route and still address the content I feel I need to.

So that's what I'm doing. Hope it doesn't interfere with anyone else's work - I think the relationship between all the works will be pretty rich. As we've been saying for awhile, we've got a collection of approaches you won't often see under the same roof in the usual art worlds.

See you tuesday night or wednesday morning - sorry I have to miss the party!

Coming Together

Here is a quick update.

The newspaper piece "everyday" is complete and hung on my studio wall. I will take images of it tomorrow and get them posted. Also Chris, I have twenty-two of the 24x18 paintings completed and will post images as well.

As I mentioned before the drawing project "never finished" will also be available for the exhibition.

Adam, you mentioned also the possibility of some larger paintings for the show. I have 2 to 3 36x48 inch-ish paintings available to send. Or I have 3 52x68in paintings in Chicago, but no way to transport them.

That is the quick update from my neck of the woods. I am excited to see what everyone has in store. I am anxious to see you all.

About the Saturday activity, I am open to suggestions. I thought Alan's idea might be a good way of interacting and incorporating the audience.

healed! (and an update)

a friend of mine sent this image yesterday - he said that they are photographs of auras before and after a healing! i don't know where they came from.

Also, just to let y'all know, my piece for the show is probably now going to deal solely with sound. I had been working on a piece about death and photography, but I just don't think I can get it together - it requires the cooperation of Grand Rapids county offices, and I have had little to no luck in getting it.

SO, the sound work for the ceiling I had thought of doing as a kind of complement to the rest will probably be my sole piece - I'm looking to create a lot of the piece when I get there. It will involve a combination of live and pre-recorded components, basically along the lines of what I posted a while back about haunting the rafters. The sounds will be less about ambience or atmosphere than about percussion - knocks and whirring, flutters and brushes. Hoping to populate the whole ceiling with little things - of course looking to not infringe or impede upon anybody else's work up there.

approach

from jered...

"Any ideas for the meeting?

Amount of work for the show?

1. I will have 22 paintings that are 24" x 18" for the project Chris and I
are working on.

2. I also have the 10' x 10' newspaper drawing "Everyday" that is nearly
completed. I will post new images of it this week along with the paintings
in progress.

3. I also have the drawing project "never finished" which you saw at the
Wendy cooper gallery. That can expand anywher from a few feet of wall space
to possibly twenty feet by 8 feet.

4. I other considerations. Do we need or want more work? Let me know and I
can let you know what is available."

from alan...

talking on the phone about the workshop, "meeting"
harmon suggests the participants pick a story from the newspaper which speaks to them spiritually
then after a discussion perhaps something gets made from the picks
this speaks to jered's newspaper project
it also opens up the everyday experience as resource
does something need to be made
is there another way to document this meeting
how can we all bring something different to this meeting

also...
it seems like the textbook project is becoming integrated into the classroom this fall for barbara, chris, seth, and myself. i am really excited about the discussion.
i will rock the visual culture with evidence.
i have just returned from california, and michigan is cool and wet
i am in town for the long haul now
collecting cardboard
getting ready for classes
please let me know if there is anything you need in the next few weeks
after next week the gallery is empty until the opening
any more specifics on work you are bringing

ps on the closing night of the show
the gallery will accomodate the rock show by devandra banhart and scout niblet
i am excited for this show in the show
anyways see you in a few weeks folks

pps i love this carpet. the center is a fragment.

ppps there is some really interesting stuff in the current issue of cabinet about doubles.

Printmaking in 2004

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

"the last months of summer months are upon us folks, and sweat is pouring down our brows in grand rapids, michigan. the sweat upon a brow lightly browned by outdoors virginia, plain virginia. that's right, ladies and gentlemen, virginia's beach, virginia'a printmaking, ferric chloride, the sun."

upon my arrival back home in grand rapids, it's been nothing but printmaking inspired thoughts and activities: continued renovation of the calvin printmakers group facilities, moving a press to the heartland, making a stamp for our postcard, and just today preparing a budget for a proposed collaboration with integrated architecture and herman miller. i have also been acting as if i have been bitten by the printmaking mosquito, "sweatin' side by side."

why am i telling you this, you might ask? why am i talking about printmaking in 2004? well, i'm excited about the whole thing, making prints, working toward an ordinary aura textbook with possible editioned components, stamping 1000 postcards, renovating a shop. i am reminded that printmaking is a social activity, i am reminded about the aura of a multiple, i am reminded about chemistry and plates and naptha and newspaper. also, the blog has been so very quiet these days. my friends, in 5 weeks we will all be in grand rapids. what's to come? any thoughts about implementing projects in the fall semester to be part of OA? more thinking about our saturday session? dietary restrictions?

workshop and collaboration

this started as a comment on my earlier point (see the post "workshop?") but it got long...

This question reminds me of the discussion last month about our differences of approach. The workshop brings up some other questions for me about our relationship to our topic.

