Send Me a Poet :: Open Thread

[General] Carpenter snapped up his intercom. "Send me a poet," he said.

He waited, and waited...and waited...while America sorted feverishly through its two hundred and ninety millions of hardened and sharpened experts, its specialized tools to defend the American Dream of beauty and poetry and the Better Things in Life. He waited for them to find a poet, not understanding the endless delay, the fruitless search, not understanding why Bradley Scrim laughed and laughed and laughed at this final, fatal disappearance.

"The Disappearing Act," by Alfred Bester (1953)

Sixty years ago the science fiction writer Alfred Bester predicted a 22nd-century, very lengthy world war being fought by America in which the atrocities were so severe that more and more soldiers returning from battle not only withdrew into an autistic world within their own minds, but could literally physically disappear for periods of time into a fantasy world of their own creation, full of people, places and things anachronistically collected from their dreams. They would physically vanish from their secret hospital ward (Ward T) for hours and then days and then weeks at a time, leaving their doctors and generals behind scratching their heads about this disappearing act, this human telekinetic evolution. 

Once they thought they understood this new power somewhat, their attention shifted toward the potential it might give the military to get the upper hand in the seemingly endless war to protect our cultural commitment to "beauty and poetry and the Better Things in Life" (by transporting American troops back in time to defeat the enemy then).

The problem they had in understanding the soliders' power well enough to actively harness it was they no longer technically understood the process for creating dreams. In order to win this war to protect our way of life, the country had forced everyone into specialized fields of study, ensuring the generals could call on experts on any practical topic at any moment to respond quickly to the unpredictable progression of the war.

The hell these disappearing soldiers had to live through before this ability came to them is left to the reader's imagination, but the hell awaiting those people who were unable to figure out how to travel into their own private American Dream, whether to win the war or escape it, was hauntingly imagined by the short story's end. In the story, General Carpenter, who was leading the war effort, called back from prison a rogue historian (Bradley Scrim, imprisoned for pointing out that the effort to save the American Dream was actually killing it) to help him understand how and/or why these soldiers were disappearing. Scrim, rather bitter for being imprisoned and fully aware of Carpenter's militaristic designs on this new power, is here explaining to Carpenter what he was able to determine by examining the soldiers in Ward T:

“The concept is almost beyond understanding. These people have discovered how to turn dreams into reality. They know how to enter their dream realities. They can stay there, live there, perhaps forever. My God, Carpenter, this is your American dream. It’s miracle-working, immortality, Godlike-creation, mind over matter... It must be explored. It must be studied. It must be given to the world.”
    
“Can you do it, Scrim?”
    
“No, I cannot. I’m a historian. I’m noncreative, so it’s beyond me. You need a poet...a man who understands the creation of dreams. From creating dreams on paper or canvas it oughtn’t to be too difficult to take the step to creating dreams in actuality.”
    
“A poet? Are you serious?”
    
“Certainly I’m serious. Don’t you know what a poet is? You’ve been telling us for five years that this war is being fought to save the poets.”
    
“Don’t be facetious, Scrim, I—....  

"Send a poet into Ward T. He’ll learn how they do it. He’s the only man who can. A poet is half doing it anyway. Once he learns, he can teach, your psychologists and anatomists. Then they can teach us; but the poet is the only man who can interpret between those shock cases and your experts.”

Scrim's joke on Carpenter, of course, is that he knows there are no poets left in this highly professionalized society.

Two things I've read recently have made me remember this story (which I had first read in high school). One was Anton Vidokle's provocative essay on (among other things) the professionalization of the contemporary art world, "Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art."

In discussing how Warhol had masterfully bridged the business and art worlds toward his own individualist ends, Vidokle concludes:

Warhol’s economic independence seems to have been misunderstood. The independence that came from his bridging of the bohemian sphere and the sphere of day-to-day commerce has been converted into a vast proliferation of so-called artistic practices that treat art as a profession. But art is not a profession. What does being professional actually mean under the current conditions of de-skilling in art? We should probably be less concerned with being full-time, art-school-trained, professional artists, writers, or curators—less concerned with measuring our artistic worth in these ways. Since most of us are not expected to perfect any specific techniques or master any craft—unlike athletes or classical musicians, for example—and given that we are no longer tied to working in specific mediums, perhaps it’s fine to be a part-time artist? After all, what is the expertise of a contemporary artist? Perhaps a certain type of passionate hobbyism, a committed amateurism, is okay: after all, we still live in a reality largely shaped by talented amateurs of the nineteenth century, like Thomas Edison and so many others. I think it’s perfectly acceptable to work in some other capacity in the arts, or in an entirely different field, and also to make art: sometimes this situation actually produces much more significant work than the “professional art” we see at art fairs and biennials. Ilya Kabakov supported himself for decades by being a children’s book illustrator. Marcel Duchamp worked as a librarian and later sold Brancusi’s work to make a living, while refusing to be dependent on sales of his own work.

but the other thing I've read recently that reminded me of Bester's cautionary tale, was the chapter in Douglas Rushkoff's brilliant new book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now on the "collapse of the narrative." He begins his explanation of why he believes we are living through the collapse of traditional narrative with a very compelling description of the importance of storytelling:

As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values and then passing them on to future generations. Our children demand we tell them stories before they go to bed, so we lace those narratives with the values we want them to take with them into their dreams and their adult lives. Likewise, the stories and myths of our religions and national histories preserve and promote certain values over time. That's one reason civilizations and their values can persist over centuries.

