conditions

“Draw an imaginary map. Put a goal mark on the map where you want to go. Go walking on an actual street according to your map. If there is no street where it should be according to your map, make one by putting the obstacles aside. When you reach the goal, ask the name of the city…” 

(Yoko Ono, Map Piece, 1971).

SwanSong (Amen)

 
Shannon Jamieson (June 12, 2006)
Brocie Road, Ontario

SwanSong (Woolf)

Virginia Woolf (March 28, 1941)

River Ouse, Sussex

"The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air." 

(The Waves, 182)

Invisible continuity is intrinsic to water. This continuity exceeds us even while being the biggest part of us. It's this continuity that makes our effect on water an effect on us. That is to say: "I am the Thames!" or "The Thames is me!" 

 (Roni Horn. Still Water. Plate 7)

SwanSong (Ader)

Bas Jan Ader (April 18, 1976)
150 km of the west coast of Ireland

Swan Song (Thomson)

Tom Thomson (July 8, 1917)
Canoe Lake, Algonquin Park

SwanSong (Lombardi)

Mark Lombardi (March 22, 2000)
Williamsburg, NYC

http://benfry.com/exd09/

Swan Songs (Lennon)

John Lennon (December 8, 1980)
The Dakota, NYC

Swan Songs (Pasolini)

Pier Paolo Pasolini (November 2, 1975)
Ostia, Italy

"So it's absolutely necessary to die, because till we're alive we are lacking of sense, and the language of our life (with which we express ourself, and to which we attach the maximum importance) is untranslatable: a chaos of possibility, a research of relations and meanings without solution of continuity. Death makes an instantaneous montage of our life: that is, it chooses ones really significant moments (and not more by now modifiable by other possible contrary or incoherent moments), and it puts them in succession, making of our never ending, instable and unsure present and so linguistically not describable, a clear, stable, sure past, and so linguistically describable (just in the ambit of a General Semiology). Only thanks to death, our life is used by us to express ourself."

(Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, Garzanti, Milan)

Biography / Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini

SwanSong (Genet)

Jean Genet (le 15 avril 1986)

chambre 205, Jacks’Hôtel,  Paris

His sudden death came whilst he was still proofreading his last novel, "Prisoner of Love", which was published posthumously the same year.

SwanSong (Gaudí)

Antoni Gaudí (June 7, 1926)
Gran Via, Barcelona

SwanSong (Deleuze)

Gilles Deleuze (November 4th, 1995)
Paris, France

His last book was Essays Critical and Clinical (1993).

SwanSong (Pope Joan)

Pope Joan (Easter, sometime between 853 - 855AD)
Papal processional route, Rome 

Social and cultural  concerns - public figures, and how each act as a social conscience, a social voice of the times.  Pope Johannes, offered a voice for those without voices, (the poor, the dispossessed, and women).  Her swan song:  she died in labour - act of creation - bled out or killed by crowd.

SwanSong (Benjamin)

Walter Benjamin (September 27, 1940)
Portbou, Catalonia 

un-followed swan songs

Arthur Cravan (Mexico swansong)
Dark Spring - Hans Bellmer's partner
Tessling - apple story

SwanSong (Schumann)

Robert Schumann (29 July 1856)
Endenich, Germany

Spirit Variations - Schumann's last work
Schumann's lost symphony (a one time performance)
Research composer:  Murray Schafer (honorary doc, composer) 

Pilgrimage

The act of seeking - a quest, homage, journey, revelation, hardship, challenges, multidimensional - new myths require new pilgrimages. What is being sought? A journey reveals that the act of journeying itself is goal - not a means to an end.

Guggenheim Haunted Exhibition

Andy Warhol, Orange Disaster

Sally Mann, Motherland 

Sophie Calle, Father/Mother (memorial)

Ori Gersht, Unknown Land

Hiroshi Sugimoto. Ocean. 1990

Indris Khan, Homage to Bernd Beehe (Bromide Print)

Rosangela Renno (Brazil), Untitled Hangman (Red Series)

Mapple Thorpe, 1998 Self-Portrait. One year before he dies.

