charleswood

<p>Fred, Tim:</p> <p>I can put myself in Eggleston's place in the beehive photo, I've sat there just like Tim has in that Southern type of place in that era. Both Tim and I could have attempted to take that picture, so it is literal and real to me, to Tim. It is Tim, my and Eggleston's lived experience, it's documentary. There's nothing to interpret. For others, they can view it differently. </p>

<p>I then read it thusly.</p> <p>We have an expectation to find in Eggleston's pictorial survey of America a molded sameness in the characters. Instead we are fascinated because Eggleston presents us with Penrodesque characters, not with characters that are extruded and stamped. We're fascinated because they aren't vacant and insentient at all. We're startled, perhaps even exhilarated to see pictures of prototypically normal types, types capable of self-loathing [why self-loathing mentioned first, <em>should</em> they be self-loathing], adaptability [is adaptability a modern vice, an ancient one, or not a vice at all? It's a vice if instead he used adaptability as a euphemism for sneaky], dissembling, sanctimony, and licentiousness. Interesting in their lack of progress. Lack of progress? Compared to whose progress? <em>Their</em> progress? What about progress in the North because Szarkowski sure seems to be singling out Eggleston's South as a repository for vices. An enumeration of vices as belonging to a non progressing sub-culture is archetypally termed a shadow projection. I don't know which is worse: to be regarded in someone's ill informed imagination as a bland, vacant, insentient dullard or to be displayed in a picture book as self-loathing, dissembling, sanctimonious, adaptable [crafty, sneaky], licentious, prideful, parochially stubborn, irrational, selfish and lustful.</p> <p>Szarkowski's text asks us to be fascinated by the exotic and bizarre characters 'exhibited' in Eggleston's book. The subject IS exotic and bizarre to Szarkowski's presumed readers. Szarkowski's self-assessment is that what he says might be nonsense. It isn't nonsense when seen as Szarkowsk's confession of a deeply held prejudice of a Yankee toward the South, albeit unconscious and full of projection, Cameraonesque.</p>

<p>Fred for me interpretation, analysis, I don't know. So the word interpretation. Let me think. An interpretation begins with identifying literals and proceeds to associate meanings to the literals. Identify the literals, then sequentially tag the literals with possible meanings. Interpretation: two steps and you're done. Szarkowski seems to call that two step process a reading. (See below) On the other hand an analysis can begin once all significant literals are interpreted, are identified and tagged with meanings. An analysis would then take all those identified elements and compare each to the other and each to the whole thing. An analysis can also bring in other contexts, etc. Interpret elements, analyze or critique the whole collection of elements that have been interpreted.</p> <blockquote> <p>Think of it as a picture that describes boundaries: the boundary between the city and the country, civilization and wilderness, the fail-safe point between community and freedom, the frontier of restrained protest or cautious adventure. And the boundary between the new and the old, the new neighborhood advancing into the old land, but the neighborhood itself not so new as last year, the house in the foreground no longer the last in the line, and the '56 Buick that stands by its doors already poised on the fulcrum of middle age, still well-shined and well-serviced, competent and presentable, but nevertheless no longer young. And the boundary that separates day from evening, the time of hard shadows and yellow heat from the cool blue opalescent dusk, the time of demarcation between the separate and public lives of the day and the private communal lives of evening, the point at which families begin to gather again beneath their atavistic roofs and the neighborhood sounds with women's voices crying the names of children.</p> </blockquote> <p><br /> <em><br /></em>He walks through the picture elements, associates meanings with them (tags them). He calls that a reading:</p> <blockquote> <p>Such a reading might damage the picture only for the very impressionable, and might prompt some others to look at the picture longer than they would have without the encouragement of words. But the meaning of words and those of pictures are at best parallel, describing two lines of thought that do not meet; and if our concern is for the meaning of pictures, verbal descriptions are finally gratuitous.</p> </blockquote> <p><br /> Here is part of his analysis or critique:</p> <blockquote> <p>One can say, to repeat, that in Eggleston's pictures form and content are indistinguishable, which seems to me true but also unsatisfactory because too permissive. The same thing can be said of any picture. The ambitious photographer, not satisfied by so tautological a success, seeks those pictures that have a visceral relation to his own self and his own privileged knowledge, those that belong to him by genetic right, in which form matches not only content but intent.</p> </blockquote> <p><br /> Fred are you then saying that his methodology is to interpret then to critique? Is he being that formal in his writing? If so he is in both realms, in both interpretation and analysis.<br> <br /> How good is it? How helpful? Probably not an example of his best writing, as Phil has suggested in offering a bit of a better piece by Szarkowski. But clearly, Szarkowski abandoned the notion that he would write in Eggleston's forward something that was 'right'. That's clear and I've more than well supported that conclusion of mine.</p> <p>But I should add, if I've ruffled any feathers, that I think I could have done a better job than did Szarkowski at interpretation and analysis of an Eggleston had I the background and training. What I couldn't have done is to find an Eggleston and had I found him I would have felt so much uncertainty in my own assessment of Eggleston that I couldn't have stood before a critical audience and promoted him as tirelessly as Szarkowski seemed to. With an Eggleston I wouldn't have had the courage of my convictions. I've had the courage of my convictions about other things, but not that. It's all so ambiguous and I tend to just want to crush things that wiggle around that much.</p>