Rushkoff's basic argument as to why narrative is collapsing is that the values and collective goals our stories have until now expressed and preserved and (and therefore communicated forward to successive generations to guide us in moving forward) have relied on our culture being "future-focused,"  and yet, according to him, we no longer are:

When people stop looking to the future, they start looking at the present. Investments begin to matter less for what they might someday be worth, because people are no longer thinking so much about "someday" as they are about today. A stock's "story"--the rationale for why it is going to go up--begins to matter less than its actual value in real time. What are my stocks worth as of this moment? What do I really own? What is the value of my portfolio right now?

The stock market's infinite expansion was just one of many stories dependent on our being such a future-focused culture. All the great "isms" of the twentieth century--from capitalism to communism to Protestantism to republicanism to utopianism to messianism--depended on big stories to keep them going. None of them were supposed to be so effective in the short term or present. They all promised something better in the future for having suffered through something not so great today. (Or at least offered something better today that whatever pain and suffering supposedly went on back in the day.) The ends justified the means. Today's war was tomorrow's liberation. Today's suffering was tomorrow's salvation. Today's work was tomorrow's reward.

Rushkoff argues that these stories worked for a while in the US, they "helped us construct a narrative experience of our lives, our nation, our culture, and our faith. We adopted an entirely storylike way of experiencing and talking about the world." And that the act (or art) of storytelling became a valued part of our culture itself.  

He quotes Aristotle, though, who said: "When the storytelling in a culture goes bad, the result is decadence."

Indeed, here in the US, after the turn of the century, Rushkoff argues things began to move so quickly we lost our collective future-focused patience (the "discontinuity generated by the 9/11 attacks should not be underestimated" in understanding this, he notes). With that lack of patience, we also seem to have lost the time we're willing to dedicate to traditional, linear storytelling. That art form takes a certain degree of patience to endure the set-up, the character development, the story arc (from introduction to crisis to climax to conclusion).

I know myself that during and in the aftermath of 9/11, I was not consuming information patiently enough to endure such time-consuming constructs. I wanted to know what was going on now! because I was convinced our very survival, and the survival of "the American Dream of beauty and poetry and the Better Things in Life" depended on us having access to that information now. 

Indeed, since then, even when we told ourselves we simply must relax, we increasingly did so with DVD or online libraries of stories and, very importantly, remote controls! that enabled us to skip over the boring parts, skip the development if we wanted to, essentially, skip the narrative and live entirely in the now of our favorite bits...the crisis...the climax. Instead of spending an evening relaxing, surrendering our minds to another person's carefully crafted story, we could construct our own faster-paced diversion, channel surfing from crisis to crisis, climax to climax. No commercials, no painfully slow development...no traditional narrative...and, taken to this practice's logical conclusions, eventually no reason for anyone to create the more traditional vessels to carry forward the experience of our lives, our nation, our culture and our faith. I highly recommend Rushkoff on this. I've been obsessed with it lately.

In fact, my previous, admittedly strange, post was an experiment in traditional storytelling from a post-narrative-collaspe point of view. What I mean by that, is it intentionally begins by acknowledging time constraints (under-edited, raw prose, choices I realized were probably wrong, but which were left in anyway because developing the replacement transition would take too long); and yet still acknowledging the role of stories to convey values (lest we lose them entirely); doing so via the time-tested role of universal (i.e., project-able) stereotypes, motifs, and symbols; and yet conceding through a Sloterdijk-esque admission that even though there's something off about our "hero's" motivation, he's the best we got, so we might as well move forward with him, because our Beckettian sense of self tells us that move forward we must, at all costs.

All of which is not designed to launch a new career in literature, but more humbly to simply open up a more in-depth discussion of the role of story-telling in a post-narrative culture. Consider this an open thread on that topic.

Let Me Tell You a Story

[Author's note: I've been working on this story for quite some time...it's coming along nicely now, and so I'm sharing a draft here...all details are subject to change, though, according to current events mostly...just so you know...]

In a country far away there lived a young, simple man, in a small apartment, in a quaint village. His name was Amaro.

Amaro lived by himself, not counting his cat (named Starpaw...because it had a star shape on its...but you're already ahead of me, aren't you?). Nor counting his ficus (which I mention only because he talked to it sometimes, having heard that that would make it grow faster...but...we're not really interested here in how well or not Amaro's ficus grew, so we'll just...uh, just forget I mentioned the ficus). 

Even though his apartment had a built-in book shelf, he didn't read much, so Amaro used it to display the various medals he had received in the Boy Scouts for achievements in things like First Aid or tying knots. He also used it as the place he kept his keys and wallet when he came home, alone, each evening.

Simple as he was right now, though, Amaro had plans. Among them were a beautiful wife, at least three children (two boys and one girl), a summer cottage near Lake Wagaravoaka, a position of respect eventually within the company that recently hired him as a junior associate, and one day a very expensive watch he could leave behind as a family heirloom.

This last part of his plans consumed a great deal of Amaro's time. He was frequently up late researching the world's best watches on the Internet and had even set up a Google alert for record-breaking auction prices. His current plan was to buy a Patek Philippe, but (because he didn't live anywhere near the London, Paris, or Geneva salons where they were sold) he secretly hoped he'd stumble across one that no one else quite knew the value of at an estate sale...or some similar scenario...especially if he was to get one on his current salary.