I'll hit a few points here.

1 - the "interventionists" at massmoca is a show of work that is basically the stuff I'm most likely to call my aesthetic home. it's caused a huge buzz in the worlds i run in, especially because it was supposed to include critical art ensemble's work before steve kurtz was so ridiculously terrorized in the name of the patriot act. (the artwork was confiscated by the FBI). The massmoca show is not about 9/11 or even explicitly about the current political scene - but since the work all seeks to affect its surroundings socially / politically, i guess they saw it as appropriate to talk about the event.

2 - I'm pretty suspect of collaboration or audience participation as automatically inclusive, or desirable as a way of providing access to the work. for example, in our art education program at UIUC they spend all their time showing kids matisse or whatever and then having them paint with the same colors and from the same subject matter as a way of understanding the work. this is too narrow. what makes matisse matisse isn't just colors or goldfish or naked ladies - matisse found an entire worldview through working for a lifetime, one that we might only ever understand through looking, talking, reading, writing. though I'm sure art historians would gain something from trying out the media they study, I'm more confident that Erwin Panofsky understood more about perspective without making a drawing than any art student who spends a month making a perfect perspectival rendering of his dormroom.

Admirably, art insitutions are looking to include broader audiences - PS1 has pool parties, the Met sells childrens' books about Van Gogh. But I've seen few, if any attempts at such evangelism that acknowledge the differences between artist and audience, or that nurture sustained engagement with the art itself. They usually err on the side of safety and superficiality, and almost never raise serious questions about the definitions of art, audience, or institution.

3 - "inward looking" - related to my last meandering point, I guess I see collaboration as typically occupied with interrelations between the collaborators, as they try to figure something out together and learn where and who they trust. it's tough work, and the more people are involved the more likely that they focus on group dynamics and the challenge of communication. Though there are ways in which this practice may model the world, it is not primarily engaged with the outside world. i have seen collaborations that face outward, instead of inward, but typically this only happens when the collaborators choose a very specific problem/challenge. I think Paul Wittenbraker's ,Civic Studio has accomplished this sometimes, as have Temporary Services. In these instances I think that collaboration is not privileged or even talked about - it's just a given that collaborative practice makes sense for their inquiries. I don't really think we have enough in common as a group to come up with this narrow an inquiry.

4 - It sounds like the workshop is intended to provide some access point for the audience/public, so as not to say "here are the artists, here is their work, have at it." With as diverse as our approaches are, I can see where something (hopefully not a wall-text) is needed to tell folks why we belong together. Why is a participatory art-making exercise the way to accomplish this? Why don't we discuss the need more before filling it?

Our topic and approach as a group still looks very vague to me. We have accomplished some things though:
- we've engaged in conversation around content (still unfortunately uncommon in the artworld)
- our subject is not often addressed by the artworlds we run in
- we've assembled despite radical differences in approach, method, medium

These are the things we can address in the Saturday event - in fact, I think we owe it to the public if we are responsible to our task. (Since vagueness is not a responsible artistic strategy.) What can we do on Saturday that would truly address what we think we have or haven't accomplished in this conversation? Even the blog is an insurmountable and disorganized object to hand to a new viewer. We need to give them a more intentional and organized chance to see what we're up to.

I guess what I'm saying too is that I'm not really confident that the work is going to speak for itself on our subject matter. That doesn't make for bad work - there are obviously a diverse range of approaches to the form/content relationship here - but it could make for a bad exhibition. Of course I'm not looking for the audience to get hit on the head with a message or something, but I think we need to let them know what we think in order to be responsible.

Panel discussions are often ill-attended and dull, but maybe there's something related to that we can do. I think we owe it to our audience to do more work for them, not ask them to do the work. Could we organize a discussion around some example, a film, a piece of music, an artwork? Do we each give a 5-10 minute blurb about the topic of ordinary aura and then open it up to discussion?

On the 911 question, it's not that I think we have to help people grieve. But I think we have to acknowledge that strong context for anything that happens on that day, especially when it's printed next to the numbers 9/11. (Can't we just say "Saturday?") I don't see it as appropriate on that day (or most any other day) to say "come, try out what we did and see if you can understand us better." We need to be looking outward, at the world.

Creative Capital application notes

The following is one of the attempts to clarify our purpose in making a book based on collaboration... this artist book, studio text/workbook is being proposed for a Creative Capital grant.
The deadline is this coming Wednesday, the 8th. Please, if you've got any ideas pertaining to this, post some comments. Thanks.