Zhang Huan, 12 Square Meters 1994 (performance)

Ana Mendieta 1978 Silveta Series [shadows]

Markus Hansen, Curtain 2004 (dust, varnish, breath)

photo/documentary

Martin Parr (1970's) The Last Resort

Hogarth (1800 conversation pieces / social critic / elicite topics)

Beuys, Cosmos & Damien (social commentary and construction)

Thomas Demand, 2001, Poll (trompe l'oeil)

Joanne Kane, Portrait of a Man, 2007 (historical)

Muybridge: self portraits (man/animal in motion, sciences, animal in locomotion)

Ernest Eugene Appart, Firing Squad Commune, 1871, (illusion)

Simon Roberts "We English" (doc. satire)

Anon, 49th parallel (government / function)

encounters

Lynn's story: preparing consciousness to move out of body - journey prior to bodies death - let go - a journey in which you do not return to body, field of consciousness - a cord of consciousness.

A journey characterized by almost arriving, destination in sight but never achieved.... Unclear as it maybe - to document the sites of last utterances, the ambiguity, or uncertainty sets in, when one questions the last utterance, was it a final work, a last breath, a final ode... where were these marks made, and what is the importance of recording them? A connection to place, desire to mark things... ' look here, this sign post tells us where the wall once stood', we preserve pieces of it too remember. In this project I travel to the often unmarked sites,  to record the shadows.

Writing oneself to death: George Orwell (tuburculosis) went to the remote isle of Jura (Scotland) against all doctors advice, to complete what would become his final work, 1984. Far from medical aid, and anything else for that matter, accept the calling to complete the work, and the necessary conditions to do so. worth his life. What is it that drives this spark? To complete the master work that will outlive the creator. Hemmingway shot himself when he was no longer felt able to write, lie for one's work and one's work only.  The tension of death, the knowledge of its proximity, produces a need.

Romantic conceptualism

In 2006, Jörg Hiser curated an exhibition entitled Romantic Conceptualism, which aimed to point towards a group of artists who, since the sixties, express an evident element of romanticism in a conceptual practice.

The Now:

Excerpt from a conversation between Mladen Stilinović and Ariane Daoust, Zagreb, June 2009

 

AD: You make a distinction between your practice and that of Western Conceptual art. Boris Groys has coined the term “Romantic Conceptualism” to describe this kind of art in your part of the world. What do you think of it?

MS: It’s just another approach to art. Conceptual art in the West references reason and philosophy, whereas here it also references literature, poetry, everyday language, emotions and many other things besides. This difference is cultural, and is explained by a different attitude or state of mind. You can’t say that Conceptual art pertains to the Romantic spirit or to poetry in the West. In fact, these words are hated because Conceptual artists are cold, rigid and innocent.

http://www.voxphoto.com/english/expositions/stilinovic_mladen/stilinovic_mladen.html 

The Past

As Walter Benjamin suggests of the Romantic sensibility, “the thoroughgoing mystic must not merely leave in suspense the communicability of all knowing, but must directly deny it … a depth greater than ordinary logic can attain.”  

(Benjamin, Walter. “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” In: Selected writings, Volume 1.  Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University; 2004. p. 139.)

Sol Lewitt proposes, “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists.  They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach." ( Lewitt, Sol. Sentences on Conceptual Art, 1969)

Pedagogy

research-creation

Sophie Calle and detection

The Locked Room Method
http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue9/yearlockedroom.htm

vanitas

Vita brevis, ars longa
Rachel Ruysche - female 17th century Dutch painter

technology

Technology, “as a practice, a technique, or a device for altering the world or the experience of the world.” 

(Rebecca Solnit, Ghosts and Machines)

Quotes

Nothing I knew had any chance against death.

The Death of the Moth & other Essays, Virginia Woolf

these are the killed...
birds during practice...
blood, a necklace on me all my life.

The collected works of billy the kid, Michael Ondaatje

"To give to this dust a semblance of consistency, as by soaking it in blood." 

- Louis Veuillot, Les odeurs de Paris, 1914 (104 Arcades)

Les géographies solonnelles des limites humaines..."  

Paul Eluard, les yeux fertiles. 42

"It is no longer "I" who expel, the "I" is expelled." 

Julia Kristeva, cont. aes, 544

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity
Until death tramples it to fragments.

As Shelley formulated in the famous verse

Every epoch not only dreams the one to follow, but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening... It bears its end within itself and unfolds it.

Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“Death becomes that which sets a boundary to our projects and so delimits our lives as our lives.”