A few years later, on a day in late Summer, no closer to his other plans, Amaro did happen to read of an auction of the belongings of a popular local dignitary who had no heirs. Amaro thought the odds were probably pretty good, and indeed after searching Google for images, low and behold there was a Patek Phillipe on the dignitary's wrist at a ceremony to open a new sewage plant.

Amaro immediately sold all the stock in his uncle's company he got as a graduation present and the four-door sedan his grandfather had given him as his inheritance when he passed away a few years back (he didn't drive it much anyway). Between the two sales he amassed roughly 2,000,000 chmartas...a small fortune for someone like him, but a solid investment nonetheless in the heirloom he now understood was his destiny.

The auction was held at the dignitary's huge house on the outskirts of the village. It turned out to be quite the local occasion, with fine hats on many a head and a virtual who's who of people from the village attending. The room where the auctioneer had set up (with a podium, a side table, and rows of chairs) had been the dignitary's grand dinning room, and as the strong afternoon sun gleamed through the stain-glassed windows with colorful pastoral scenes, it made it quite festive, if a touch too warm. By the time Amaro arrived, all the seats were taken with people fanning themselves, and so he stood in the back of the room.

Amaro studied the room as the auctioneer began with items he had no interest in: some artwork, some rare books, a scotch collection, boxes of linens, and an assortment of silver platters and such. In the second row Amaro recognized one of the Vice Presidents of his company, a Mr. Srkortoz, who had obviously arrived early enough to get a good seat but had yet to bid on anything. A few rows back sat Cristiana, the baker's daughter with the wonderful child-bearing hips, the soft kind eyes, and the long black hair. She had bid on one of the boxes of linens, but backed down when the price got too high. Several seats over sat Herzimao, the village's best realtor, who seemed to get exclusives on all the best properties long before anyone else knew their owners were thinking of selling. 

"I'll have to put a bug in his ear about cottages on Lake Wagaravoaka," thought Amaro.

"Next up," declared the auctioneer in a tone he reserved for truly special items, "We have a truly special item from the estate: an antique gold watch. Just look at that craftsmanship, Ladies and Gentleman. Let's start the bidding at 60,000 chmartas."

Amaro could feel a rivulet of sweat stream down his back. He knew that watch could fetch the equivalent of 3,800,000 chmartas in London or Paris. He only hoped no one else in the room knew its true value. He decided to play it cool and let the bidding peter out before striking.

After the bids reached 1,000,000 chmartas, though, it was apparent to Amaro he wasn't the only one who really wanted that watch. The skunk Srkortoz raised his hand for the third time, sending the bid to 1,010,000. In a flash, though, Cristiana's hand shot up and it was 1,015,000. For the next flurry of bids, the two of them essentially kept their arms raised, vigorously wiggling their hands to indicate, impatiently, Yes, Yes, the next step...I'll pay it...I'll pay it.

After the price reached 1,045,000, though, their arms came slowly down. The last bid belonged to Srkortoz, and Amaro could see by her body language that Cristiana was struggling with the idea of committing to 1.5 million chmartas for a piece of jewelry.

She didn't need to worry about it, as it turned out. 

As cool a customer as one would expect him to be under pressure, Herzimao raised his hand, and the bid was 1.5 million. The smile on Herzimao's smug face told Amaro that the realtor too had read the slouch in Srkortoz's shoulders as a sign of resignation. 

"Going once at 1.5 million," the auctioneer rejoiced. "Going twice..."

"Two million chmartas!" came Amaro's voice from the back of the room. A collective gasp and a hundred heads swung around to witness the audacious act of arrogance. The indignation on Hermizmao's face was matched only by the heartbreaking look in Cristiana's teary eyes. As for Srkortoz, Amaro was not quite sure he had ever seen anyone that color of bright red. All three of their faces conveyed one crystal clear message though: Amaro was persona nongrata, permanently.

"Sold!" cried the auctioneer, with a bang of his hammer, apparently having gone once, twice, and three times while everyone else was trying to process what had just happened. Amaro beamed, despite himself, but couldn't take much more of their glares, and he so took his pack of cigarettes from his pocket and indicated to, well, everyone in the room, all of whom were still watching with their mouths open, that he'd just pop out for a quick smoke. 

"Next up is this fine, bound collection of celebrity signatures," said the auctioneer, as the attendees, one by one, returned their eyes to the podium.

There was a welcome breeze as Amaro stepped through front door of the house, lighting his cigarette, just in time to see a late comer dressed in black, walking up with an obviously heavy briefcase. 

"Hot as hell in there," explained Amaro, stepping aside to let the dark stranger enter the house.

"Not yet, it's not," responded the stranger, who kept on going.

Odd, thought Amaro, but as he walked a bit further into the front garden, the idea of wearing his new Patek Philippe to work next week seized his imagination. Of course, he should be careful with his new heirloom...he wanted it to still be perfect when he left it to the lucky son he favored the most...but part of the myth he would build around the watch would need to include a photo of him wearing it at the office, as if it were the most natural thing in the ...

BLAAA-A-A-A-A-M!!!

Amaro was face-down on the ground....

His ears were ringing so fiercely he felt dizzy. Red-hot chunks of wood and roofing were raining down around him. When he managed to turn over, he looked back toward the house to see gray smoke billowing out what had been the stained glass windows. Far off behind the house, he saw the tall dark stranger, running through the fields.

"My watch!" thought Amaro. 

