For our final guest speaker event today we were honored to be joined by cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram. David spoke for an hour and then engaged our panel in a lively discussion for well over another hour. We all agreed it was the perfect way to cap our penultimate day of dialogue, so I encourage everyone who's been following to watch the video. Questions and comments for David can be posted under this thread. Enjoy!
Link: David Abram talk
5 comments:
As codetta to today’s deeply inspiring, nourishing, replenishing talk with David (deepest gratitude to You, David) just wish to give arc to Daniel’s question concerning the future of an (A/a)rt-sans-ego. I feel extremely fortunate to have experienced in flesh and with forever-after altered state, such ego-free — but also spirits-infused, materiallly blissed-out trans-portality (trans-‘Art’?)— in the work of two of our fellow panelists, Christine and Deborah. I keep finding in their work a sense of Time — untethered from any personological bearing — that seems to span the most distant pasts and futures yet all magically concentrated into a vibrating present. Their work mystifies me. Their work transits an impossibility: evoking incalculable distances (where in the universe did this come from?) and yet giving hum of place that tremors with immediacy and incisive punctuation: here. Here. He(a)r(e). H-e-(a)-r-(e) is a verb.
So, as a signing-off, thank you Taney too, for bringing us all, to H-e-(a)-r-(e)...
As we listened to David last night I considered how multidimensional our connections with each other actually are. As is appropriate for the group that was gathered in the zoom room for 2 ½ hours, this was a rich trove of philosophical reconsiderations and reframings. But even more striking to me was how closely the evening resembled the ones I have had with shamans, indigenous elders (male and female) and wisdom workers, ones where sacred journeys to other realms happen with and through words, images, emotions, sacred substances and inchoate powers that are unseen and unnamed. As an artist I live for moments like those, and I feel so grateful and gifted when they happen.
Jon, I am so honored by your what you wrote and how deeply you have penetrated my visual work. That understanding was there right from the beginning. Our adventure together doing Clew was its own kind of sacred expansion, one that I continue to reference, learn from and build upon. You collaborate at a level I have never experienced before: limitlessly creative, perpetually permutating, deeply authentic, and so far above the my way/your way duality. Our friendship has been one of the greatest gifts of my life.
And one last shout out to the ever resourceful, ever open, ever brilliant, ever talented, ever-warmhearted Taney: This has been such an unexpectedly rich adventure. I would go anywhere with you! Thank you for all that you did to bring this extraordinary gaggle together. I will be talking about the experience of this 10 day float down the Thingly Affinities river for years to come.
Jon and Deborah, what beautiful words from you both -- thank you. This whole thing has been such a thrill for me. While I'll save my concluding remarks for a separate post, let me say here that it has indeed been an extraordinary gaggle! And to think that this light we generated came out of what is such an otherwise dark season. (We might look back on this experience in twenty years and marvel over the scant mention of the menacing microbe!)
There's so much to say about David's talk. So many memorable bits ("You are therefore I am"; our self-imposed exile from the great voluminous "inside"; the I as upright spine -- I could go on and on!), but I want to comment here on a thought I had while David was discussing language. If our separation from the world can be linked to the rise of phonetic writing, where, arising now from abstractions, the glyphs no longer visually evoke anything of the landscape beyond us, we might be tempted to make an analogous claim for art. We might say that when art ceased to represent things in the world, turning instead to form *as form*, color *as color*, it withdrew into itself, coiling into a closed subjectivity that furthered our isolation inside our abstractions. But the thought that occurred to me was: No! If you think about it, exactly the opposite is the case. We might instead say that when visual art was fixated on representation, the impression could easily be had that the idea was to "read" or “decode” it -- that instead of luxuriating in what was actually present (pigment, stone, metal, that slab of gorgeous mahogany), the mind's job was to move elsewhere, into *ideas* of the things represented. (How many art history lectures actually mention materials? How many discussions of narrative paintings include anything about their forms?) Taking this idea one step further, then, abstract art -- which, it seems to me, is the dwelling of the artists on this panel -- might be seen not as a retreat into human subjectivity, as is so often claimed, but rather as a turning outward toward, and a rekindling of our affection for, other things in the world. It's that radical otherness that David talks about: abstract art as an encounter with otherness -- but an otherness that holds within it intimations of our shared thingliness. This is how I’d like to think about form/forming moving forward. There’s still a lot of work to do, however, in shedding “form” of its modernist-humanist-retreatist associations.
One more thought: Jon mentions Deborah's and Christine's work as consummate examples of posthumanist art. I could not agree more. I have not, alas, had the opportunity to see either's work in the flesh -- and my flesh longs to do so. One thing that hasn't come up in this dialogue is the body-denying, utterly stultifying experience of viewing art online. I wonder if anyone would care to explore this issue and what might be done about it.
As a reviewer/critic, I've found it important to refuse to review virtual "exhibitions" of artworks created to be seen and interacted with in meatspace (I like the term)--at least as long as there are physical shows worth taking seriously. The Internet is a wonderful source of information about such works but passing off a website, even with fancy virtual interactivity, as a real show of sculptures or drawings or (yes) paintings gets me the wrong way.
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