Incompleteness

Recently I've been reading Todorov's "In Defense of the Enlightenment" (good book). Todorov points out something I hadn't really considered before, an inherent restriction in the concept of freedom (p5):

To engage in [individual autonomy], one must have total freedom to examine, question, criticize and challenge dogmas and institutions: none can be regarded as sacred. An indirect but decisive consequence of this preference is the restriction as to the character of authority: it must be on the same dimension as human beings, meaning it must be natural not supernatural. This is the sense in which the Enlightenment produced a 'disenchanted' world, obeying the same physical laws overall and, insofar as human societies were concerned, revealing the same mechanisms of behavior.

In other words, if we have total individual freedom, that implies that all concepts are equally open to being questioned, criticized and challenged. This means all concepts must be of the same order - there can be nothing above criticism (since that would limit freedom). This in turn restricts the character of authority - there can be no authorities above reason. Consequently if we choose freedom we must give up a supernatural god, since a supernatural god is formulated as a being of a different order, hierarchically above critique. So individual freedom implies we must reject certain concepts, in other words we are not totally free.

This style of argument reminds me strongly of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, from 1931. Gödel showed that, for any formal system T that met certain basic criteria, "T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent." In other words, all formal systems have the equivalent of the liars paradox: "this sentence is false." Mathematical systems are inherently incomplete: we can never have a grand theory of everything, since all sufficiently complex mathematical reasoning systems will contain statements that are contradictory.

I wonder, then, if philosophical reasoning is also incomplete: do all philosophical absolutes contain within them a paradox or contradiction which renders those absolutes incomplete? Anyone?

Partage du methodologie

Asthma Attack. Art stops.

Marginalized by mass media, stripped of grand narrative by pomo funk, art is proclaimed dead. Unable to do anything anymore. We have devolved, according to Giorgio Agamben (2000), to pure communicability, where nothing can be said. Pluralism, says Boris Groys (2008), means that all art discourse is ultimately futile and frustrating.

Can there be a cure?

Yes, we hear. Like the bionic man, we can rebuild. We have the science. Inject a dose of pure research into the heart of art. Research will restore rigor to the viscera, pump vigor into the limbs, spread the balm of money onto the bowels, bring respect to the intestines. Through research, art will regain its place as a viable arena of operation. All praise the new art PhD.

But, with the regulating pacemaker of methodology strapped to its aorta, we must ask if our new art is alive at all. Or is it a walking zombie?

*

There are many reasons why art in the academy is now being framed as research: art departments, wishing to increase their funding and academic standing, see research as a way to provide validation and rigor, separating institutionalized art from the whimsical arbitrariness of “intuitive” or “expressive” art. Yet, although research brings prestige and funding, we are still left with defining what exactly it means to do research in art.

Throw a stone at the word research and you hit the word method. To do research, we are told, we systematically apply methods in order to conduct an inquiry located in a discipline. A central question, then, is what methods?

One body of the literature in art research focuses on process-based methods. For example, according to Carole Gray (2004), art research means employing methods to achieve a “process of accessible disciplined enquiry”. To do art research, we follow these stages:

1. Planning the Journey
2. Mapping the Terrain
3. Locating your Position
4. Crossing the Terrain
5. Interpreting the Map
6. Recounting the Journey

What is disappointing about this approach is that it equates art research with project management. Following the stages above tells us nothing about the art that is produced… rather it tells us the steps we ought to follow to make it. This use of methods to define process is a retreat to an identification of art with craft, in other words with a set of conventions that dictate ways of making. Meanwhile, a jarring ground truth is ignored: many artists are indisposed to following a sequence of steps in their making. Artists can be idiosyncratic, inconsistent, oblique, eccentric, unpredictable, failure-driven, wayward, non-normative, and whacko, not because they lack training or discipline, but precisely because these tactics are effective tools of discovery in art making. Art is often far more unplanning than planning.