He stumbled to his feet and ran back into the front door, his shirt pulled up over his mouth as the smoke seared his lungs. The dining room was beginning to clear a bit, but the wallpaper was still burning in spots. The auctioneer's smoldering podium was still there, but there was no sign of the Patek Phillipe.

Blackened, moaning bodies lay in mounds or crawled over mangeled chairs throughout the room. Near the front row, Amaro spotted Srkortoz, rummaging through a heap of something on the floor. He flew over the others and nearly dove into Vice President. 

"Where is it?" Amaro screamed, pulling him to his feet. "Where's my watch??"

Srkortoz, completely deafened by the blast, assumed Amaro was asking him if he was alright. He flung one arm over Amaro's shoulder and leaned in to indicate they should head out the front door. Amaro rifled through Srkortoz's pockets as they hobbled together over the rubble. It wasn't easy going. Three rows of scorched chairs back, they passed Cristiana rising jittery from the floor. Srkortoz grabbed her outstretched arm and pulled her up as well.

The trio finally made it out the front door as other survivors, dazed and bloodied, began to assemble in the front garden. Off in the distance, Amaro could hear the village volunteer fire alarm wailing. 

 Satisfied that Srkortoz hadn't pocketed his watch, but still not ready to give up on it, Amaro headed back inside the house. Cristiana and Skrortoz looked after him in wonder and then in admiration at this heroism. Inside the house, though, Amaro made a beeline for the spot where Herzimao was trying to tighten a tourniquet around his injured thigh.

"Empty your pockets!!" he ordered the badly wounded realtor. Years of practice (so he could tell what couples who were discussing an offer in another room were saying) had taught Herzimao to accurately read lips. Still shaken, he did as he was told, taking out his wallet, his cellphone, some lose change, his keys, and the cast-iron, sword-shaped pen he carried in order to produce with a ceremonial flare for his clients to sign the contracts for their new homes.

Seeing that Herzimao didn't have the watch, Amaro rather absent-mindedly began using the pen to tie the tourniquet tighter, as he scanned the room for other ideas on where his watch might have ended up. Herzimao, who had forgotten this trick from his Boy Scout days, looked up at Amaro with profound gratitude. When the tourniquet began to hurt, he reached out and nodded to Amaro that they should head outside.

In the front garden, Amaro looked at each of the survivors with suspicion. Any of them could have scooped up his watch in the chaos. He had no choice. He would need to search them all.

By the time the first responders and TV trucks arrived, word was already spreading through the front garden about how the earnest young man who had surprised everyone with his extraordinary bid on the watch turned out to be the hero of the day, pulling people from the wreckage and checking on everyone he could. By the end of the day, the legend of Amaro's life-saving First Aid interventions had circled the globe via Twitter and Facebook. An Auto-tuned interview of him confessing to reporters, "I wasn't thinking...I was just acting on instinct" became an instant YouTube sensation. 

It lasted only 15 minutes, relatively speaking, but it would have to do. 

Many years later, when caught grumbling to himself by his wife Cristiana or his fellow VP Srkortoz, whose wife and kids often joined Amaro's family at what everyone in the village would agree was the best cottage up on Lake Wagaravoaka, Amaro would say "Oh, nothing...never mind."  He'd just circle the skin around his bare wrist and shake his head. Everything was fine. He had no regrets.

Opening Tomorrow, Saturday, May 11 @ Winkleman Gallery : Leslie Thornton, "Luna" 6-8 PM

Tomorrow is Chelsea Night in Frieze New York Week, with many galleries remaining open until 8 PM. We're having a reception for the amazing new exhibition by Leslie Thornton. Stop on by!

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Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to present Luna, our second solo exhibition by New York artist Leslie Thornton. In Luna, Thornton continues her intricate and complex exploration of nature and technology, through the interplay of place, memory, and abstraction. The exhibition runs May 11 – June 22, 2013, with an opening reception Saturday, May 11, 6-8 PM.

A triptych of three vertical flat-screen monitors comprises the centerpiece of the exhibition. On each screen there is an image of the parachute-jump tower at Coney Island. Each image is captured and modified so that the reference to place and object is transformed, and subsumed, only to reappear as another form of spectacle. There are occasional figures, walking by, and there are a great many seagulls punctuating the shifting surfaces of the image.

Thornton’s project deals with the relationship between chronology, technology, mediation, and with the “historical” as an artifact of the cinematic/digital image. Luna is an invocation of loss, as well as a tacit critique of nostalgia. How do you address history with something as fragmentary and minute as cinema? What occurs and is at stake in today’s digital absorption of the “world”? By focusing on the presence of the technical image, Luna addresses the trace: an impression, a trace of a voice, a trace of the disappearance of voices, an unflinching engagement with the passing away of place. In Luna, the trace is almost subsumed, it saturates the auditory field, and in this diffusion, it (almost) disappears, leaving but a ghost, an audial echo, riding the repetitive circulation of increasing static/noise: memory’s future.