<p>And Fred gets another sense of things, and I agree that the photo comes off as conscientiously cavalier. Is there a correct interpretation? No.</p>

<p>Phil S "Who is this "common man"? The irony of the anti-intellectualists is that they so often see and express themselves as being smarter and standing above those who are in the pursuit of ideas ( which comes from a willingness to doubt rather than stating or thinking one knows it all and has nothing new to learn ) while at the same time thinking to speak for the "common man".</p> <p>Consider this quote from Szarkowski:</p> <blockquote> <p>These pictures are fascinating partly because they contradict our expectations. We have been told so often of the bland, synthetic smoothness of exemplary American life, of its comfortable, vacant insentience, its extruded, stamped, and molded sameness, in a word its irredeemable dullness, that we have come half to believe it, and thus are startled and perhaps exhilarated to see these pictures of prototypically normal types on their familiar ground, grandchildren of Penrod, who seem to live surrounded by spirits, not all of them benign.</p> </blockquote> <p>"These pictures are fascinating partly because they contradict our expectations."</p> <blockquote> <p>Whose expectations are contradicted by these fascinating pictures? What specifically are those expectations being contradicted?</p> </blockquote> <p>"We have been told so often of the bland, synthetic smoothness of exemplary American life...."</p> <blockquote> <p>Who is 'we'? We refers to Szarkowski's presumed readers, his audience. Szarkowski and his audience have been told so often that words like bland describe American life. Is he saying that his audience has been told so often that they themselves are bland and synthetically smooth? Does his audience agree that as Americans they are bland, synthetically smooth, possessed of a comfortable, vacant insentience. Does his audience, do his readers consider their own lived lives as an extruded, stamped and molded sameness? Do his readers believe themselves <em>in situ</em> to be irredeemably dull, do they only half believe that they themselves are bland, synthetically smooth examples of vacant insentience, wearing a patina of extruded, stamped and molded sameness?</p> <p>Does his audience look around at other audience members and gasp at how irredeemably dull everyone is, gasp at themselvesf? Is that how Szarkowski describes his own audience, as vacantly insentient? If he were describing his reader, wouldn't the reader put the book down for being insulted by being described as synthetic, vacant and insentient? Does a writer normally insult his reader? Or, as I suspect as more likely, is Szarkowski describing the common man, the uncultured, those without a fine patina, distinguishing the common man from his cultured audience, his cultured audience of course not being synthetic, vacant, insentient, stamped, molded all the same, his audience is not irredeemably dull like the common man? </p> </blockquote> <p> "....thus are startled and perhaps exhilarated to see these pictures of prototypically normal types on their familiar ground, grandchildren of Penrod, who seem to live surrounded by spirits, not all of them benign.....Such speculations, however, even if not simple nonsense..."</p> <blockquote> <p> <br> Startled? By what? That the pictures defy the preconception of a neighbor as being just an uncultured blob of sameness? Phil can you see how Szarkowski can sound like he is speaking from a seat on a high horse? Would he go into a pool hall or tavern and say "Hey folks, you vacantly insentient dullards, check out my threads?" I suspect he wouldn't. Because for his audience he is play acting above all.</p> <p>But his speculations are simply nonsense and he acknowledges that. Nonsense might also be my interpretation of the 'hair' photo.</p> </blockquote>