Eric Matthews, 20^th century continental philosophy, p. 54

---

 

Landscape

1800 - 1860 landscape takes prominence.  Land and spirituality inspired by visionary William Blake.  The smallness of man (18th century motif and point of transition into modern age). Transition from painting to photography, painting as stage, an empty canvas to fill, vs. analogue photography as a slice of reality that is tied to the moment and site the photo was taken.  (Beate Gutschow, Aperture LS/S)

Sea as stage for human drama, fate beyond control, struggle with nature, powerlessness.  Like Turner's transcendent late vision where country and inhabitants dissolve into light and colour. (Varnishing Day - as Constable declared: "Turner has been here and fired a gun.")

Death/Dark/Thanatourism

Kate Palmer:  The artist as thanatourist: Joel Sternfeld's On this Site  

“As the fascination that photographs exercise is a reminder of death, it is also an invitation to sentimentality,” writes Susan Sontag. “Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgments by the generalized pathos of looking at time past.” If the past is “an object of tender regard,” then we bring a dual sensibility to Sternfeld’s photographs: a kind of nostalgia for the familiar, but one that carries with it a trace of the familiar as catastrophic.

Walter Benjamin - material history

Benjamin was influenced by surrealism. It became his "attempt to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations of reality, its scraps, as it were" (Briefe II, 793). "Paying attention to the correlations, correspondences between a street scene, a speculation on the stock exchange, a poem a thought, which with the hidden line which holds them together... placed in the same period, clarifying and illuminating one another, so that finally they would no longer require interpretative or explanatory commentary" (Illuminations, 11).

This reading of history against the grain, by means of diverging from official historical texts, (and the victors who have written history), and informing oneself rather from the often discarded and overlooked remnants. Gathering evidence of particular phenomena - drawing inspiration from Goethe, on matters of significance and appearance, or more particularly when they coincide.  Has this come to be known as materialist history? 

A book made entirely of quotations. The violence of decontextualization, ripping the tradition, extracting the pearl. In place of the dialectic, Benjamin engaged dialogism, where various voices are present in the text. Dialect tends to make a synthesis.

Memory and Promise

Benjamin has been regarded as melancholic in regards to visualizing the future (promise) although very attentive to memory, the past and what has come before.  

Derrida, proposes that it is memory that is the ultimate victim, as we can never return to it, rather everytime we revisit a memory we change it - it has changed.

How is this a parallel to Foucault's method of geneology - not searching for an essence, an origin, but a recognition that all is fragmented and constantly shifting (Nietzsche).

Benjamin, Photography and the mimetic faculty

Originating with the ancient Greeks, mimesis is classically defined as the visual or literary representation of nature. The word mimetic is often used in this way to describe photographic images. Our engagement with photography, however, should also be considered in relation to what Walter Benjamin calls the mimetic faculty: the capacity to yield to our surroundings, to perceive and produce similarities, and to become Other. This faculty unsettles our everyday interactions with the lives of photographs, from the latent image to the print and beyond.

birth of the tragedy

Dionysian ecstasy is a mass phenomenon and spreads almost infectiously. This is expressed mythically by the representation of god consistently surrounded by a swarm of followers. Everyone who surrenders to this god must risk abandoning his everyday identity and becoming mad: both god and follower can be called Bacchus. Dionysus brings to the fore (when he is "in us" and causes us to "stand outside ourselves" with the group) the irrational side of our nature, unlike Apollo who stands aloof as a symbol of the higher, refined cultivation to which we mere mortals can only aspire.

ecstasis "standing outside of ourselves", an important aspect of the collective experience.

existentialist / god is dead / no absolutes
immoralist... you know your situation best to decide right or wrong
cyclical rather than linear : constant progression (evolution) is modern view
phoenix: regeneration, rebirth, starting over often, repeating, burns by its own means, (ashes, children, fire, sun)
everything about humanity is diseased
body and mind as a hole

an excess of every dimension

Muybridge completed extensive cloud studies.

What is at stake in Alfred Stieglitz’s series, Equivalences?  In Stieglitz’s clouds, photography becomes its own representative process and depicts its own constitutive method. But the famous Stieglitz was able to create these "self-portraits of photography by itself" thanks to the outlines of the clouds, by showing how their ethereal shapes are projected onto the celestial expanse, enabling this expanse to act as a background and to reveal these arabesque impressions of the photographic act. 


measure of infinity / bottomless subject / a corpuscular substance without shape or body

See also: Philippe Dubois

所在の地層
Ryoji IKEDA
Stratum of locus, 2002
フォトエッチング、エッチング、
アクアポイント、ドライポイント
Photo-etching, etching, aquatint & drypoint
55.0 × 69.2cm (plate)

votives

Latin votivus, from votum vow, expressing a vow, wish, or desire, or offered or performed in fulfillment of a vow or in gratitude or devotion.

