More from Robert Persig’s Zen. This really strikes a tone with me, especially when thinking about experiences informing our view of the world as opposed to hear-say. When discussing a Gradeless school:

As  a result of his experiences he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school.

That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hands could get you anything-from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

He also talks about how we can reach real rhetoric thinking- without imitation- brick by brick- breaking something down (a building in his example) to its constituite pieces and thinking individually about them, and gradually ‘zooming’ out (starting with the top left brick and working along).

I feel a contradiction here- by mimicking or using this method of thinking surely there is a level of imitation?

“When a politician does something even slightly scandalous, journalists are up in arms for weeks, but before a peep is heard from the press about a faulty product it has to go as far as severely injuring people […] The lack of criticism is understandable given that horrible designs are far less interesting and far more abundant than corrupt politicians”

Regarding Bruce and Stephanie Tharps list of the number of specialised methods a designer can choose from:

“The absence of a philosophical unity int he way we go about making things is a symptom of our technologically driven, globalised culture”

Regarding an earlier point that we know more, and have studied, analysed, categorised etc. more about the natural world than we have our own man made environment- e.g. there are ‘products’ in land-fill that no one knows about.

“It’s ironic that we are trashing the natural world, which we cherish, admire and study, for products that we don’t care enough about to document”

Interesting point regarding the study of products- I feel it is a good test of what we really care about- though there are obviously plenty of products that are studied and analysed etc.

Started and need to finish:
Zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance – Robert Persig
The practice of everyday life – Michel de Certeau
Non places, and introduction to super modernity – Marc Auge

Little quote from Zen:

“In a car you are always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realise that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is over-whelming.”

Several from the other two- thought I haven’t had time to write them up yet… this week.

More, from Hickey’s Air Guitar- with regard to a gallery that the author setup in 1967:

“In the nineteen eighties, people stopped wanting to know how much fun it was. They wanted to know how much money we made, an they were shocked and dismayed to learn that we didn’t make any money. We made a living. We paid our bills, paid our artists, and eventually paid off our note. We had a place to live, food to eat, work we liked doing together, and no “spare time.” Had I been more candid, I would have confessed that we were totally disinterested in making money. That was what my professors at the University did. They “made money” working in a vicious bureaucracy, so that they could spend it in their “spare time” doing exactly what they liked [..]. thus I have always associated the desire to make money with a profound lack of confidence in one ablity to make a living, to make one’s way in the world through wit and wile.”
p.106

Interesting comparison between making a living, which I see as ‘doing’, and making money which involves some sort of life split, with no real ‘doing’- both split lives seem to lack profound meaning in so far that “making money” simply supports another activity- its sole purpose is to enable another life- and the other lifes purpose is to act out what is earned in the other life.

And on art and money:

“…art and money are very much alike,  in both embodiment and conception. To put simply: Art and money are cultural fictions with no intrinsic value. They acquire exchange value through the fiduciary investment of complex constituencies–through overt demonstrations of trust and (or acts of faith, if you will) of the sort we all perform when we accept paper currency for goods or services.”

Lovely- daily act of faith in determining value- the objects only work due to a worldwide understanding/belief in them.

Though I somewhat disagree- here art’s value is due to popularity, as opposed to just doing- it becomes about telling people about it- an example is this: On Thursday I met a man whom had cycled from Germany down to Donostia- the purpose of his trip was a pilgrimage- he was delivering a stone for his deceased Grandmother, he didn’t write a blog, and didn’t broadcast his mission, unlike the bourgious bicycle caravan where it seems the ‘work’ or act of doing only becomes validated by the documentation- arty pictures, drawings, blogs etc. I still think it is a lovely thing to do, but I wonder how it is different if it were to ‘just happen’ instead of be broadcast. So is the mans trip from Germany art, or does it not qualify simply because nobody knows about it- whereas the bourgious bicycle caravan is art due to its documentation, and widespread knowledge of it?

First post- a few quotes from David Hickey’s Air Guitar which I am currently working my way through- he has an interesting conversational, stroytelling style which makes art theory far easier to digest and remain engaged by for someone like me.

“Kindness, comedy, and forgiving tristesse are not the norm. They signify our little victories–and working toward democracy consists of nothing more or less than the daily accumulation of little victories whose uncommon loveliness we must, somehow, speak or show.” p. 38

“if, [..] you receive a memorandum from the government officially stating that the sky is blue, you will shrug, but you will believe it, since the government labels things, then counts them, and averages them out. Defining the norm is its instrument of control over idiosyncrasy.”

“Yet, we apparently spend so many days and hours in this state of attentive painlessness that we now consider ir normal–when, in fact, normal for human creatures is and always has been a condition of inarticulate, hopeless, never-ending pain, patriarchal oppression, boredom, and violence” p. 39

“when art abandons color, as it did in the nineteen seventies, it can only recede into the domain abjection- into the protocols of language, history and representation. The consequence of this [...] is that all discussion of art under such regimes begins at the position of linguistic regress that renders invisible the complex dialogue between what we want to see and what we want to see represented.” p. 51

This is my new space to talk about/write about books- what i’m reading or have read- and what I am going to read- I think its become necessary to have space to think about what I’m reading, otherwise it goes in one ear and out the other. I aim to write something once a week.