1 As a professor, what would I like this book to do?
Firstly, make art interesting and show that art can come from places that everyone is familiar with. Allow students to relate their lives and interests to this thing called art-making which in my definition is about translating one’s experience into a form that others can consider. Thus, everyone has a valid place in the studio class- from advanced students to freshman, undecided in their majors. In light of Ordinary Aura, this ties into the believer/nonbeliever aspect of reaching audience.
Secondly, encourage students to be active in their work and give them a place to explore their interests and talents. As a sketchbook, it would be understood as a tool that is integral to the thought process. Work being done visually, in writing, in terms of collecting like a scrapbook, or a journal would all be contained and, most importantly, exist in the same place so that connections among these approaches might be made. As a textbook, it would contain (and be continually updated) relevant factual information about art historical periods and figures, movements that would tie into study as well as contemporary theory to encourage debate. A link would be formed between the old and new in a way that is open to the students’ input and editing. (Remember, this is more a STUDIO resource than an ART HISTORICAL one. This means that rules can be bent.)
Thirdly, I would hope that the book as a form, as an object, would be significant to students in this digital age. Aspects of bookbinding, structuring of image and text, ordering of thought, pacing… all these things are inherent in the printed form of a book and would definitely form a component of any curriculum stemming from Ordinary Aura. Not everyone has access to a computer and the needed software to do web design or layout. On the other hand, most everyone can find scraps of paper, pencils, collage bits, etc. that can be used to learn the same visual language for personal expression.

2 What makes this book different and indispensable?
Instantly, the look of the thing separates it from the normal, dry “Design I Foundations” text. Right now, the book may be bound with inserts, perforated, various kinds of sheets, transparencies, stencils, envelopes… it may not even be bound, coming instead in a case with many loose sheets waiting to be reorganized, substituted by the student, etc. Shouldn’t creativity be exercised in the product if that is what your product is trying to inspire and teach?
Ordinary Aura is in no way an end point where, if purchased, it will serve a class for a couple of semesters and then be retired for the next edition which is, more r less, the same thing only in a different package. Ordinary Aura is a flexible tool for studio professors and students. Its main functions are to inspire conversation and the sharing of ideas by promoting collaborative working, an exploration of materials and the forms of visual communication (especially in book form) and will be constantly supplemented by both the work the students do and also annual, gust edited, theme-based magazines. These annual supplements will be able to address in depth particular, timely themes allowing professors to engage their students in issues of politics, religion, contemporary art and theory, film… anything! Which makes Ordinary Aura an endlessly useful text. In fact, it is the students and people who use the text who actually become its authors.
(Down the line, say in five years, I suggest a contest or something where artists and users submit their most intriguing work to be included in a “2nd edition”. Also, the WIKI or website could be an ongoing version of this publicly written book for artists and art students)

3 Who is the target market?
College level art students in art, writing, and film. Also, professors who wish to bridge relevant contemporary theory, teaching and their personal artistic practices to create a studio environment for students that is energized, rigorous and self-fulfilling.

4 How does this book attract this market?
Well, the aesthetic of the book will be a major, “make or break” aspect. It will seem very unusual to some and extremely dynamic and exciting to others. I don’t necessarily care about the former. The aesthetic of the book which is at times raw, refined, sophisticated, grungy, eclectic, et al. Seeks to inspire by being from the outset a VISUAL and TACTILE experience. The way it is made and what it is comprised of will illustrate to students that their own worlds, the things around them are filled with potential. As John Cage said, “Anything can be art, all you need to do is change your mind.” The book, Ordinary Aura has connections to artists like Martin Kippenberger and Dieter Roth in that it seeks all-inclusiveness, expansiveness of thought and material exploration while deconstructing its very form as a book. Other artists such as Gabriel Orozco and Rirkrit Tiravanija come to mind.
Ordinary Aura is timely since the way it is made mirrors in a physical sense, what websites and blogs do virtually (And as a matter of fact, there will be a Web component of Ordinary Aura). Our text will be constantly rewritten by those that use it. This sense of authorship and exploration seems to me a very attractive element for those with artistic minds.

5 You say there will be a web component?
Certainly. A WIKI seems like a likely way for a constantly growing, publicly written “encyclopedia” of thought to be formed. Through this, classes and individual artists from around the world could meet, work together on ideas, search information, share their artwork, notify others of relevant links and information, exhibitions, etc. The possibilities are, as with the textbook, as endless as the imagination of the artists using it.
With the Web, elements such as sound and moving images can be utilized which expands the potential to other media and also more people.

why?

hey all. as i have been reading the blog, talking with adam, thinking through the "inventory", and imagining where this all might be going (the show and also beyond), i am continually brought to the question, "why?". convinced that this show and this group is important, i nonetheless ask, "why are we doing this?"

i think that this is a very valid, if not critical, question and one that deserves consideration as we prepare for the show. i would really like to hear your thoughts our purpose. here are a few other related questions that could inform our conversation:

why should Christians produce a collaborative show?
how is this show different from others?
does this show have a distinct purpose?
why are you personally interested in this project?

