Rirkrit Tiravanijas, "Less Oil More Courage"

Jason Rhoades

George Seurat, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte"

John Miller, from "Middle of the Day"

Art:21 Allora & Calzadilla Interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5HE5uA_BGk

Sarah's FUNDRED

1. The quote on pg. 50 by Duchamp and the second paragraph on pg. 56 are disturbing. Clearly, Duchamp was aware of his roots when he cam to the US, or else he wouldn't be scared of them. He chose to be unattached to them, as talked about on pg. 56. Did he uproot only in his art? Although leaving his roots was freeing, like swimming, he really had the roots of the ivy, which HAS roots, and is able to bring along the tradition and replant. A person ALWAYS had roots, whether they are many, few, attached, not attached, tangled, growing, or dried up. The radical sounded more like a tree....being tall, strong, and stationary. The tree is firmly rooted in one belief, canopies over all, spying and judging, and not budging. So strong, but can be cut down. The fall is enormous.

2. About pg. 66. No, postcards are designed for tourists, they are not visions thought the eyes of the local people. The gulf war pics displayed on the news were chosen by TV networks with political agendas meant to sway the public by showing select images, giving people an inaccurate view of what was really going on. I don't think Paul Gauguin had that sort of agenda. I think it is interesting to see how an outsider would translate my world, because then I may see a different perspective. Why do we travel anyway? We must keep our images in our heads as did Daney?

3. About pg. 26. If the other artists from other countries were not influnced by Western evolution in art, why can't we critigue them based on their own evolution and history? They must have one? And what if they don't want to add in? Some don't want to on our turf.

4. About pg. 26. The idea we should dewesternize. Does Bourriaud argue how we could do this? Is it possible? What are we trying to save here? The world, art? Why do we have to be so in control?

5. I would like to discuss a section on pg. 31, about how "...film has been moving more toward the image...art has been going in the opposite direction..."

What does post production mean to me?

Well, I didn't know anything about it before this class. I have a limited opinion of it because it is new to me. I guess I am trying to define it, which is not the question. I think artists source nature and man made objects for their own work. We are inspired by anything and everything. The problem sourcing from another artist who doesn't want you to use their work, or corporations who want a buck from you. I don't have a problem with post production. Nothing is safe anymore...if you make home porn, you are taking the chance its going end up on the internet. To be continued...

Homework for 2/15/10

Daniel Pflumm



Thomas Lélu & Jean-Max Colard, Roue de vélo, After Marcel Duchamp, 2006



Michael Gumhold, Movement #1913–2007, 2007




Ji Lee, Duchamp Reloaded, 2009




Sherrie Levine, Fountian (After Marcel Duchamp), 1991




Shepard Fairey's Obama Hope poster



5 Questions/Comments:

1. Discuss the term "intellectual property" used by music industry lobbyist Rick Cairns. He says, "...the unique expression of love is (his) property. (He) wishes to own the rights to that property." Does he realize what he is saying? Does he want to profit from love, or control the expression when expressed by people? Both? What a horrible would that would be. We would all be emotionless, fearing being sited and charged for emoting.

2. Ideas are more valuable than gold."Wealth is in the products of the mind."...quote from RIP. The only place we cannot plug into at any given moment is the mind. What we think is contained in our heads, and nobody can see in. Although, now we have brain scans and technology that can see in...but not our thoughts. We have lie detectors, but they are not 100% fool proof. So, now, the idea that leads to a money making product, tangible or abstract, is what is valuable. Once it leaves the brain, there is fear it will be stolen be another.

3. On page 23 of Postproduction, there is a Marx reference: "man produces his own body, e.g., through feeding one form of consumption....a dress becomes really a dress only by being worn, a house which is uninhabited is indeed not really a house."
So, if it has not functioned for its intended use, it is not valid, or it is not worthy of the object title? If nobody is around to hear the tree fall in the forest, did it really make a sound? Back to consumption, can a person consume a person? Can an emotion be consumed?

4."...the moment of presentation is made sacred...we only look at what is well-presented; we only desire what is desired by others" from page 27 of Postproduction. This quote makes me think of the question above, #3. The art object is not yet art until it is viewed, but it also has to be well-presented, but it also has to be wanted by many people for it to be valid. Or valued.