<p>Thanks Alan. And I read Szarkowski as saying that you are right, that Eggleston takes a picture of an apple and it is just an apple. Szarkowski heard exactly your opinion from many critics. Yet Szarkowski persisted in his support of Eggleston. The car in the neighborhood isn't as 'fascinating' to me as the photo of the woman with the hair. From one picture, I would think of Eggleston as a kind of joke. But in the hair picture, I felt a lot of things. If the woman doesn't know her hair is hopelessly out of style, if that is her blind spot, not knowing she looks like time has stopped for her, then the picture is taken of the back of her head. We can't see the backs of our own heads. We're blind to what we can't see about ourselves that everyone else can see. But that's how I see that photo. Did Eggleston intend for that photo be interpreted the way I see it? Or for Eggleston was it just a lady smoking in a café? There aren't answers and I find that a bit irksome.</p>

<p>Alan Klein "There's really not that much there. Heck, it's only a picture."</p> <p><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qsSkaXuuUE8/TTUbueanS-I/AAAAAAAAADc/ZbzqWi6O_qE/s1600/050820101166_resize.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qsSkaXuuUE8/TTUbueanS-I/AAAAAAAAADc/ZbzqWi6O_qE/s1600/050820101166_resize.jpg</a></p> <p>It's only a picture. You say there isn't really much there. So your opinion is that there is something there? You didn't write "There isn't anything there." You wrote there isn't much there. What is the 'much' that <em>is</em> there for you? </p> <p> </p>

<p>Anyone else, as I have, as Szarkowski had, visually scan one of the two Eggleston photos and describe in writing for the thread's benefit their feelings and imaginings of either photo?</p> <p><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304449/Colour-Photography-pioneer-William-Eggleston-honored-showing-America-new-light.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304449/Colour-Photography-pioneer-William-Eggleston-honored-showing-America-new-light.html</a></p> <p><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qsSkaXuuUE8/TTUbueanS-I/AAAAAAAAADc/ZbzqWi6O_qE/s1600/050820101166_resize.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qsSkaXuuUE8/TTUbueanS-I/AAAAAAAAADc/ZbzqWi6O_qE/s1600/050820101166_resize.jpg</a></p> <p> </p>

<p><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304449/Colour-Photography-pioneer-William-Eggleston-honored-showing-America-new-light.html">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304449/Colour-Photography-pioneer-William-Eggleston-honored-showing-America-new-light.html</a></p> <p>So Tim look at that one. It's from the '60's. I remember being in places like that and wondering what was the deal with the hair. And the smoking? Thinking 'what's the deal with the hair': weren't we all there at some point? Seeing a woman, a stranger with the beehive long after that style had passed, she never having changed her style? But it was impolite to notice, impolite to take out a camera and record it because that would call attention to the fact that you noticed something about another person that was private about them and not quite right or comfortable in themselves, something rigid in them. You smile maybe, but you don't say. But there it is in a photo. I smile. And that's my reaction to the photo. It's a surreptitious photo of someone's blind spot. It's banal and it is sensitively done. Is it dated? Probably. You would have to know the era, the timing of hair styles, and the charge that was in the air at that time. So it would take some study for a young person to 'get' it.</p>