i am opening these questions to everyone, and welcome your thoughts- briefly or at length. i'm interested to hear your responses, and i think that this will help us solidify the vision, cohesion, and execution of the show.

briefly, i would start off by saying that i think we should recognize that we have been given faith and a creative voice by grace (ti 3:5) and with purpose (ep 8-10). also, we know that all things exist for the glory of God (co 1:16). therefore, this should not be a self-serving interprise (however that translates).

secondly, we should remember that we were made to exist in community (jn 13:35) but also to live in the world (mt 5:14) (both purposeful and related). actually, i believe that the community we develop may be the most important and influential (is that important?) aspect of our project. i am suggesting that we keep in mind our potential for community offline, and subsequent influence, as we proceed with the project and as mentioned, beyond. whatever that could be. i know that adam, jered, chris, and i have been talking about this since iowa and wondering what may come of our relationships and shared interests/vision.

with all that in mind, i think that gathering the group prior to september, even in small, separate groups, would be great on many levels. i also think that the motivations and purposes that surface in this dialogue could inform the structure and plans ahead. again, i believe that this project and group are important and have great potential for the show and in the future. love to hear your thoughts...

Tentative checklist

As Adam's email circulates requesting of us a list of works and statements, etc. for the UICA's contractual agreements, I wondered if we could revisit the idea of outlining where we are so far...

What do we have so far? And, what do we need?

I The Cloud of Witnesses- the portraits I have been working on are in full swing. The first 30 are showing in Raleigh at the moment and I start the next batch today.

II Adam's "City of Heaven"- cardboard/mixed-media installation at the Heartland

III Barb's small paintings on panels. BArb is heading to NYC for 2.5 weeks to be in the Drawing Marathon at the NY Studio School and is bound to produce drawings that could accompany this show and appear in the

IV Book? IS this happening at all? I have been accumulating scraps and sketchbook pages and photographs... This blog is itself becoming a tome.

V Alan's incredible photographs from Uganda and Turkey.

VI Seth's TextTree projections

VII Seth's Spirit Writing projections

VIII Floor drawing? Based on Seth's proposal of a map of the City of Heaven or something else...

IX Kevin's Omniscient Camera from Times Square

What esle do we have??????

What do we need?

I Design for the postcard... ASAP! This needs to go out soon, believe it or not.

II SOUND??

Anything else?

I think it would be good at this point to talk a little about our vision for the space. I know it seems impossible to start arranging work and I don't think we should try, but getting more images of work in progress might help us all to fuel our work and relate it to what the others are doing. I can not help but think in terms of installation when dealing with a collaborative show... The space is large enough that we won't need to make everything mesh Martha Stewart style, but for cohesiveness and clarity, I think we should strive for distinct dialogue/connections among the work.

holy city of the future

I've had this idea in the back of my head for the past couple of days; it might be interesting, but I can't tell yet. It came from looking at this image, another shaker drawing, of the Holy City.

Obviously, this is a detailed map, with a key that is, irritatingly, not included with any version I've found so far. The neat thing is, this City apparently exists in the air, or in the heavens, directly above the Shaker settlements of Hancock and Edgefield. Hancock was then much smaller than this, but the text that accompanies the drawing apparently prophesies that Hancock will grow until it merges with Edgefield, and then the new mega-settlement will be a perfect earthly replica of the Holy City, directly beneath it.

So I've been looking at the floor plan of the Monroe Gallery, one of the first things posted to this blog. What I'd really like to do is to take this floor plan, reproduce it, and re-label it with the aspects it will have in the future, when it becomes the eventual Holy City (or Holy Gallery). This would be an enterprise in fiction; it would be a fake key to the grounds. We could maybe paint lines into the floor of the gallery and number the various areas, if that's allowed, so that if people are standing in the door they know they're standing in the Gate of Forgiveness or whatever.

I haven't mentioned it yet in this blog, because it doesn't really seem relevant, but for a long time I've been fascinated by old science fiction pulp imagery, the kind has this now-naive-seeming enthusiasm for the future as a place in which humans will have been alchemically transmuted into something better, war will have been cured like a disease, and so forth. So when I was thinking about this faux future Holy City, I immediately started to think in terms of sf pulp imagery; cherubs with jetpacks on, heavenly paradises consisting of revolutionary new labor-saving devices, and so forth. This doesn't follow so clearly out of everything else we've been talking about in this blog, I know; I'm just mentioning it.

I suppose I could justify it by framing the use of sf tropes as transformation of current everyday materials; cars are made better by becoming flying cars, dishwashers become sentient, we ourselves become functionally immortal, impervious to disease. But whatever.

I've also thought about using it in conjunction with the spirit writing thing, so that labels for the various parts would be writing themselves.

some epistemology

i've been interested for awhile in the work of historians of science and philosophers of knowledge who seek to criticize the enlightenment emphasis on the material without resorting to "un-scientific" reliances on the spiritual or hidden.