5. The Cannibal Manifesto was published in 1928 by Brazilian poet and polemicist Oswald de Andrade. Its argument is that Brazil's history of "cannibalizing" other cultures is its greatest strength, while playing on the modernists' primitivist interest in cannibalism as an alleged tribal rite. Cannibalism becomes a way for Brazil to assert itself against European post-colonial cultural domination. (wikipidia)

The Cannibal Manifesto:

Only Cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.
The unique law of the world. The disguised expression of all individualisms, all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.

Tupi or not tupi that is the question.

Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the Gracos.

I am only interested in what’s not mine. The law of men. The law of the cannibal.

We are tired of all those suspicious Catholic husbands in plays. Freud finished off the enigma of woman and the other recent psychological seers.

What dominated over truth was clothing, an impermeable layer between the interior world and the exterior world. Reaction against people in clothes. The American cinema will tell us about this.

Sons of the sun, mother of living creatures. Fiercely met and loved, with all the hypocrisy of longing: importation, exchange, and tourists. In the country of the big snake.

It’s because we never had grammatical structures or collections of old vegetables. And we never knew urban from suburban, frontier country from continental. Lazy on the world map of Brazil.

One participating consciousness, one religious rhythm.

Against all the importers of canned conscience. For the palpable existence of life. And let Levy-Bruhl go study prelogical mentality.

We want the Cariba Revolution. Bigger than the French Revolution. For the unification of all the efficient revolutions for the sake of human beings. Without us, Europe would not even have had its paltry declaration of the rights of men.

The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls.

Filiation. The contact with the Brazilian Cariba Indians. Ou Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. Natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Surrealist Revolution and the technological barbarity of Keyserling. We’re moving right along.

We were never baptized. We live with the right to be asleep. We had Christ born in Bahia. Or in Belem do Pata.

But for ourselves, we never admitted the birth of logic.

Against Father Vieira, the Priest. Who made our first loan, to get a commission. The illiterate king told him: put this on paper but without too much talk. So the loan was made. Brazilian sugar was accounted for. Father Vieira left the money in Portugal and just brought us the talk.

The spirit refuses to conceive spirit without body. Anthropomorphism. Necessity of cannibalistic vaccine. For proper balance against the religions of the meridian. And exterior inquisitions.

We can only be present to the hearing world.

We had the right codification of vengeance. The codified science of Magic. Cannibalism. For the permanent transformation of taboo into totem.

Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Made into cadavers. The halt of dynamic thinking. The individual a victim of the system. Source of classic injustices. Of romantic injustices. And the forgetfulness of interior conquests.

Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays.

Cariba instinct.

Death and life of hypotheses. From the equation I coming from the Cosmos to the axiom Cosmos coming from the I. Subsistence. Knowledge. Cannibalism.

Against the vegetable elites. In communication with solitude.

We were never baptized. We had the Carnival. The Indian dressed as a Senator of the Empire. Acting the part of Pitt. Or playing in the operas of Alencar with many good Portuguese feelings.

We already had communism. We already had a surrealist language. The golden age.

Catiti Catiti
Imara Notia
Notia Imara
Ipeju*

Magic and life. We had relations and distribution of fiscal property, moral property, and honorific property. And we knew how to transport mystery and death with the help of a few grammatical forms.

I asked a man what was Right. He answered me that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him.

The only place there is no determinism is where there is mystery. But what has that to do with us?

Against the stories of men that begin in Cape Finisterre. The world without dates. Without rubrics. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar.

The fixation of progress by means of catalogues and television sets. Only with machinery. And blood transfusions.

Against antagonistic sublimations brought over in sailing ships.

Against the truth of the poor missionaries, defined through the wisdom of a cannibal, the Viscount of Cairo – It is a lie repeated many times.

But no crusaders came to us. They were fugitives from a civilization that we are eating up, because we are strong and as vindictive as the land turtles.

Only God is the conscience of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of all living creatures. Jaci is the mother of vegetables.

We never had any speculation. But we believed in divination. We had Politics, that is, the science of distribution. And a socio-planetary system.

Migrations. The flight from tedious states. Against urban scleroses. Against Conservatives and speculative boredom.

From William James and Voronoff. Transfiguration of taboo into totem. Cannibalism.

The pater familias is the creation of the stork fable: a real ignorance of things, a tale of imagination and a feeling of authority in front of curious crowds.

We have to start from a profound atheism in order to reach the idea of God. But the Cariba did not have to make anything precise. Because they had Guaraci.

