The Year of Clarity of Vision is half done. What clarifications do we have, collectively or individually? Do we have, metaphorically speaking, perfect vision for anything at the moment? In AFH News Blog over the past few months, we have focused on the studio through the lens of Daniel Buren’s seminal essay, and then submitted the legacy of Donald Judd as an alternative, among others. Currently, I have shifted the 4D analysis to focus on a conceptual, visionary idea of the gallery. Buren drove his discourse in this direction, to take on the roles of gallery and presentation institutions in the art world. Judd offered, over his lifetime, a comprehensive artist’s critique and responsive action to the status quo of his era. As the pandemic-interrupted MoMA Judd retrospective illustrates, another world was possible, one which did not necessarily obviate the dominant art complex. Over time, we should note that both both Buren and Judd paths have led to longevity for the artists and their work, in a multiplicity of arts sectors and creative dimensions.
On one level, the AFH Spring Update was a gesture, revisiting the MEGAzine format. The 4D curatorial approach in assembling MZ content is universal in its aspirations, while the content itself is more or less specific, relative to the creator and the nature of the selected material. The suggested narrative is Now, which is blindly contemporary and omni-directional. Scope is a limiting question at the beginning of the assemblage process, but the program - progressively open-ended - leads to the whole kind of writing. There is a recognition within the project that the finished document is the result of incredibly complex phenomenon mashed up. I like the metaphor of the LEGO structure in the video game apparently self-building, although the gamer knows there’s more to it. The unseen creative hand is a function of software mechanics, but is represented through the GUI as a potent force for systematic construction. A curatorial (4D) MZ goal is to establish maximum space for free expression for every participant, within the fairly strict platform parameters of the medium. A blog is a fine vehicle for a few types of media, with a a fairly direct mode for presenting linkage, or context, but it isn’t a real thing, except on its own (virtual) terms. The printing of a MEGAzine, which we accomplished with the Novad End of the World MEGAzine, reveals another logistical level for dispersion, having to do with the book-object itself, and the well-defined practices of book (re-)production and distribution. We’re still talking about highly processed stuff, in its derivative iterations.
The third thread in the AFH 2020 weave involves establishing foundations for a (5th) book for my doctoral project/thesis. The subject is 4D love. My collaborative discussions with Liza Buzytsky inspired all three movements. Beginning a textual analysis on dimensional love during quarantine and now the race-based social unrest probably makes no immediate sense. Yet the separation and collapse of things informs a desire, perhaps reactive, to immerse intelligence, the spirit and the senses in a project rich in feeling, but strangely autonomous of any singular perception. Love is not a categorical uniformity. When one mentions love, one assumes the other party to have a similar idea of love, yet, is that ever true? Like art, the concept of love is forever unsettled, and infinitely diverse. Definitions of love always fail, and love avoids erasure through recursion as well as anything we can imagine. The power of love is a phrase that is often repeated, but love is useless to run, for example, a car engine. Energy is susceptible to science. Love is not, really. Even brain and DNA science is inconclusive, when it comes to love. The quarantine has provided copious opportunity for subversion of and by what we broadly stipulate to be love. Take for example the UK authorities caught violating protocols to visit Mum or the mistress.
^ Abbot Kinney Festival 2010: Pop-up poetry reading from cell phone; credit card guillotine by Cain Motter.
To introduce the project of conceiving 4D Love, I see a path parallel to the opening of the 4D Art treatise A Thing… For decades I have been questioning what art is, who is an artist and what art is for. I would ask the same questions of love (for humans). I think it is worth specifying, at least in the beginning, that the love we will discuss is anthropocentric. Art and love are phenomena that eventually distinguish people from other creations. While we may witness much beauty in nature, the mode of expression of art - and love - in human society suggests its own category of thing. I would argue there are other facets of the human thing (behavior, thought, feeling, etc.) that are particular to us, such as war. The definitions of art, love and war are spread thin. One is free, mostly, to assign any these terms to a vast range of activities and phenomena. This makes it more difficult to engage in a conclusive manner with art, love and war (and those other things). Why would anyone not want to settle on a definition of art, love or war? This question presents its own line of inquiry, which we will set aside for now.
What is love? Google generates “about 12,790,000,000 results” for this question. The fifth book in my doctoral thesis will be devoted to my answer to this question. I discovered in my Google search that the movie star Will Smith has made a video titled “What Is Love?” According to YouTube, this video had been viewed 2,424,696 times, since November 2019. Wow! The video post includes 6,025 viewer comments (as of June 15). I don’t know if these comments are curated or not, but I found them worth scanning. [Full disclosure: I once worked as an art handler and installer for a week in his family home in Calabasas. Will and his family were very pleasant to us. I recall Jada realized that the LA Packing crew I was part of had been on-site, since early in the day, and by afternoon most of us had not had a break for lunch. She kindly had the chef fix us an excellent meal. Maybe that happened on another job with another of our clients, but if it did I don’t remember it.) Will’s video summarizes some background for the question What Is Love? It is an ancient question that everyone seems to wonder about. There are some qualified spiritual authorities who have attempted to answer the question, and we can learn from those answers. We can accept Will’s definition of Love, and so on, and be done with this side-project, or continue. Alas, like art, love is always an open question, with no resolution.