A big one for me in this area is the late Michael Polanyi, who was somewhat in the same room as Thomas Kuhn, who is more familiar to most as the origin of the much abused term, "paradigm." Polanyi devised a term "tacit knowledge" to describe a certain kind of extra-sensory knowledge that is crucial to science, to life, social functioning. He opposed this view to materialist science, in which meaning and knowledge arise from the division of the world into quantifiable parts.

Here is a an excerpt from a short essay where he explained this lifetime of work in a few paragraphs:

Unbridled detailing, the ideal advocated by Laplace and his modern followers, not only destroys our knowledge of things we most want to know; it clouds our understanding of elementary perception--our first contact with the world of inanimate matter and of living beings and our initial act of self-transcendence. Against the self-destructive commitment to ultimate lucidity, I propose the theory of tacit knowing. A theory of knowledge which endorses our capacities for understanding transcendence in the world will be found to establish self-transcendence.

I look at my hand, another face, or a machine. I recognize its area by its enclosed contours, by the relation between the object itself and its background within my field of vision. While I attend to the object itself I am relying on multiple clues-shapes, colours, extensions, perhaps in changing relations to each other. But I do not focus directly on each aspect of the object in its field. I have awareness of many of these aspects of the whole. In the case of the human face I rely on an awareness of its many features for attending to the characteristic appearance of a particular physiognomy. Attending to the details implicitly while focally addressing myself to the whole, I integrate the features into the cast they jointly form. The act of perception, therefore, comprises two types of awareness. I have subsidiary awareness of multiple facial features while I integrate these aspects into the face as a whole to which I attend focally. I perceive things through the dual activity of subsidiary and focal awareness. This is, in outline, the theory of tacit knowing.

Subsidiary awareness is controlled by focal awareness. The first type of awareness leaves itself open to the integrating function of the second. I am not able to specify with distinctness the particulars of a comprehensive entity. In this sense I know more than I can tell. I rely on my subsidiary awareness of the details of an object for attending to the coherent entity which is their meaning. There is, then, a from-to movement in all knowing. If, in allegiance to the ideal of total lucidity, I claim to know directly and distinctly aspects I actually only rely on subsidiarily, all comprehensive entities are destroyed, a program of self-and world-destruction results, a "world" composed of bits of matter in motion in which nobody lives. I rely not only on the several aspects of an object as I attend from these to a coherent view of the whole; I also rely on my body with its multiple and complex levels of functioning as I perceive things away from my body in the external world.

My body is the only thing in the world I normally never experience as an object. Instead I experience my body in terms of the world to which I am attending from my body. I continuously rely on my body as a subsidiary means for observing objects and other comprehensive entities outside and for using these entities for my own purposes.

The kind of knowledge I have of my body by dwelling in it is the paradigm of knowing particulars subsidiarily with a bearing on the comprehensive entity formed by them. Hence when I rely on my awareness of particulars for attending to a whole I handle things as I handle my body. In this sense I know comprehensive entities by indwelling their functional parts, as if they were parts of my body. Such is my conception of knowing by indwelling.

Through indwelling I participate in comprehensive entities, from my own body and the objects I perceive, to the lives of my companions, and the theories we employ to understand inanimate matter and living beings. I partly transform myself in that which I am observing and thereby extend my range of knowing to include knowledge of all the hierarchies--from inanimate matter to the frameworks of our convivial settings and the firmament of obligations which supervene the operations of our intelligence within these frameworks.

This is why a commitment to unbridled lucidity tends to destroy understanding of complex matters. Focus only on the particulars of a comprehensive entity and their joint meaning is effaced. Our conception of the entity is destroyed, leaving us only with bits and pieces scattered about in random meaninglessness.

Our view of life must account for how we know life; biological theories must allow for their own discovery and employment. Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence. Beginning with our own embodiment our theory of knowledge must endorse the ways we manifestly transcend our embodiment by acts of indwelling and extension into more subtle and intangible realms of being, where we meet our ultimate ends.

Aura - definition

I looked "aura" up in the old Webster's Collegiate dictionary. I will go ahead and post my copy for the terms and a few others that relate.

