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A
student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher
Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. [...] The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other
side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration - how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?
I
’d like to add a word about newness in art, for artists, too, have long known that happenstance breeds new worlds,
that sometimes the creative spirit must
abandon its own designs, the kingdom of our intentions being so cramped and predictable. Leonardo da Vinci used to suggest that art students “look at any walls spotted with various stains,” so as to “arouse the mind to various inventions.” Sandro Botticelli liked to throw a sponge wet with colored paints against a wall, then search out new landscapes in the resulting splatter. But it is in this century (perhaps prompted by similar movements
in biology, psychology and physics) that the role of chance in art has expanded, especially in Dada and surrealism, where a studied attention to accident abetted the attempt to baffle logic, convention, and bourgeois taste.
O
ur minds and bodies are always limited by their origins. Change in mind and body
means being stretched out of what is known
in order to sow the seeds of openness to what is unknown, and that is why change and transformation is more a matter of loss than it is of growth. The language of growth tends to become personal, entrepreneurial, and ambitious. Taking on the new is always easier than letting go of what is old, because what is historical is what is known and comfortable. Sometimes we are so used to, so caught up in, our ways of moving and being that we don’t see them as stale or
outmoded until symptoms appear to tell us so. The first step in working with our conditioned minds and bodies is seeing what is old in the first place. Then we can let it go. We have a home in the present moment whenever we arrive.
T
o be radicant means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them
in
heterogeneous
contexts and formats, denying them the
power to completely define one’s identity, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting
behaviors,
exchanging
rather than imposing. What if twentyfirst century culture were invented with those works that set themselves the task of effacing their origin in favor of a multitude of simultaneous or successive enrootings? This process of obliteration is part of the condition of the wanderer, a central figure of our precarious era, who is insistently
emerging at the heart of contemporary artistic creation.
W
riting
is
disembodied
the art,
most and
reading and writing are
largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers
rarely experience. Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind.
F
or most people in the world today, life has much to do with verbalization. Talking. Reading.
Writing. Thinking. Imagining. Language is a magnificent human invention (though other species seem to have done all right
without it), but it is so embedded in our consciousness that we don’t realize how much revolves around it. It wouldn’t be too much to say that we worship language or that we’re addicted to it. We equate it with living itself.
S
oon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins
to swim smooth and swift and peaceful.
It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand.
P
eople hold books in a special way - like they hold nothing else. They hold them not like inanimate
things but like ones that have gone to sleep.
W
hat’s
that?”
he
said,
“Those are my books,” I said. “Oh no,” he said.
“You don’t read any books all this year.” No books! All year! He didn’t understand who he was saying this to. A Jewish intellectual junkie from Brooklyn. “That’s the whole problem,” he said. “You know too much already. You merely know everything.”
M
aker
philosophy
relies
on crowd sourcing, and community knowledge that
is free and available. The point is to do it yourself: create, don’t just consume. It’s an amalgam of pre-industrial nostalgia (you can be a blacksmith!), neo-hipsterism (you can be a blacksmith who listens to Bon Iver!), and modern communications technology (you can be a blacksmith with a blog!). The goal is to take a measure of
creative production away from industry, and professionals, and put it back in the hands of amateurs.
W
hen Tiravanija does make objects, they are most often multiples and ephemera
connected with exhibitions. Since the early 1990s, Tiravanija has published multiples in the form of backpacks, cooking utensils, and maps as part of his practice. These
commonplace objects used for cooking or camping serve today as memories of the artist’s earlier projects and also stimulate new interactions, whether physical or purely in the imagination. In Untitled 2008-2011 (the map of the land of feeling), Tiravanija presents a visual chronology of his life and work between 1988 and 2008, as told through the pages of his expansive passport.
S
o what did Amalfitano’s students learn? They learned to recite aloud. They memorized the two
or three poems they loved most in order to remember them and recite them at the proper times: funerals, weddings, moments of solitude. They learned that a book was a labyrinth and a desert. That there was nothing more important than ceaseless reading and traveling, perhaps one and the same thing. That when books
were read, writers were released from the souls of stones, which is where they went to live after they died, and they moved into the souls of readers as if into a soft prison cell, a cell that later swelled or burst. That all writing systems are frauds. That true poetry resides between the abyss and misfortune and that the grand highway of selfless acts, of the elegance of eyes and the fate of MarcabrĂş, passes near its abode. That the main lesson of literature
was courage, a rare courage like a stone well in the middle of a lake district, like a whirlwind and a mirror. That reading wasn’t more comfortable than writing. That by reading one learned to question and remember. That memory was love.
S
olitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall,
but in remote places it isn’t an absence but
the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.