<p>Captain Obvious? Yeah <em>kind</em> of, if you mean he uses a lot of words to say something fairly easy to understand. And he is hard for me to understand. I find myself rephrasing to get the gist of it. I don't get it all. I'll show you what I mean.</p> <p><em>One can say then that in these photographs form and content are indistinguishable - which is to say that the pictures mean precisely what they appear to mean. Attempting to translate these appearances into words is surely a fool's errand, in the pursuit of which no two fools would choose the same unsatisfactory words. For example, </em><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qsSkaXuuUE8/TTUbueanS-I/AAAAAAAAADc/ZbzqWi6O_qE/s1600/050820101166_resize.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><em>consider the picture on page 75</em></a><em>.</em></p> <blockquote> <p>Perhaps these photographs mean precisely what they appear to mean. Perhaps. To translate appearances into words is difficult. If two translators tried, each attempt would be unsatisfactory and no two translations would be the same. Let's try a translation of the picture on page 75.</p> </blockquote> <p><em>Think of it as a picture that describes boundaries: the boundary between the city and the country, civilization and wilderness, the fail-safe point between community and freedom, the frontier of restrained protest or cautious adventure. And the boundary between the new and the old, the new neighborhood advancing into the old land, but the neighborhood itself not so new as last year, the house in the foreground no longer the last in the line, and the '56 Buick that stands by its doors already poised on the fulcrum of middle age, still well-shined and well-serviced, competent and presentable, but nevertheless no longer young. And the boundary that separates day from evening, the time of hard shadows and yellow heat from the cool blue opalescent dusk, the time of demarcation between the separate and public lives of the day and the private communal lives of evening, the point at which families begin to gather again beneath their atavistic roofs and the neighborhood sounds with women's voices crying the names of children.</em></p> <blockquote> <p>He imaginatively free associates out loud while his eyes scan the photo. He sees boundaries. Pulls a bunch of boundary examples out of his hat and embellishes them. New/old. Day/night. Public/private.</p> </blockquote> <p><em>One can say, to repeat, that in Eggleston's pictures form and content are indistinguishable, which seems to me true but also unsatisfactory because too permissive. The same thing can be said of any picture. The ambitious photographer, not satisfied by so tautological a success, seeks those pictures that have a visceral relation to his own self and his own privileged knowledge, those that belong to him by genetic right, in which form matches not only content but intent.</em></p> <blockquote> <p>One can say Eggleston's pictures mean precisely what they appear to mean. It's true as far as it goes, but to only go that far isn't saying much. That can be said of any picture. An ambitious photographer wants to say more in a photograph than A = A. An ambitious photographer seeks to spill his guts and impart his own privileged knowledge, known down to his bones, where form matches content and intent. [Form = content = intent. What the heck does that mean????]</p> </blockquote> <p><em>This suggests that the pictures reproduced here are no more interesting than the person who made them, and that their intelligence, wit, knowledge, and style reach no farther than that person's - which leads us away from the measurable relationships of art-historical science toward intuition, superstition, blood-knowledge, terror, and delight.</em></p> <blockquote> <p>That's just bad writing. E.G. "This suggests" what suggests? This? What's 'this'? He has a problem. He's just said this is a picture book of mere objects. Most photogrpahers want to do more than take pictures of apples that look like pictures of apples. Here's Eggleston. His pictures of apples look like apples. He wants you to buy his picture book. But what's intersting about apples and what's intersting about a photographer who seems to only be able to photograph an apple as an apple. How interesting then can Eggleston as a person be? He writes "which leads us away from the measurable relationships of art-historical science toward intuition, superstition, blood-knowledge, terror, and delight." Measurable relationship of art-historical science???? What??? Toward what???? As best I can tell he is blowing smoke to hide that he has nothing to say here that would transition to the next paragraph.</p> </blockquote> <p><em><em>These pictures are fascinating partly because they contradict our expectations. We have been told so often of the bland, synthetic smoothness of exemplary American life, of its comfortable, vacant insentience, its extruded, stamped, and molded sameness, in a word its irredeemable dullness, that we have come half to believe it, and thus are startled and perhaps exhilarated to see these pictures of prototypically normal types on their familiar ground, grandchildren of Penrod, who seem to live surrounded by spirits, not all of them benign. The suggestible viewer might sense that these are subjects capable not only of the familiar modern vices (self-loathing, adaptability, dissembling, sanctimony, and license), but of the ancient ones (pride, parochial stubbornness, irrationality, selfishness, and lust). This could not be called progress, but it is interesting. Such speculations, however, even if not simple nonsense, presumably relate only to Eggleston's pictures - patterns of random facts in the service of one imagination - not to the real world. A picture is after all only a picture, a concrete kind of fiction, not to be admitted as hard evidence or as the quantifiable data of social scientists.</em><br /></em></p> <blockquote> <p>Here is where he had better tell us why we would want to buy this picture book. He says the pictures are fascinating. He says why they are fascinating. The pictures challenge our preconceptions. Lofty half believed preconceptions at that. But what are we looking at in these pictures? Who knows? What we do know is that they fascinate. What else can we know? Not only is photography not rocket science, it isn't science at all. {I think Szarkowski is in that paragraph modeling some imaginative grooving for potential buyers. Essentially he's saying groove on it.}</p> </blockquote> <p>But if Eggleston's work is truly fascinating, and I do see where some of it is, then how do you explain that? Tim, I doubt anyone has adequately explained that yet. I take Szarkowski at his word when he says the work is fascinating. But he can't explain it and others criticized him for that. He had to respond to his critics, colleagues, academics. To his critics he just couldn't simply write hey, beats me why I like it, just groove on it.</p>