Classic theories of channels, infrastructure, and institutions are eerily convergent. Each is understood as a kind of bridge that delimits a landscape, facilitates a passage, and forestalls a loss. . . Facilitating passage, each allows displacement in space, through time, between persons, and across possible worlds. Delimiting landscape, each helps constitute the poles so related: speakers and addressees, producers and consumers, selves and others. Finally, forestalling loss, each ensures that some medium endures—that words won’t fade, that goods won’t spoil, that personas won’t wither.
—Paul Kockelman

Among the tacit references set into play in Luna one might find Claude Shannon’s ideas about the relation between message, image, translation and noise —of the necessity of noise, and its value in conveying sense and meaning. Shannon’s works are foundational for contemporary digital culture; one might also find traces of Michel Serres’ notion of the parasitical nature of technical reproducibility, and Roman Jakobson’s ideas about the recursive reflection on the materiality of the channel of communication itself. In Thornton’s hands these complex notions do not appear as dry, supplementary, footnotes but are actively embodied and celebrated, enfolding the audience in the sensual pleasures and sadness of other worlds. Leslie Thornton’s lyrical disfugurations of the apocalyptic—the end, or endings, that appear as a form of uncanny nostalgia, return us to a Coney Island of oneiric spectrality, of desire, dream, and delirium at its most ethereal and sublime, to a nostalgia for what never was, but that one might always have wanted, a technological sublime that we might still want.

Leslie Thornton is considered a pioneer of contemporary media aesthetics, working at the borders and limits of cinema, video, digital media, and installation. Such seminal works as Peggy and Fred in Hell operate in the interstices between various media-forms to address both the architectural spaces of media, and the imaginary spaces of the spectator’s involvement. Thornton uses the process of media production as an explorative and collective endeavor “position(ing) the viewer as an active reader, not a consumer.” She is among the most influential of contemporary artists in opening up new spaces for media, re-mapping its boundaries and possibilities within the projective spaces of the museum or gallery as well as within the public spaces of cinema, television and internet transmission.

Thornton’s career has been an unusual one: as one of the first artists to bridge the boundaries between cinema and video, to explore their affinities and opacities, she has embraced their differences as positive, complementary, attributes. Thornton’s complex articulations and stunning innovations in media form and content push the principles, presumptions and promises of time-based artworks, opening unexpected spaces for contemporary artistic practices. Her projects are ongoing and provisional; she has been unafraid to return to, rework, and rethink, issues, topics, and subjects, to strike out in entirely new directions. Leslie Thornton’s works continue to have a profound impact, and an enduring influence on, an entire generation of media artists, critics and theorists.

Leslie Thornton’s works have been exhibited worldwide, with screenings at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Harvard University, and installations/exhibitions at Museum53, Shanghai, China; Zürcher Gallery, New York/Paris; Tate Modern, UK, FluxSpace, Philadelphia, IFFR/Museum of Natural History, Rotterdam, and solo shows at Winkleman Gallery, NYC, and Elizabeth de Brabant Gallery, Shanghai, China. Thornton has won many awards: she is one of the youngest artists to have received the Maya Deren Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Film Institute/Anthology Film Archives; she has also received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, The Alpert Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts; In 2013 she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Leslie Thornton is currently Professor in the Modern Culture and Media Department at Brown University, and Faculty in Media at the European Graduate School/ Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinare Studien (EGS/EUFIS).

Kyrgyz Crafts Fair Exhibition - One Night Only @ Winkleman Gallery, May 8, 6-8 PM

 
One of the things I'll never forget about my trip to Kyrgyzstan were the colors and patterns of the textiles and the seemingly endless warmth of not only the crafts, but virtually every object one found in the bazaars and tiny little shops along the highways that form the "New Silk Road." Everything in this mountain country seemed designed to please the senses. 

A guide to Kyrgyzstan notes rightly that "the Kyrgyz are best known for crafting utensils, clothes, equipment, and other items used in everyday life and making them beautiful. Many articles are made of felt: carpets (shirdak and alakiyiz), bags for keeping dishes (alk-kup), and woven patterned strips of carpet sewn together into bags or rugs (bashtyk) . Ornate leather dishes called keter are also made." 

It is our distinct pleasure to invite you to a one-day only Kyrgyz Crafts Fair Exhibition, hosted by Winkleman Gallery, May 8, 6-8 PM.

The Kyrgyz Crafts Fair Exhibition is organized by the Public Fund “Partnership for Culture and Crafts” with idea of the presenting to the public of Kyrgyz Craft. Small Craft fair of 6 Kyrgyz designers will be presented within this event. The exhibition is supported and welcomed by the Winkleman Gallery. The opening of the event will take place on 8th of May 2013 at 6PM-8PM on Winkleman Gallery 621 West 27th Street New York, NY 10001.

 
Handmade Kyrgyz silk and felt scarf 

Stop on by...I promise you'll be delighted!

Perhaps the Means Justifies the Means

Exitus acta probat. The ends justifies the deed (or the means). 

This is the motto on George Washington's family coat of arms, and it is believed to be the first American President's defense of the bloodshed it took to win the Revolutionary War. With the advantage of hindsight, it's easy to agree with our founding father on this point in this context.

But I'm beginning to wonder lately whether, culturally, we've taken that idea past its logical extremes. I'm beginning to wonder whether we're so consumed by the ends that we've lost sight of the significance of the means. And I don't just mean for wars or other big decisions that put human lives at risk, I mean for smaller, daily decisions that put our very humanity at risk.

In the foreword to Jacues Ellul's analysis of the effects of our increasingly technical culture, The Technological Society (1964), Robert Mertom wrote:

By technique [Ellul] means far more than machine technology. Technique refers to any complex of standardized means for attaining a predetermined result. Thus, it converts spontaneous and unreflective behavior into behavior that is deliberate and rationalized. The Technical Man is fascinated by results, by the immediate consequences of setting standardized devices into motion. He cannot help admiring the spectacular effectiveness of nuclear weapons of war. Above all, he is committed to the never-ending search for "the one best way" to achieve any designated objective.