Another body of writing in art research (e.g. Sullivan 2010) locates art research as a “method of enquiry” that generates “new knowledge” or “understanding”. Sullivan acknowledges that the methods used in art research should come from art, and not be imported from, say, project management or social science. He goes on to suggest that we use those methods for seeking knowledge, after tidying them up to make them “rigorous”:

“… if you happen to be making art within an educational setting, then there is a responsibility to be able to use your imaginative and intellectual drive to respond to our incessant need to know and to do so in a way that meets the rigor demanded of practices undertaken in institutional communities.” (2010, p242)

Part of me wonders whether increasing the rigor of art practice will also dampen the very creativity and imagination Sullivan so admires (rigor as in rigor mortis comes to mind). Mostly, though, Sullivan's tack makes me think of an art educator I once heard saying “artists are so imaginative and creative, if we just used artists to design cars, think how great cars could be.” Aside from how this patronizes the creativity of non-artists, it implies art is a kind of service bureau for imagination. Sullivan similarly wants to yoke art into service, this time for knowledge production. But is art really a service? If we define art as a service for inquiry into knowledge production or understanding, we ignore how art operates phenomenologically and ontologically. This over-constrains art to an epistemological frame. Elkins (2009) responds to this by asking bluntly: what is the new knowledge produced by a painting by an artist like Picasso?

Sir Christopher Frayling provides a third way of thinking about art research. Frayling identifies three approaches: research into art (using research as a historical lens, e.g. carrying out research into art history), research for art (using research in service of a practice, e.g. researching a new pigment) or research through art (where the art itself is research). The last category, research through art, is the least well defined, and therefore to me probably the most appealing. Faced with the over-determined alternatives, thinking of art itself as research is a good start. What exactly this means, however, is unclear. And again, we should not forget a ground truth: artists carry out investigations for and into their practices on a daily basis as part of their making, as they look at other artworks or study processes for making. It is unclear what leverage Frayling’s three distinct labels give us over a single label.

*

James Elkins (2009) urges us to spend time asking what other approaches are possible before we commit to categorizing our options, copying existing methodologies, or restricting art research to loosely defined goals like “new knowledge”.

My first response to this challenge is to propose inverting the research paradigm. Instead of asking what methods go into art research, we should ask what methods come out of it. Art, in this paradigm, is not about the production of knowledge, but the production of worlds, each with their own systems, discourse, rules, and possibilities. It follows that we should not restrict how art is made or what methods are followed, since that restricts what worlds are possible. Instead, we should focus on the worlds proposed by art, and investigate the distribution of methods intertwining with those worlds - not so much a partage du sensible (Ranciere 2006) as a partage du methodologie.

How could we do this? To start to answer this, lets consider different ways for analyzing art. I have often heard art enthusiasts asking "what does this artwork mean?" This question presupposes that the role of art is to generate meaning. Some art viewers, on the other hand, may ask "what is this artwork doing?" This is a far more open question, one that imbues in art a degree of agency, supposing that art can act, can do things in the world, is a form of life, or at least it has lifelike qualities. The question "what is it doing?" does not limit art to generating meaning, but broadens the enquiry - we can talk about what an artwork is doing in terms of the history of art, or in terms of its political ambitions, or in terms of how we experience the work in moment (a phenomenological account). The question of doing is, in my opinion, a relatively recent invention, one that only begins to make sense once art takes on performative qualities, from the Dadaists onwards. The shift from "what does it mean" to "what is it doing" signals an expansion in the methods that art participates in, from methods of meaning, to methods of interaction and embodiment. It is a change in the methods of analysis of art that also signals a change in the distribution of methods that art participates in.

References

Georgio Agamben, Means without ends: notes on politics. 2000.

James Elkins (editor), Artists with PhDs. 2009.

Christopher Frayling, Searching and Researching in Art and Design, in Proceedings of the National Research Conference Art and Design in Education. 1997.

Carole Gray, Julian Malins, Visualizing Research: A guide to the Research Process in Art and Design. 2004.