Caspar David Friedrich
The Monk by the Sea
1809/10 (Berlin Nationalgalerie)
Oil on canvas, 110- 172 cm

Herr Friedrich painted this painting five times, characterizing romanticism as a movement exploring the human condition, the nature of loneliness, and nostalgia for the horizon of untouched landscape.

More on Caspar's windows

if i am a writer

If I am a writer I will have to be careful, I must not fall into the trap of believing that my passion, of itself, is art. As a composer or a painter I know that it is not. I know that I shall have to find a translation of form to make myself clear. I know that the language of my passion and the language of my art are not the same thing.

The sincerity of feeling is not enough, the true writer knows that feeling must give way to form. It is through the form, not in spite of, or accidental to it, that the most powerful emotions are let loose over the greatest number of people.

Art Objects, Jeanette Winterson

self-writing / autobiography

"There is no such thing as autobiography, only art and lies."  

(Winterson, Art & Lies, p. 69).

excavation. shaken from the grave.


Rembrandt painted himself into biblical passages, for example there would be fourteen on the boat rather than the traditional thirteen, as the artist would insert himself.


The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge—it does not—but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions. 
(Paul de Man, Autobiography As De-Facement, 70)

"The dominant figure of the epitaphic or autobiographical discourse is, as we saw, the prosopopeia, the fiction of the voice-from-beyond-the-grave; an unlettered stone would leave the sun suspended in nothingness."  (Autobiography As De-Facement 77)

Rousseau's autobiographical writings: his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker (along with the works of Lessing and Goethe in Germany, and Richardson and Sterne in England), were among the pre-eminent examples of the late eighteenth century movement known as the "Age of Sensibility", featuring an increasing focus on subjectivity and introspection that has characterized the modern age.
 
Reference point in the history of literature are St-Augustine's Confessions, and Essays of Montaigne. Rousseau continued the emphasis of introspection / recollection as a mode of writing, but how does Rousseau expand? linking to character to childhood and legitimicizing a mode of writing that advocated the pursuit of self-fulfillment as worthwhile , even noble. Later to influence Wordsworth, Shelly, Byron, etc, the romantics embraced this as well as the contempt for social mores, dislike of authority.

Art

the nature of a work of art
is to not a part, nor yet
a copy of the real world
(as we commonly understand
that phrase),
but a world in itself,
independent, coplete, autonomous;
and to possess it fully
you must enter that world,
conform to its laws,
and ignore for the time the beliefs,
aims, and particular conditions
which belong to you
in the other world of reality.

(Oxford Lectures on Poetry: Professor Bradley: 1901.  Cited in Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies)

authorship

"There is a tradition that includes Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, the comte de Lautréamont, and Jorge Luis Borges that rejects the originality of the author, characterises the author as producer, and identifies a collective authorship: Individuals are the ensemble of their social and cultural relationships. They compile and arrange knowledge and act as mediators of an idea, and ergo exist as a subject in the plural."

Nollert, A. (2005) “Art is Life, and Life is Art”, in Block, R. and Nollert, A. (eds) Collective Creativity. Kassel & Munich: Kunsthalle Fridericianum & Siemens Arts Program: 25

Spinoza: what can a body do?

In affect, we are never alone. That’s because affects in Spinoza’s definition are basically ways of connecting, to others and to other situations. They are our angle of participation in processes larger than ourselves. With intensified affect comes a stronger sense of embeddedness in a larger field of life — a heightened sense of belonging, with other people and to other places. Spinoza takes us quite far, but for me his thought needs to be supplemented with the work of thinkers like Henri Bergson, who focuses on the intensities of experience, and William James, who focuses on their connectedness.

(Brian Massumi)

see also: Deleuze, Gilles. Expressiom in Philosophy: Spinoza. (Joughin M. trans.) Zone Books, New York: 1992.

Eugène Cuvelier

Eugène Cuvelier (French, 1837–1900)
Près de la Caverne, Terrain Brûlé
Salted paper print from paper negative

Aristotle
poet: what could be / historian: actual state

practice-led

Roy Ascott, diagram/presentation, Speculative Research

Research, has traditionally been defined in academia by non-artists, however the emergence of practice-led research gives artists the opportunity to define research within the field of art. Particular challenges that this presents, is that within the creative disciplines there is a tendency to pose unanswerable questions, questions that would not be relevant to other established disciplines. How then do we evaluate it? What are our methods? Ultimately the research is speculative, a similar challenge that philosophy also encounters, however there is nonetheless evidence, a long standing historical record that attests to the value, if not the need, in searching and articulating a series of responses, if but not to contribute to the cultural landscape.