<p>Alan Klein - "It's the part when he starts seeing things in the picture that aren't there or describing mental conditions of the photographer as to why he took the picture, what it means, etc."</p> <p>For discussions sake, here's the picture I like from the link in the excerpt <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qsSkaXuuUE8/TTUbueanS-I/AAAAAAAAADc/ZbzqWi6O_qE/s1600/050820101166_resize.jpg">http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qsSkaXuuUE8/TTUbueanS-I/AAAAAAAAADc/ZbzqWi6O_qE/s1600/050820101166_resize.jpg</a></p> <p>Szarkowski writes "<em>But the meaning of words and those of pictures are at best parallel, describing two lines of thought that do not meet; and if our concern is for the meaning of pictures, verbal descriptions are finally gratuitous.</em>"</p> <p>So Szarkowski is writing some words, is using a few words to illustrate that the words he wrote are gratuitous.</p> <p>And Szarkowski also says "<em>Such speculations, however, even if not simple nonsense, presumably relate only to Eggleston's pictures - patterns of random facts in the service of one imagination - not to the real world.</em>"</p> <p>So Szarkowski is pointing out that even if what he just wrote was not nonsensical, his words would relate not to the real world, but to the picture. The real world stimulated Eggleston's imagination, he took a picture, and Szarkowski doesn't imagine that he can know to satisfaction much about either Eggleston's intent or much about that part of the real world Eggleston concretized in a photograph.</p> <p>Some photography is starting to look to me as though performed by a scarcely hidden puppeteer using the puppets of a photograph to lure the imagination of the viewer. So Alan I wonder if all we can do with a photograph at times is to just see things in the picture and not know if they are there or not, not know why a pictures was taken, and not know for sure what a picture really means.</p> <p> </p>

<p>Fred "I think the urinal does not lose its original self."</p> <p>Well it has been re-purposed - thanks Alan - and isn't just a urinal anymore. It is still a urinal. But our behavior toward that particular urinal would have changed, that change in behavior I take as a confirmation that the mind has changed with respect to that particular urinal. But it still is a urinal and that is part of the deal, and it is about more than that particular urinal. A spider wouldn't make a distinction between a urinal on display in a museum or one in situ. To a spider it is a urinal, no behavior marker of a changed spider mind that can't be explained by purely physical differences between the two (surface moisture, etc.)</p> <p>I'm not a fan of reified schema, and do question the value of my over thinking.</p> <p>Fred "If photography and art are about imagination and emotion, a photo has the power to objectify not just the objects in it but the imagination and emotion brought to the experience by the photographer and in the experience or subject itself."</p> <p>I agree and the behavior of specifically creating a space to contain objects in play would be a behavioral marker to look for in some other species to see if they, like our species, may be able to imagine that some <em>thing</em> is also something <em>else</em>. A snake doesn't re-purpose. We make tools, crows too, but crows can't but be entirely pragmatic about that, not making temples to house beautiful tools, the idea of beauty probably not well developed in that species. I just say play when I could have said create a space to imagine within. In imagination things are plastic and malleable. Fate doesn't seem to be plastic and malleable enough!</p> <p> </p>