Ours is a progressively technological civilization: by this Ellus means that the ever-expanding and irreversible rule of technique is extended to all domains of life. It is a civilization committed to the quest for continually improved means to carelessly examined ends. Indeed, technique transforms ends into means. What was once prized in its own right now becomes worthwhile only if it helps achieve something else. And conversely, technique turns means into ends. "Know-how" takes on an ultimate value. [emphasis mine]

The problem that even Ellul couldn't have predicted back in 1964 is how hyper-connected we've become, which has only served to decrease how carefully our ends can be examined. Yesterday in his New York Times column Thomas Friedman noted:

Something really big happened in the world’s wiring in the last decade, but it was obscured by the financial crisis and post-9/11. We went from a connected world to a hyperconnected world. I’m always struck that Facebook, Twitter, 4G, iPhones, iPads, high-speech broadband, ubiquitous wireless and Web-enabled cellphones, the cloud, Big Data, cellphone apps and Skype did not exist or were in their infancy a decade ago when I wrote a book called “The World Is Flat.” All of that came since then, and the combination of these tools of connectivity and creativity has created a global education, commercial, communication and innovation platform on which more people can start stuff, collaborate on stuff, learn stuff, make stuff (and destroy stuff) with more other people than ever before.

And Friedman notes how this new hyperconnectively is really a good thing for people who are self-motivated. They can get things done with speeds unimagined before. But getting things done is a good thing only so long as the ends to those means are a carefully considered (i.e., good) thing. Moving at light speed for its own sake, and with the casting aside of nonproductive things that moving so quickly requires, is a path to guaranteed regret.

Just last weekend, I had a conversation with a high school classmate I hadn't seen in many years, and we realized we both had come to a similar conclusion. Between the time we left high school and just recently, we had been so focused on achieving our life's goals, we stopped doing some of the things that we really enjoyed (for her it was making ceramics; for me it was playing tennis and piano). After taking them back up again, we were both not only very pleased with the pleasure they brought us, but a bit upset we had ever stopped doing them. Yes, we had accomplished a lot in the interceding years, but these "means" toward a happier life had been put aside quite foolishly we realized. The means toward achieving our goals could have/should have been more balanced with the things we love doing.

Someone recently shared a quote from Leonard Cohen, who reportedly said "Success is survival" (and he should know). When you stand back and look at the short-lived "success" stories of people who climbed to a certain height only to then drop off the other side and disappear altogether, Cohen's definition rings true. And if survival is the "ends," then how you climb, so much more so than how quickly you get to an imagined "top," would seem to be everything.

A Primer on "Nano-Nonobjective-Oriented Ontographs and Qubit-Built Quilts"

Even though we’ll do the occasional controversial political exhibition in our gallery, such as Yevgeniy Fiks’ “Homosexuality Is Stalin’s Atom Bomb to Destroy America,” which generated quite a few written responses, including this selected sub-list:

• Евгений Аронов, "Неблагонадежная любовь," Радио Свобода, 11 апреля 2013
• Zach Savich, "April Reviews: Jena Osman; Yevgeniy Fiks," The Kenyon Review, April 2, 2013
• "Gay in the USSR," by Nora Fitzgerald, Foreign Policy, March 26, 2013
• "An Artist Asks, How Swishy Was Karl Marx?," by Blake Gopnik, The Daily Pic, March 26, 2013
• "The Modern Art Notes Podcast." by Tyler Green, Modern Art Notes, March 21, 2013
• "The Queer Bombs of the Cold War," by: Ivan Savvine on Wednesday, OutThere, March 20, 2013
• "In Sight/In Mind: Yevgeniy Fiks," by Kathleen MacQueen, Shifting Connections, March 14, 2013
• Sophie Pinkham, "The Homosexual Atom Bomb," n+1, February 25, 2013

very few exhibitions we’ve presented have generated the technical (and with that, oddly, in some cases hostile) level of discussion that our current show by Shane Hope is doing. 

I suspect the hostility comes from the fact that partially what’s at stake in Shane’s work is nothing less than a vision for the future of humankind. 

Because of the interesting/challenging nature of most of the questions we’re getting on a daily basis though, and because I can’t easily call Shane each time someone in the gallery asks me something beyond my knowledge base, I asked him if he’d be willing to do a quick Q&A with me on the types of questions we get most often and a few raised by comments to reviews of his show online. His answers were so charming, intriguing, and in places unexpected, I thought I’d share them here: 

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Q (EW): Let’s begin with a few easy ones to set the context. The question we hear most often by people who’ve never seen your work before is “What am I looking at?” With the experience you now have after The Armory Show of people from all walks of life (with widely different knowledge about art and/or technology) asking that question, have you found a single best answer? 

A (SH): That “What am I looking at?” question has a some serious semantic gamut gap. Here are at least two go-to replies: Firstly, the future. Actually, allusions to the future's futures as in visual art answers to technological singularity blindsightedness. Secondly, 3D printed molecular models. My main goal as of late has been to visually relate the operative ideologies, promises, and hype of 3D printing to the R&D and speculations surrounding theoretical molecular manufacturing. 