"Art research is speculative, anticipatory and visionary. It involves thinking out of the box, seeking to move the mind, the senses, and the arena of action beyond the initial frame of inquiry. When involvement in art research is no more than an employment move to compensate for the collapse of the art market, or a servile academic repackaging of 20th century art strategies, it loses its distinction from humanities research, or simply hangs on the coat tails of scientific inquiry. Speculative research must produce its own protocols; the artist as researcher must engage with knowledge in new ways, creating new language, new frames of reference, new systems and behaviour. It must be non-linear, associative, risky, connective, transformative as well as intellectually, artistically and even spiritually challenging. The material, conceptual and spiritual infrastructure needed to support this emergence calls for research in creative agency, architectural form, and cultural organisms "

(Roy Ascott, presentation, Speculative Research)

How does making participate in the recuperation and genesis of (embodied) knowledge?

The place and form of making at the scale and pace of the individual body:
live, tactile, visceral invocation
time as a process and material
coupling reason and imagination
when language fails - conceptualization as violence to original experience
 
what is art research?
process, qualities, principles, constraints?

Shopenhaur

Body as direct access to the thing-in-itself, an irrational force often referred to as will, somewhat like the platonic essence that underlies all appearances. We, through our bodies, have direct access to this will, each through our own private experience. Through both being a body and having a body, the will is the common ground, the primordial stew, that we all manifest in action, agency, in representation. Shopenhauer proposes the thing in itself, as a blind striving force, a repository of drives, conflicting. Despite the irrationality, there is nonetheless an ethics, grounded in the common grounds which binds us all in an understanding of both pain and pleasure. When the ego is quiet, it is possible to empathize, understanding that another's pain () is also our own.

Excerpts: The brain and spine as parasitic, manifestations of the intellect, a tool of the will/primordial stew which S considers secondary. Demonstrated in instances when the intellect is absent for example (horse, clock) when blind striving force is no longer governed. Nietzsche promoted such states for example in Dionysion self-experimentation by inducing debauchery and inebriation, giving priority to the unconscious, the primordial.

Can the will deny itself? Would taking one's life be also an act of the thing in itself?
Both S and N suggest the positive, that the will begets life. Maintaining that the will is blind, yet assuming that the will strives to propagate.

() is a signature of Ann Hamilton, who inserts ellipses in her text to indicate a pause (rather than the traditional ommitence.

The Onion Field
Davison, George, b.1854-1930
Camera Work XVIII, 1890
15.4 x 20.4 cm
Photogravure

NSPIRED BY EMERSON'S ideas and images, photographers began to explore the expressionistic potential of photography. This movement, known as Pictorialism, was characterized by painterly techniques involving soft focus lenses and heavily manipulated printing processes like gum bichromate and bromoil. George Davison's famous image, The Onion Field, is an early example of an impressionistic or pictorial photograph. Its soft focus was achieved using a pinhole lens.

Pictorial photographers considered themselves serious amateurs—motivated by artistic forces rather than those of financial gain. In Europe they formed salons and clubs like The Linked Ring Brotherhood, The Royal Photographic Society (of England) and The Photo-Club of Paris. And in America in 1902, Stieglitz established the group called the Photo-Secession. He chose the name "Secession" because of its use by some societies of avant-garde artists in Germany and Austria to denote their independence from the academic establishment.

Photogravure proved to be an effective tool for the pictorialists, aiding in their mission to convince a skeptical audience that photography had significant expressive potential. For once, the qualities of gravure enabled them to more accurately reproduce the subtle and beautiful character of their images in books, journals and limited editioned portfolios.

The final issues of Camera Work were illustrated with images by newcomer, Paul Strand. For the first time these gravures, printed on a heavier stock, have come to represent a turning point in the history of the medium. Stieglitz wrote of Strand, "... The work is brutally direct. Devoid of flim-flam; devoid of trickery and any 'ism'; devoid of any attempt to mystify an ignorant public, including the photographers themselves. These photographs are the direct expression of today..." Straight Photography was born.

http://www.photogravure.com/history/chapter_pictorialism.html

Photography with large-format cameras