<p>I hate to say that I like the Eggleston on page 5 per the Szarkowski excerpt. There is something ineffable about it as Szarkowski writes.</p> <p>How picture this, though maybe, maybe not as banal: I found my neighbor, sitting on a towel in the park at the end of the street. He spoke to me in earnest of the great mass of mycelium consciousness that is our creator, that massive subterranean substrate that is all things; and how we don't see that trees await in conscious eagerness for us to play with them. And if I did take that picture, how could I ever be done with it? It's heartbreaking. He had one of the finest minds I have ever encountered. I miss that, its just gone now.</p> <p>Something Matt wrote: "Those photons are bouncing off of your subject whether you're there to ponder them or not."</p> <p>For me to state that "those photons" when I'm there with a subject would not be <em>those same protons</em> is as much a philosophical statement as to say that those protons would be there regardless if I was or wasn't. My neighbor wouldn't be in the park without his mind were I not his neighbor; and without me no photon could have reflected off him in the park because he wouldn't be there, and I wouldn't have been there if not that he existed and I knew him? So I offer that we are recording events with cameras that are even more complex than the complex optics involved. (Hey, it's a philosophy of photography forum so I riff in that direction...)</p>

<p>I think Fred your term transformation is similar to my term de-objectification. A urinal is an object de-objectified by being placed in a museum, transformed with the help of an artist's playful imagination. I suppose that a Chinese scholar's rock isn't all that different from Duchamp's Fountain, the urinal. The rock, the urinal are transformed, and I use de-objectification as a term for that event from which a rock or a urinal becomes no longer a rock or a urinal by operation of imagination. Objects are mere objects unless imagined to be otherwise. I like the term de-objectify, at first blush anyway, because I'm trying to root the transformation in the imagination. And I think that through art objects are de-objectified regardless if happening in a context of "mimesis, imitation or representation", a context Andy M. notes as art concepts salient to photography.</p> <p>Art objects as objects <em>per se</em> are objects that exist in space, occupy a space [a frame, a screen, a concert hall, a stage, a page]. That framing defines the space within the frame as imaginary, as pretend space, as play. The contents of that framed space are objects de-objectified. Some discussions concerning whether particular de-objectified products don't belong in that space boil down to making an argument for 're-objectifying' the contents of the frame. In your terminology that might be a transform - re-form, put in frame, remove from frame. An example of re-form would be to criticize Duchamp's fountain as being nothing but a urinal. A scholar's rock argued to be just a plain old rock. I was calling that thought process re-objectification of the de-objectified, clumsy terminology no doubt.</p> <p>Phil I think in my neighborhood the soul of man is the soul of a warrior under siege and I'm inclined to photograph the fortress homes in my neighborhood as a series to illustrate same. It is ugly I'm inclined to say. I take your points to heart though. I also think that in the ancient history of art, a cave is a frame and the frail human mind, developing, needed a frame to remind itself that it's imaginary objects weren't really real, weren't real because of where they were placed, and where they were placed was in some sort of frame. That cave art for its framing must have seemed magical.</p> <p> </p>