Aura 1a. a subtle sensory stimulus (as an aroma) b. a distinctive atmosphere surrounding a given source (the place had an aura of mystery) 2. a luminous radiation; NIMBUS 3. a subjective sensation (as of lights) esperienced before an attack of some nervous disorders.

related term NIMBUS Check it out in the extended entry

nimbus 1a. a luminous vapor cloud or atmosphere about a god or goddess when on earth. b. a cloud or atmosphere (as of romance) about a person or thing. 2. an indication (as a circle) of a radiant light or glory about the head of a drawn or sculpted divinity, saint, or sovereign. 3a. a raincloud that is of uniform grayness and extends over the entire sky. b. a cloud from which rain is falling.

gutai group

hi there,
adam invited me to join the conversation about the show. as a brief introduction: i live in chicago, preparing to go to the SAIC for an MA in art history. i'm a christian and am not particularly interested in christian art [for similar reasons mentioned by kevin]. if i have a faith interest in art, it's more in terms of how the spirit manifests itself, as opposed to how the artist has tried to manifest it.
there are a number of conversations i'd like to join in here, but for now, i thought i'd mention the Gutai group. There a post WWII group from japan that was concerned with the everyday as it relates to an eastern traditional perspecitve on the earth/spirituality/ancestors,etc. apparently, they were quite the break through for the country's art scene, there was a lot of abstract expressionism mimcry going on. the shock of wwII brought these artists to rethink their approach [away from a western perspective].
Gutai art does not alter matter; it gives matter life... In Gutai art, the human spirit and matter, opposed as they are, shake hands... My respect goes out to the works of Pollock and Mathieu. Their works are the cries uttered by matter: by oil paint and enamel themselves." (Yoshihara, Gutai manifesto, 1956)

you might have seen some of their other work; tightly stretched plastic between trees filled with red-dyed water, a bright colored cloth suspended just above the ground interacting with wind. or a favorite, some big magazine like Time found out about them and flew over for an interview. upon arrival they were shown the work: three painted [live] chickens. they put away their cameras and went home.
the gutai group were explicitly a-political and held onto objecthood. i'm not sure, but this seems to be a bit of a break from most artists concerned with the 'ordinary'. a lot of this type of work seems to deal with politics or the practice of an exchange with the audience.
political: dadaist anarchistic events, guerilla girls, etc.
in terms of exchange: artists like manzoni [sp? sold his shit in a can/signed people]. or public art groups providing some social service in order to improve/mystify the everyday or to create a formerly non-existent community.
i hope this is making some sense. i haven't read all the postings, but it seems that the notion of exchange or politics aren't a large part of the show. personally, i find it refreshing that neither are a priority in the show, considering the times, politics and religion are horribly tiring.

rowley

definitions

i wanna get more philosophical than I perhaps have the right too here for a minute. (I don't have a great command of the language, I'm kinda homegrown here.)

what do we mean by aura? i haven't seen much in the posts here about that yet, maybe i missed it in the original emails, before i came along.

are we using it as a substitute/surrogate for "divine?"

thinking about what i know of the word aura -

if something has an intangible essence, then it has an aura. here the essential nature of the thing is unseen, not perceived, but known through extrasensory means. not empirically verifiable.

aura is present, but not empirically knowable. enlightenment science would have us define the aura as a matter of FAITH, or perhaps BELIEF, where faith is defined as belief without any reason to believe.

and probably most science would say there is no "essence" or aura of a thing anyway - the thing is there in front of us, what you see is what you get. (except in maybe quantum physics, I guess.)

two questions here:

- why should the essential nature of the thing not exist in the realm of the sensory?
- why must senses be the only source for real knowledge?

ordinary

the build up to summer 2004
has come from a simmer to a boil,
it's boiling, ladies and gentlemen,
let's strike the hot iron.
things are really happening these days
the water is ready

i was really fascinated with the days activities/conversation on this blog
and enjoyed this feeling of engagement i witnessed
chris and i spoke briefly on the phone today, planning to talk more later
i was in the shop today sending out grades, and thowing things out.
home depot. taco bell.
also i had to sumit my grades by wednesday, which is the first day of summer session 2004. so i did that today, still needing to prepare a syllabus, order materials, and dial in the shop. also i took some photo files from alan harmon over to be printed at instructional graphics. 8 images, from turkey, mostly, and uganda. we spoke about several of them on the phone earlier today. the evil eye, wings, rugs, pieces of metal, paradise paintings, walls. alan talked about posting those images, which i may get up before he does.
it turns out a 21x29 print costs about 26 dollars.
friday, i am closing on the mayfield house. i will be moving over the month of june. also planned: garage demolition party, swingset removal, painting rooms, a small class of six making big heads, puppets, unlocking the calvin print shop, making a design for the 2005 festival of faith and music booklet, and perhaps a yard sale.
it has been raining quite a bit here lately, and was cool today.
yesterday i went for a moped ride with rowley kennerk and ryan thompson.
we had ice cream and arrived at home, the last minute raining.
we saw roads flooded
rowley was hoping to post something ealier.
seth, can he gain access to post?

tonight i am going to the debut of dynamite's monday night at the avenue. ryan, phil, matt playing music and videos.
there are new shows up at uica, which i have not seen yet.
the monroe show, loop & snip, has some sculptural sweaters, quilts, and collages.
chris and i talked a little bit about the mailer. we were thinking perhaps the size of the circular ruins postcars, a double. what are some thoughts on the design?
chris mentioned schwitters when we talked.
i am always excited about the postcard, i must say. it sees the world.