The rigor of inquiry presupposes the primacy of purpose. Why love, why art, why life? To what end? Therein lies the crux. Death is the problem that love, art and life fail to solve, but in their own way succeed in the purposing of resolution. I refute the notion that the recognition is itself an expression of morbidity. The awareness of the story’s end ruins its novelty, surprise or shock. Love, art and life however are not stories, however. They are made into narratives, fitted or formed. The experience of love, art and life is not reducible to any narrative. With respect to art, whether the subject is a flower, a nude, a king, a landscape, or nothing at all but color, one’s experience of the art work in question will not translate properly to text. The two modes of expression are fundamentally alien to each other. The enemy of the ideologue is the free or unmediated witness. The interstices between belief and fact remain suspended in the multi-directional nature of perception. So long as the perceptual is defined as both projection and reception the confusion will continue. The issue is what is real and what is imagined, or not real. This is the program space for art, for love and life.
I am not opposed to making art or love, or pondering their natures during a dimensional crisis event. On the contrary, as a survivor of past personal and historical cataclysm, I encourage the practice of art and love, and wondering about them, especially in moments of upheaval. I remember the first time I realized how important art and love are to human survival in the most horrible conditions. On a tour of Yad Vashem in the early 80s the Holocaust drawings that were preserved and displayed had a deep and lasting effect on my understanding of art and its value to one’s descendants. The sketches made by Jews in the nightmare of The Final Solution are to my mind as precious as any art made ever. It is important to not apply hyperbole to the act of creation in the midst of awful destruction. I view this to be a basic human characteristic, key to our survival over time. When humanity is one the verge of erasure, sing a song, dance, make love, make a painting or a poem, take a picture of loved ones. When flames are consuming all you hold dear, pick up a piece of charcoal and a scrap of paper and render what you see as realistically as you know how. Or just scratch out a childish flower-thing - and you will feel better, guaranteed. An action of this kind is not a cliche of fictional narration. It is an existential promise. The Israeli memorial I visited almost forty years ago is not the same now. The site is greatly expanded. In my memory Yad Vashem was a dark, grief-stricken monument to the dead and lost, built by the survivors. The sketches I remember were small, tiny, rudimentary, crazy on materials that were scrounged from hell and somehow passed on so I and many others could witness them. The names and numbers of the dead, their shoes and the many other artifacts are in sum representative of the genocide. None of it impacted me the way the sketches did. I tried to find them by searching the Yad Vashem digital archive, via Google, but could not. I do have photos, but they are blurry and dark. I have my memory of them, and that is plenty.
The COVID-19 pandemic unleashed upon the world re-frames the sexy buzzword cache, the novelty, the pizzaz of disruption. So much of the mundane has been interrupted. In my lifetime there is no precedent. Social interaction has been minimized. The public experience is curtailed to a degree that previously applied only to major storms; or criminal-on-the-loose/terrorist incidents. Storms are common enough, depending on one’s location and the season. The prevalence of mass murder has risen over time, to the extent that it is considered a health threat. Terrorism post-9/11 replaced the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation, but outside major cities or away from strategic infrastructure, seems spectral, despite the concerns of a small constituency of professional and amateur Alertists. Compounding the extreme effects of nationwide quarantine is the obvious lack of coordinated response and leadership in America. There is no settled-on global response to the Corona Virus. I find the most troubling dynamic at play here to be ideological interventions subverting not just commonsense, which in the area of medicine can be very wrong, but also the mechanics of science. It is clear in this country who and what is driving policy. The power elite in the economic and industrial sectors is pushing agendas that clearly prioritize their interests over all others. This fact is reflected in the outrageous profits accrued by the richest Americans over the period of a few months of pandemic, which caused at least forty million citizens to lose their jobs, the closure of millions of businesses, and a ferocious wave of impoverishment and precarity. The reportage has been managed so that one finds it nearly impossible to gauge the severity of the systemic damage. How many people have been evicted or been foreclosed upon, due to the plague? We are not even informed with any consistency as to the effectiveness of various prevention protocols. Substantive reportage on even the most important aspects of the COVID-19 impacts is a confused, confusing and inconsistent mess, primarily due to the absence of trustworthy sources. Additionally there are volatile international conflicts in play. Not to mention a cascade of eruptions in civil society, highlighting long-simmering divides in our relations. 2020 is, in a word, a year of unrest.
Trying to imagine alternative reality is the purview of cinema. The availability of streaming content tests the presumptions about the effects of mass isolation, but how? As Geert Lovink has pointed out, the critique of media has failed. The powerful forces that combine in media industry have seen to that, with the complicity of corrupt politicians and technocrats. The interests of democracy are not the first priority of the tech-barons. The configuration and operations of their empires express the culture of comsuming technology. Our society is preponderantly artificial, now. Only with outright rebellion will the tide turn. Full scale war is the remedy, since all previous opportunities to peacefully reverse the conquest of the popular imagination have been exhausted. To dress this contention in fine speech is a wasteful pursuit. The American Dream cannot be an opioid-induced hallucination that sprays fake gore and pixelated sex fantasy. The Dream cannot be a billionaire getting to run everything like a video game.