Q: We also receive a very interesting array of comments about what people thought the work was until they came up close to it, including textile/fiber artwork or quilts, collaged toy bits, and even (by a prominent art critic) painted macaroni. The textile artists in particular are very enthusiastic about the similarities between their practice and these works. Does that surprise you, and if not, why not? 

A: Not so surprising as it is confirming. I’m trying to increase awareness of object-shock styled otherness after all. And that's akin to how abundance technologies will manifest objecthoods the likes of which we’ve not known and maybe can’t know without equivalently extraordinary exocortical enhancements. Arguably, objects are already starting to be thought of as more about their semantic-brainstorm-cloud formations of computability above and beyond them. 

Q: Another common question (I’ve heard it a dozen times myself) is “If these are generated on a machine, why does it look like I can see the artist’s hand in these works?” 

A: Distributed agency. The hand of the artist has always been about algorithms, albeit biological and heuristic. To trial and error is human? Naw, not only anyway. Human is NOT as human does. If you can hack them well enough, all machines prove to be more than what they ever do too. To properly problematize, I refer to my 3D printers as mindchild-playborers yet consider them not-so-much mere collaborators. We share together in new collablobjecthoods. Carpentry can now be considered an act of making an object become philosophy. Plus, I do actually paint on and compose parts upon these pieces. My approach to painting is to put forth solution spaces spanning across problems. Some artists show only answers, whereas I show the work. 

Q: Now for some more technical questions. Can you give us a quick overview of the software and hardware you use for your 3D-printer-generated work? 

A: From molecular modeling to 3D printing, my open-source linux-based software toolchain is considerably lengthy. Here’s a shortlist: PyMol, NanoEngineer-1, Blender, MeshLab, Skeinforge, Slic3r, and Printrun. Several of those I'm myself modifying and configuring before compiling. There's also plenty of python scripting going on in-between and throughout. I also always assemble all my own hardware from scratch. There's definitely a discernible difference to pursuing an Arduino-based RepRap piecemeal approach to 3D printing rather than building some 'some-assembly-required' kind of kit such as an Ultimaker, Up!, or Makerbot. Sourcing all your own parts separately and having to learn how to hand-hobble it all into working order each time produces printers with personality. I can hear my gear. 

Q: When you say your process involves certain types of “hacking,” can you be more specific? 

A: Hacking generally means to tinker with any kind of system in order to better understand how it works, discover exploits etc., and ultimately redirect or expand that system’s use parameters and creative deployment potential. My ability to hack so many systems involved in my overall toolchain additionally accounts for that aforementioned “hand-of-the-artist” look. And as far as the future of hacking matter is concerned, materiality may become all about atomic administrator access-privileges and whether or not you can root your reality. 

Q: In one of the online articles about your current show, a commenter wrote “So people will buy my scrap filament and failed prints if I stick it on foam board and claim it is art.” Aside from the dismissible snark, though, that comment does raise the rather interesting question of what, in your practice, constitutes a “failed” 3D print? 

A: All models are all about how wrong a model has to be to not be useful. While I do actually code for generative molecular designs and algorithmically-automated alternative representations of nano-scaled structures, I additionally aim at atomoleculuring anythingyness artifacts for itselfhoods. I mean, more attention might well be properly placed upon that which 3D printing pundits too often dismiss or discard as fails, extraneous, unfinished, scrap, unusable, and ultimately recyclable (soylent green tea anyone?!). The most useful 3D printed prototypes aren't so much exhausted or collapsed into fully exploitable usability in the Functionalist sense. Parts provide qualities serving only as temporarily useful caricatures. Artifacts are kinds of qualities that objects do. It should by now be better understood that the sum of the parts is actually much greater than the whole. 

 Q: Another commenter on that site asked whether these works are not better described as “collages” than “paintings.” How would your answer that? 

A: I use paint as a binder to affix my 3D printed molecular models to sundry substrates. My “Nano-Nonobjective-Oriented Ontographs” and “Species-Tool-Beings” are sculptural reliefs and yet somewhere between collage and assemblage since some models are printed paper-thin. When I say I work to inscribe object-to-object fault lines of relata distortion on equal ontologically flattened footing with humans, 'fault lines' can be taken to mean literal painterly reconciliations. When I claim to consider my compositions compendia serving to lay bare the interobjectivity between unit operations, paint is precisely that which must behave like scar tissue, as evidence of paying dues, earning injuries and also healing. 

Q: Personally I was floored that Bruce Sterling (the highly influential science fiction writer and one of the gods of the “cyber punk” genre) was so impressed with your technical “rap” (if we can call it that) in your press release that he wrote on Wired: “check out that last paragraph where the gallery pitch turns into pure Burroughsian gibberish. That’s some pretty good stuff.” What role does terminology (at times of your own invention) play in your overall practice? 

A: I consider my praxis to be first and foremost a form of Future Studies. To round out that program by indirectly describing that which definitely defies depiction, I draft these “pathetic-prophetic techno-poetic cognitive haze phraseologies”. Sterling's tip of the proverbial hat is professional peer review proper and affirming feedback bar none. To the initiated, my writings prove parsable inasmuch as the content obviously originates from or refers to sci-fi, hacker, transhumanist, singularitarian, and futurological terminology. Regarding my refined “rap” or rather “enzymin’-rhymin’ chmodder-fodder” style, I say I'm speaking “in speculative-vernacular”. 

Shane Hope's exhibition Nano-Nonobjective-Oriented Ontographs and Qubit-Built Quilts continues in the gallery through this Saturday, May 4, 2013.