more later
wolpa

all for now

i'll put some posts together in the next day or two.

for now i just went through and tried to comment a bunch of places - sorry, maybe too much time has gone by for my comments to make sense.

a list for now:

1 - wiki wiki wiki
2 - subject matter is far from the only problem with trapperkeeper-art
3 - presence/absence and sound
4 - i'm really freaked out about iraq and those prison photos and our leaders and the christian support for them. i've been freaked out since 9/11, but I'm getting more worried all the time, and it's not just the harper's magazine talking. what the xxxx is going on???!!!
5 - acknowledging signal interference without fetishizing it
6 - can i upload mp3's to this site? if not I can put them elsewhere and then link them. i'd like to share some things.
7 - the village, by shyamalan. comes out in july, looks good. looks like some things adam might be interested in. the TERROR of what is OUT THERE

uhhh that's all. sorry. i'm blurting irresponsibly.

crawling out

hey everybody
sorry i've been absent. aint nothing holy about my days of late, the ordinary consisted this month of nothing so rich as the grass - ordinary was plodding through a fast schedule without looking anywhere but the next step in front of me. after final crits and dept politics and handwringing about everything i'm crawling back out from the shadow. gonna read up on all your posts this next day or two, post some things myself. need to do some reading elsewhere too.
i met jared last week at his open studios in nyc, that was great.

workshop

Hi Adam,

I've been looking over the fall exhibition schedule to see if anything
jumps out as a learning experience. "Ordinary Aura" absolutely does
just that.

I was already hoping to create a kind of collaborative process class or
workshop before I saw the show information. What these artists are
working with in terms of materials and processes seems likely to
translate into an inspired collaborative project created locally.
Potential ramifications would include area artists and students in
various disciplines working together and communicating more often even
after the project is completed.

First, do you know if any of the artists are planning to be in town for
the reception or any time during the show? And second, would you like
to brainstorm ideas for a one-day workshop?

Thanks for your help. I'm excited to see the show.

John Rich
Program Coordinator, Education and Literature

dynamic text and trees

I've changed my original idea for an interactive web project;right now I'm thinking of restructuring the graphical interface, so I'll try to explain what I'm thinking. My apologies if it doesn't come across.

I've changed my original idea, to something that would allow any users to add a single word at a time. The result would be a big labyrinth of words, with an infinite number of possible paths from word to word. And any new user could choose to add a new word or words at any point. In the space, this would be projected; my idea is that the projection wouldn't be of a user in the space navigating the site, but of someone else at some remote location navigating, so that people in the space would be seeing someone else's experience of the text.

So far, I've been planning a navigation like this: the word your mouse pointer is over is largest, with the words linked to it a little smaller and greyer. When you roll over the next word in the chain, that in turn becomes foregrounded, like this:

When you're over a word, you can click on that little plus sign to add a word leading off from that word. Thus you can interject your own poetry into the existing storyline, or what have you.

For a mockup of how the adding of elements will work, with circles instead of words, check this out.

The problem I'm facing now, before I go too much further with the technical stuff, is that this will very quickly become a hugely complex structure, possible difficulty to navigate. It occurs to me now that Chris' Shaker tree might be a good visual metaphor to use, to organize all the words.

But the tree and the Spirit message makes me think that there could be more than one dynamic text project going on. For instance, it would be technologically much easier for me to make a tree shape out of words, each of which could be randomly changing over time into another word drawn from a story or Biblical verse or such.

For what it's worth, here's a small experiment I did with fading text a while ago. It's a very big flash file.

Shaker-style, Fra and found

I am attempting to post a collection of images to address some aesthetics and ideas. Some jpegs refuse to cooperate which means I will have to finish this up tomorrow, but this should give you a sense of what I am thinking as I examine Shaker drawings, paintings of Fra Angelico's and relate found scraps of drawings to these.

Shaker drawings. Barb can talk about this more, but we have been taken in a big way by these drawings recently. In them you see a beautiful blend/blur of art and life. These things are made as invitations, notices regarding weddings and the like... to map the villages, to celebrate, to channel words delivered by angels. They are fascinating to me for aesthetic reasons, but especially the way they stem from daily activity which we continue to relate to our project. There is also something of the "unicorn style" drawing we talked about earlier... or what that type of simple drawing aspires to. In the Shaker work, though, there is great substance and well, PURPOSE. I really like the one that is the "Spirit Message" and the way it relates to Seth's idea for generating a story... bits and parts from disparate authors. I like the strange way typography functions here too. There is another image I will post later entitled, "Tree of Light/Blazing Tree" which is a gorgeous symmetrical tree made of stenciled (seemingly) leaves arranged and surrounded by wavy red lines. Simple, effective and very filled with potential for us, I think-- I see it as an image that could easily translate into a large wall painting. (For that matter, a whole treeline could surround the space, painted in muted colors, they would not compete with hung imagery but rather serve to encompass the space and organize the work. Additionally, Adam and I talked originally about the presence of live plants due to the size of the place and also the large front window) The tree also appears in a stylized manner to reinforce the image of NETWORK: parts into a whole. An easy analogy is the flowchart seen in the Peter Halley pic as well as the thinking of internet usage in the text piece, et al.