<p>Nor would I suppose the artist knows what she is going to come up with next? Fred what did you mean when speaking of art as transformation? Transformation of the artist? And we don't produce to fit a definition I agree generally and that's a helpful point.</p> <p>Alan I like that about photographs being discussions about the moment.</p> <p>As to rooting in culture: I suppose if that's helpful. I like rooting in biology because that gets me into a natural philosophy category as opposed to metaphysical, philosophical, etc. At least as a starting point. And I think that if rooted in culture, we may be more apt to miss art in subculture, or mislabel it as just another object. In a way it's similar to where we can see that another culture's gods are silly fabrication and fanciful story, it being harder to discern the same of our own gods. Also, with biological roots: we've for a long time missed tool making as being something other than an exclusively human behavior so at least in a biological rooting we may have some way of identifying behavioral markers of imagination and creativity in other species. A humpback whale's song is to us just a mating song, we deprecate it, but so we deprecate our own art products, at least in my mind, when we reduce art to the operation of some more fundamental function, some mechanism or another. I suppose my interest in rooting in biology is to root art in something akin to a drive, instinct, or need, that is, root it broadly in life itself.</p> <p>As to subculture, an Elvis on Velvet makes some sense to me as Celtic, a singer with spangles for a culture that had oral histories, not written, pastoral v agricultural, and I mean Celtic traditions not in modern times, traditions for centuries that elevated oral story and song over writings of same.</p> <p>That Cole Weston photo has me thinking there's an Asian or Japanese Wabi-Sabi aesthetic in play, a sort of scene that has the stamp of time on it and some elements of decay and beauty, the kind of thing an American might go to Europe specifically to find. I also find in Western wabi sabi interpreters traces of cultural appropriation. But that is an aesthetic I've come across in my woodworking craft as an alternative to my Western aesthetic that initially favored symmetry, completeness, homogeneity to the point of my achieving true sterility and boredom in my first attempts at wood working pieces. When I say alternative I also mean an alternative mind set such that I have a reason to do some reading and study having to do more with my own growth. With wabi-sabi western interpreters I find that definitions really get in the way, as though an aesthetic could be defined by breaking it down to its constituent parts. I can see then that definitions of aesthetics don't convey much, you have to actually go to the art museum. But if anyone can get enough about my interest to recommend something to read on aesthetics, recommend something please?</p>

<p>So Fred I suppose what I'm trying to do is root art in play and root play in imagination and root imagination in biology. It isn't enough for me to have the definition of art floating around like a balloon that can be blown around and made to go where ever, when ever. If art isn't rooted in what I would loosely term biology it doesn't then mean much to me, much like to Morrison art that isn't in the world (hers political) isn't as interesting.</p>

<p>Fred - "So does utilitarianism. A bowl can be used as a hat."</p> <p>Any bowl can be used as a hat. A bowl that is more than a bowl for being 'art' is still 'art' when used as a hat. A bowl is just a bowl, a spider web just another tool, a hat just a leaf placed over the head. I can use a commode as a door stop, the mona lisa as a dart board.</p>

<p>Fred I see we were writing simultaneously.</p> <p>So if I consider Morrison's quote in context of considering that "some <em>thing</em> being at stake" is a precondition for the arrival in a species of the triplet "imagination -> play -> art", then... Maybe a characterization of what Morrison calls state art would best begin by first describing state art as the expression of a materialist aesthetic, whether politically that expression be fascist or communist. Morrison may conceive of the stakes of artistic expression as always and ultimately political. If so, to my way of seeing things, she thusly marks herself firmly with a materialist philosophy. That's because she seems to limit her conception of the stakes involved in true art to what is in my view her own over emphasis of the political.</p> <p>How useful is such an 'all political' conception, to whom, and when, whether it is over emphasis or not? I'm acknowledging that hers is a useful perspective. I have to acknowledge that because for me stakes are a precondition for imagination -> play -> art. Stakes plant us into the earth of the real world. And so what? But interestingly, art for Morrison, art which I've called de-objectification of the object, makes a complete round trip back to objectification, art becomes an object again for Morrison.</p> <p>Like any other object, Morrison probably is saying art is an effect with a cause. From Fred's Morrison quote "<em>I’m not interested in art that is not in the world.</em>" For Morrison, the world is political always, a flight of fancy gathering no magic dust at all in its return trip to good old planet earth. SAY IT AINT' SO TONI, SAY IT AIN'T SO! Well it is so, in part, but so what? Maybe in reality the only important thing that has ever arrived on this planet is the capacity for imagination.</p>