Bill by Bill

A while back I wrote the following in a thread about the alarming number of art world insiders (the "true believers") who were expressing profound disappointment with the way the gallery system had turned lately:

There are artists out there making work worthy of the true believers. But for them to help change how soul-crushing the system has become to many, how "vulgar" or "nasty" or "filthy" and therefore how unappealing to the true believers, those artists need to help stop the seemingly endless numbers of artists who aspire to emulate the multi-millionaire artists dominating the market today and show the world something more important than clever observations of how superficial we've all become. They need to look deeper at humankind and themselves...and to look away from the cynicism-fueled influences that get all the press and attention these days....and become the new influentials. The new leaders for the next generation of artists.

Most of all, they need to not take for granted that the true believers who have supported the art world for all the right reasons will continue to do so if artists don't start taking control and making the vulgar way the market is operating today look unappealing to those who see it only as a mean of buying social credibility, without even caring about the objects they're using toward that end.

You know how to do this. Don't underestimate what's at stake if you don't.

Get to it.

I'll admit. One of the artists I was thinking of when I wrote that was William Powhida.

Even as I wrote that, with Bill (among others) in mind, though, I knew the real challenge in shaking things up was going to be "to look away from the cynicism-fueled influences." 

This is a particular challenge especially because the order of the day would seem to include a new approach to institutional critique (because the institutions have grown immune to the current approach). How do you both look away from the cynical forces and meaningfully comment on them too?

It would seem our friend Bill has found a way.

Few exhibitions recently have excited me as much as the William Powhida one that just opened at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. The press release alone is reason to cheer:

Dismissed Acclaimed provincial New York-based artist William Powhida is pleased to announce Bill by Bill, a new collection of art works fabricated exclusively for Charlie James Gallery and the fast-growing Los Angeles art market.  Conceptualized and designed by William each work of art has been crafted by better highly skilled artists, designers, friends, family and fabricators under the artist’s supervision in a studio he visited at least once.  After years of going to art fairs intensive market research Bill by Bill represents a decisive breakthrough for the artist into the fields of sculpture and painting by creating unique variations on some of the dominant formulas trends in contemporary art.

Bill by Bill brings together classic Modernist forms with bleeding edge post-studio, conceptually based[1] practices to create a mercenary stunning vision of contemporary art. Begun over a year ago while on residency at the Headlands in beautiful Marin County, William has designed a line of auction-ready commodities objects across stylistic boundaries for market-savvy executive producers collectors. These objects are primed and ready for purchase to move quickly at Phillips de Pury. With a focus on painting and sculpture Bill by Bill avoids problems of reproducibility inherent with photography, new media, multiples, and editions which have diminished the deep satisfaction of buying art.  These one-of-kind objects are able to offer the ‘experience of art’ at a price that isn’t quite for everyone, which affirms William’s belief that art holds an elitist special place in culture.

A unique, signed certificate of authenticity in the artist’s signature style accompanies[2] each hand-touched[3] object. The certificate provides the artist’s critical insight into the fascinating design and fabrication process behind each work. These intimate, text-based certificates contextualize each object in a theoretical and aesthetic discourse while situating them in the broader social and political space of neo-liberal capitalism late modernity. Charlie James Gallery is relieved pleased to finally bring this moyen-garde model of art production and distribution to Los Angeles, which we believe is the only city capable of buying this.

William Powhida was born in 1976 in Ballston Spa, New York.  Powhida has no upcoming exhibitions at any major art institutions.  Recent exhibitions include “Market Value: Examining Wealth and Worth” at Columbia College in Chicago, IL; “On Sincerity” at Boston College in Boston, MA; (2012), “Seditions” at McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas, TX (2012), “Derivatives” at Postmasters Gallery, NY (2011) and Dublin Contemporary in Dublin, Ireland (2011).  His work has been discussed in October, Art in America, Art Forum, The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, New York Magazine, and the New York Times. His art was recently featured in the Village Voice, America’s oldest corporate-owned alternative weekly.

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[1] This does not mean conceptual.

[2] The collector agrees to purchase the certificate of authenticity to receive the object.
[3] The artist may have only touched to the work indirectly receiving the work or crating it.

But that's not why I'm bringing this to your attention. The review of Bill's show in the Los Angeles Times is exactly the sort of response we need to see more of in the press for anything to change.The opening paragraph is one many artists would give a body part to receive:

So rare is good satire in contemporary art that its appearance — as in the newest exhibition of William Powhida, a New York-based artist who is fast evolving into one of its sharpest practitioners — makes one inclined to stand up and applaud.

But it's this response to the work that really made my day:

What saves the work from grating sarcasm or smart aleck cleverness — toward which the artist has erred in the past — is a curious undertone of sincerity. Powhida is not mean-spirited or bitter but seems genuinely driven to understand his subject: the internal mechanisms of this peculiar social and economic ecosystem. How does the art world work and how should we feel about that? How much of ourselves should we reconcile to it?

He clearly takes these questions seriously. If he didn’t, his excoriation wouldn’t be nearly so funny. [emphasis mine]

Folks who know Bill understand that, despite the obnoxious persona (a character also named "Powhida") that is one part of his practice, he's genuinely sincere about doing what he can to curb the negative impact that too much money and too little critique is having on the art of his generation. 

All I can say to the other artists of Bill's generation is, go see this show if you can. And if you can't, pay attention all the same.