The Fra Angelico pictures are incredible simply as religious paintings. There are some strange things happening in them that I never saw before... the bloody head on the saint is gory as it is repeated in painting after painting, and the disembodied hands and heads of the mockers of Christ introduce TIME and action into a painted, frozen language in a way that startles me.

I liked that I happen to find a drawing of a trumpet on my walk the other day. Drawn on the back of a recital program along with the reminder to "call deana". The imagery is good, I think, but doubled with the person's sense of place and activity (the concert) and then my finding it and relocating it... there is something good about this archiving and imagery stemming from the everyday. Grocery lists would be another example of the cast off bits that serve purpose, contain text and typography, etc... I have been finding them a lot too, recently love the handwriting differences. There is also this desire I have to understand the person by what is on their list, but they all tend toward the banal of T.P. and bread.

Anyway, Seth just helped me sort out the jpeg problem and so I will post the other few pictures before I leave.

lil' ramblin'

Congratulations, Jered on what sounds like (and looks) like a solid showing in Chicago. I would love to hear you discuss the background for these works and any relations to Ordinary Aura that can be drawn out of these.

Adam and I did have a bit of a gripe session...

the other day when he left the Stray show. I feel like I have passed my stage of being interested in unicorn (Im actually not sure I ever had one) art and really feel like the glut of faux-naif work we are seeing is a reaction to the spotlight given to so many outsider artists as well as an accomodation ofyouth-oriented culture in art and, for that matter, a resurgence in "nostalgia" as subject matter. Lots of '80s stuff here in G'Boro.
It seems the results have been a lot of "trapper keeper" art as Adam described it... some of it, like Banks Violette touches on Gothic/Heavy Metal which is certainly linked to this adolescent dark side and which we are tapping into in this show with the intro of horror imagery. Our challenge will be to elevate and not use it simply as is which it seems so many artists are doing. My feeling about the violent images is that they are counterpoint to images that are NOT violent. In the portraits I am doing (and will post as soon as I get them over here to the computer lab) images from Evil Dead, Dracula, zombie flicks all reside alongside portraits of historic figures and friends... the idea being that a woman and her child next to a strangled victim speaks to our living in a FALLEN WORLD. They happen in parallel. Additionally, the horrific imagery comes always from pop culture/films which certain people will recognize overtly or through "collective memory" like the famous Christopher Lee Dracula. This bring up the fact that all of us have seen these things, filled our heads with this violence, Satanism, etc. and what does this mean? What choices do we make? We do agree that this exists, so now what?

Technically, as you will see, these portraits are being done 30" x 22", B+W with a sprayed gold oval border. Once you see them, please contribute ideas for me... or better yet, do some portraits yourselves. I think the more the better. Remember, they will be our "cloud of witnesses". Amidst the portraits will be drawings of birds... all kinds to tie in to the possibility of bird sounds filling the gallery. The birds are also witnesses.
The oval format will be repeated in "The City of Heaven" (What are we calling this installation at The Heartland?) in the form of peepholes in a wall. This sculpture will be a cardboard (outsider!) city that fills Adam's gallery and which will be viewed by remote access at the UICA. The layout of Adam's gallery allows for a walkway into the building to allow visitors to actually see the city in the flesh. However, they will do this only by peepholes in a wall that separates them from the sculpture. So again, the idea of parts vs. wholes and living at a remove comes in and makes us aware of our active looking. So far, Adam and I have talked about the prospect of his sculpture class and Calvin volunteers to orchestrate this construction. Any other ideas?

That's it for now.

audio presence

Chris, Barbara and I talked about the show last night, and one thing we agreed is that so far, we're all thinking about presence as a big part of this show. Making people aware of their immediate presence, making them aware of the presence of possibly forgotten, mundane objects, what it means to be truly present. Coming out of that, we started thinking that audio should be a big part of the experience of this show; Chris in particular talked about the idea of making people aware of their own immediate presence in the space, which could be done perhaps with dissociative audio that would disorient the audience, make them pay attention to the space they're in.

I know this is something Kevin's thought about a lot in previous works -- we talked about his project "Alone Together" in particular -- so Kevin, when things lighten up for you a bit, we'd love to hear what you have to say about this. My own immediate brainstorming idea was of a sort of layered audio space -- recording sounds as they happen in the exhibition space and playing them back layered over each other, so that at any one moment you're hearing everything that's happened in that space over the past twenty-four hours.

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...

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.

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.

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