<p>So a spider can't see its world in other than utilitarian terms. A species' capacity for play would then be a marker of a capacity to separate what's real from what is imaginary to a point and in degrees. Stakes in a game root play back into a strictly utilitarian world and there is no getting around that fact. I stake myself with that fact to the point of defining play as requiring stakes, play without stakes is instead just a way of wasting time. Point in fact, dogs play fight over some <em>thing</em>, constestual inhibited bites and shoving a proto kabuki theater in the result. A spider can't imagine. A dog can imagine itself the winner had instead the stakes, bites, and shoving been real.</p> <p>That drama of pure contest is professional sports and I don't see any way out of allowing that professional sports is a theatrical art, even to the point of making the officiating appear just real enough to be believable when in fact, the officiating isn't believable really and debates about the reality or unreality of officiating are essential to the theater of it. As with any theatrical performance, the audience is at risk of taking a sporting event or season all too seriously and some others in the audience may also become involved in the performance by admonishing that it's all just a game. And without stakes, who would play? None, and I feel I've made my case for defining creativity, play, and art as requiring stakes.</p> <p>So I think when we accept a definition of creativity, of art, as novel, useful, and in a social context (conversation, dialog) we accept that creativity or art without stakes isn't creativity or art. For art, stakes may be the only element that roots that activity back to a strictly utilitarian world because art doesn't have a strictly utilitarian purpose just like imagination doesn't have a strictly utilitarian purpose. Art imagines that a bowl can be more than a bowl whereas a spider doesn't imagine anything.</p>

<p>What may we call art? A consideration: Art may have its origins in a capacity to view the world in a non-utilitarian way. Art, as play, de-objectifies because play isn't real. For the strict utilitarian, art doesn't exist because for her there is but one realm, one realm populated entirely by objects and their mechanism, play itself just a handmaiden/handyman to mechanism, art mere mechanism, function. </p>

<p>Yes I do view aesthetics/beauty as in how one sees it.</p>

<p>Is body hair beautiful?</p>

<p>Allen: "The latest research contradicts that statement."</p> <p>Oh Allen you're simply nitpicking. :)</p>

<p>I see your point Phil.</p> <p>And Fred, I read the article.</p> <p>From <em>Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics</em> linked to by Fred above:</p> <blockquote> <p>The interactivity of relational art is therefore superior to optical contemplation of an object, which is assumed to be passive and disengaged, because the work of art is a “social form” capable of producing positive human relationships. As a consequence, the work is automatically political in implication and emancipatory in effect.</p> </blockquote> <p>An example of relational art from artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, a:</p> <blockquote> <p>...hybrid installation performances, in which he cooks vegetable curry or pad thai for people attending the museum or gallery where he has been invited to work.</p> </blockquote> <p>That cooking event together with interactions between artist and people an exhibit of a 'better world' of social harmony.</p> <p>Enter 'antagonism' per the author, Claire Bishop:</p> <blockquote> <p align="LEFT">If relational aesthetics requires a unified subject as a prerequisite for community-as-togetherness, then Hirschhorn and Sierra provide a mode of artistic experience more adequate to the divided and incomplete subject of today. This relational antagonism would be predicated not on social harmony, but on exposing that which is repressed in sustaining the semblance of this harmony. It would thereby provide a more concrete and polemical grounds for rethinking our relationship to the world and to one other [sic].</p> </blockquote> <p>I see that Nicolas Bourriaud is a curator.</p> <p>So I'm tempted to see a Rirkrit Tiravanija as producing art for a curated art world. To do that he relies largely on his own narrative brain and on the narratives of others. Consequently, I see Bishop's endorsement of 'antagonism' as fiddling around with a narrative, adding 'antagonism' to the narrative brain's broth, 'antagonism' being "...that which is repressed in sustaining the semblance of this harmony." I think it's worthwhile of her to wish for relational antagonism as more concrete. I'm not sure how that would look in a thusly more polemical Tiravanija's cooking performance.</p> <p>I think Bishop makes some interesting points.</p> <p> </p>