I
love [Henry] James’s phrase, the Great Good Place: I think everyone has one. Yours is tailored to your
particular sorrows and contradictions, which it soothes and resolves, and mine to
mine, which it soothes and resolves. The humour, and the wisdom, in James’s story is that the protagonist’s haven has nothing in common with an Arcadia or a Utopia, nothing orgiastic or exalting. No dreams come true there. That’s in the nature of Great Good Places, I believe. They are not projections of our wishes. They are registrations, perhaps quite humble, of what we lack.
I
love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another
trail, with a compass that argues with a map, with strangers’ contrary anecdotal directions. Nights alone in motels in remote western towns where I know no one and no one I know knows where I am, nights with the strange paintings and floral spreads and cable television that furnish a reprieve from my own biography, when
in [Walter] Benjamin’s terms I have lost myself though I know where I am.
I
have faith that all actions have significance. It is impossible to act without reason. Consequently, it is
always possible to discover something of interest through action, through making. It might take a while to find the thing with sparks. The mind is big and complicated. The things we make are just as complicated.
It’s not possible for our conscious minds to be in control of all the meanings generated by what we make. Having faith that that is the case, art making is an opportunity to explore the nature of the mind. If you come at it from the other direction, insisting that it all makes sense, you miss an opportunity to really take advantage of the bigness of what we are.
I
was like every kid who had grown up in the country, allowing the weather good or bad - to describe life for me:
its mocking, its magic, its contradictions, its moody grip. Why not? One was helpless before everything.
L
yra and Cygnus are among the 48
traditional
constellations
that have been with us for some
2000 years, since ancient Greek times. In
contrast, Lacerta and Vulpecula are “new� constellations that were introduced by the famous Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius in 1687. Although these two constellations are still with us today, Anser is not, being a victim of the actions of the International Astronomical Union in 1922 when it purged the sky of many constellations in an effort to standardize their number and to discourage the actions of astronomers eager to honor patrons or
celebrate events by inventing constellations for their star atlases. [...] So, throughout history, constellations have come and gone, and what one sees in a given star atlas reflects what was current in the mind of its creator.
P
rior to the mid-15th Century, star maps (and terrestrial maps) produced in Europe were largely
drawn by hand. They tended to be used
to illustrate the text in books, which were also written by hand as manuscripts, and free-standing celestial images were quite rare. These illustrations often were handcolored and were quite beautiful, although accuracy was usually sacrificed for art. For example, early depictions of constellations in
manuscripts
typically
emphasized
the form of the constellation figure being discussed rather than accurately representing the location of the stars within
that figure. Manuscripts often were written and illustrated by monks, and they usually took months to complete. In addition, the pool of potential readers was small in the Middle Ages, as was the pool of people who could afford to buy these labor-intensive books. Thus, the spread of star maps was quite limited in the manuscript era.
F
ollowing the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan became open to imports from the West, including
photography,
which
largely
replaced
ukiyo-e during the bunmei-kaika (Japan’s Westernization movement during the early Meiji period). Ukiyo-e fell so far out of fashion that the prints, now practically worthless, were used as packing material for trade goods. When Europeans saw them, however, they became a major
source of inspiration for Impressionist, Cubist, and Post-Impressionist artists, such as Vincent van Gogh, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Henri de ToulouseLautrec and others. This influence has been called Japonisme. The prints also influenced early Modernist poetry in many important ways, with Imagist poets such as Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and Amy Lowell allowing them strongly to influence
their imagery and aesthetic sentiments.
G
rouped together, bound in folders, these papers comprise the single uninterrupted fabric
of an entire life, the way it was in the past and the way it is now. And though inside these folders there appears to be an orderless heap of pulp, for me there is an awful lot in this garbage, almost everywhere. Moreover, strange as it seems,
I feel that it is precisely the garbage, that very dirt where important papers and simple scraps are mixed and unsorted, that comprises the genuine and only real fabric of my life, no matter how ridiculous and absurd this may seem from the outside.
I
know that my studio was in the books I was reading and in the flea markets and junk stores I visited. I know I
liked to look at objects and that the forms
I created came as a process of response to a situation. I was just coming to understand, as I graduated, that a studio is a state of mind and not a physical location.
W
hat these artists aim for in their works is not to accumulate heterogeneous
elements,
but
to
make
meaningful
connections in the infinite texts of world culture. In a word, to produce itineraries
in the landscape of signs by taking on the role of semionauts, inventors of pathways within the cultural landscape, nomadic sign gatherers.
L
ost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting
lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge
or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it.
mb semionautreview.tumblr.com cargocollective.com/maeghanbanks
Š Maeghan Banks 2013. Published in Montreal with support from FASA Concordia.