The created object reacts like the Fallen Angel. Ever since, Moses has been wandering about. What is that to us?

Before two Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil discovered happiness.

Against the Indian de tocheiro. The Indian son of Mary, the godson of Catherine of Médicis and the son-in-law of Don Antonio de Mariz.

Happiness is the real proof.

No Pindorama matriarchy.

Against Memory the source of habit. Renewed for personal experience.

We are concrete. We take account of ideas, we react, we burn people in the public squares. We suppress ideas and other kinds of paralysis. Through screenplays. To believe in our signs, to believe in our instruments and our stars.

Against Goethe, against the mother of the Gracos, and the Court of Don Juan VI.

Happiness is the real proof.

The struggle between what we might call the Uncreated and the Created – illustrated by the permanent contradiction of man and his taboo. Daily love and the capitalist modus vivendi. Cannibalism. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into a totem. The human adventure. Earthly finality. However, only the pure elite manage to realize carnal cannibalism within, some sense of life, avoiding all the evils Freud identified, those religious evils. What yields nothing is a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is a thermometric scale of cannibalist instinct. Once carnal, it turns elective and creates friendship. Affectivity, or love. Speculative, science. It deviates and transfers. We arrive at utter vilification. In base cannibalism, our baptized sins agglomerate – envy, usury, calumny, or murder. A plague from the so-called cultured and Christianized, it’s what we are acting against. Cannibals.

Against Anchieta singing the eleven thousand virgins in the land of Iracema – the patriarch Joa Ramalho the founder of Sao Paulo.

Our independence was never proclaimed. A typical phrase of Don Juan VI – My son, put this crown on your head, before some adventurer does it! We expel the dynasty. We have to get rid of the Braganza spirit, the ordinations and snuff of Maria da Fonte.

Against social reality, dressed and oppressive, defined by Freud – in reality we are complex, we are crazy, we are prostitutes and without prisons of the Pindorama matriarchy.




Note: *"The New Moon, or the Lua Nova, blows in Everyman remembrances of me" from The Savages, by Couto Magalhaes.

Cannibal Manifesto (also known as the Brazilwood Manifesto) was written in 1928 by Oswald de Andrade, a member of the Brazilian art movement known as Modernist, which began in 1923.

Questions answered, Walter Benjamin's Essay

What is the "Aura" of a work of art?

The aura of a work of art is the time and space of it's presence. The space it exists in provides a distance between the observer and the artwork that allows contemplation. The aura is influenced by physical wear, damage, or change of ownership of the piece over the years. The original art piece has an aura that a reproduction does not. This makes the original authentic.

b) In Benji's mind, what effects did mechanical reproduction, such as film and the camera/photography, have on the viewer's perception of art?

Photography freed the hand from art processes and skills humans have been using throughout history. Looking in the camera lens, pointing a shooting sped the process of pictorial art-making just like film. Because the reproduced art piece is copiable, it can reach more people, eliminating the pilgrimage once taken by the viewer to go see a work. Multiplying the work spreads the "unique existence" of a piece thin, making it less authentic. An original film cannot be seen by multiple people, therefore, they will never experience the original aura of the film.

c) What is meant by the passage: "for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependance on ritual."

He uses the example of the photo negative. One can make several prints from that negative, but there is no "original print," each one is the same. Maybe the negative is the original that holds the authenticity, but it is not a work of art...yet. Once an original and it's authenticity does not apply, it is freed from the ritualistic aspect of it, and instead it is based on politics.

d) What mechanically or otherwise reproductive processes are changing the face of art today?

Some reproduced art is cheapened by the quality of it's production. Makers sub out parts of their products, or even the whole thing to be reproduced elsewhere, sometimes cutting corners on quality to save and make more profit. I think the aura of a crappy object doesn't exist, therefore, the one purchasing it doesn't value it. It is disposable.
We also have the design aesthetic out there with digital fabrication, laser cutting and 3D modeling. Some people criticize art designed or produced this way, saying the artist's hand is further away from the artwork. There is precision in this work that the hand cannot achieve, and for me, this sometimes makes it cold and sterile. I appreciate some of this artwork, just as I do with all types art. I have no dislike for it. The computer is just a new tool we use to help fabricate. Whether its a computer program or a table saw, it is still technology. True, gross motor skills are not used with the computer, but lets not go into that now!