Boris Groys, Art Power. 2008

Jacques Rancière, The politics of aesthetics. 2006.

Graeme Sullivan, Art Practice as Research, 2nd ed, 2010.

Live the way you feel

I'm not saying its going to be easy
but I don't think you can carry on like this,
I mean, you can, of course you can, but it has a price.
I think sometimes we just have to risk it.
Live the way we feel.
And you know, it might not turn out well, sometimes
it doesn't turn out well at all,
but we have to try, we have to keep on trying,
otherwise we just become puppets,
all painted smiles, but inside, nothing.

From Little Ashes. Best moment in the film.

Design Thinking

Design Thinking - from ideo.com.

I went to a presentation at CCA Thursday by Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo. The presentation was structured as a conversation between Tim Brown and Mark Breitenberg, CCA's Provost, who himself has a record of leadership in design. In the talk, Tim Brown plugged his new book, Change by Design, which I haven't yet read.

During the talk, Tim Brown and Mark Breitenberg frequently used the term Design Thinking. It is a fairly new term to me and I didn't really understand what they meant by design thinking - at least in a way that distinguished it in my mind from thinking on the one hand or design on the other. I did hear lots of descriptive words - prototype, experiment, build, iterate, change, collaborate, reflect, observe, or analyze. In the end, though, I realized design thinking is a misnomer. What emerged (consistent with here and here) is that design thinking is not a type of thinking, like, say, analytic thinking or creative thinking, but rather it is a label for a methodology or process model, like the waterfall or spiral methodology. Design thinking is a shortcut for referring to the process that designers typically follow.

My first response was to wonder: in these days of interdisciplinary teams, how is it helpful to adopt a label for a team process which privileges one discipline over others? Design thinking hints at hubris. It is liable to lead to turf wars. I imagine non-designers seeing this as a branding tactic that positions the designers as the source of cool.

Next, I thought: it is a clever label. Designers are cool, after all. So this methodology must be cool too. And because it involves thinking it must also be smart, in the same way Adidas shoes are intelligent. What could be better? If I had to pick between, say, "human centered design methodology" and "design thinking" I know what I would swing for.

Clever labels are not necessarily good ones. I'm reminded of George Orwell's great essay on Politics in the English Language. Orwell notes that language is full of tired metaphors that people use automatically and without thought. He argues that we should always seek out fresh metaphors that evoke clear images and assist thought. As a metaphor, design thinking is fresh and appealing. However it is far from a clear image that assists thought. Quite the opposite, design thinking is so vague and sounds so good that people (myself included) immediately want to use it regardless of what it actually means. The result is a cacophony of claims. We learn that design thinking is "what all the creative people do", or it is "about innovation and creativity." It is "a human centered systems thinking that enriches life." "Design thinking converts need into demand" writes Tim Brown. Design thinking is the change agent that will lead us to a better world, where complex problems are addressed in a transparent, inspiring, transformational, participatory, contextual, sustainable way.

Design thinking has grown to become far more than a label for a process. It is a movement, a group of people sharing a vision for how to make better things. Coming from the software industry, I've seen similar movements there, all aiming to overlay some kind of roadmap over the chaotic moshpit of innovation. Scrum, extreme programming (xp), test driven development, agile, ... I could go on. Coders are a vanguard of process innovation. They are also in the unique position of being able to build software tools to assist in and instrument these methodologies. You could argue (eager as I am to use the term) that coders have been applying design thinking to the problem of software design for 25 years.

What have we learnt? That we haven't finished yet. The core of the problem is that innovation involves building things that haven't been built before and thinking things that haven't been thought before. To innovate you have to leave the map. Methodologies, on the other hand, always produce a map, structuring what innovations are possible. Methodologies only help innovation to the extent that the map they produce doesn't get in the way. In other words, the team using the methodology must realize that it is not the methodology that innovates. Design thinking does not think in exactly the same way that Microsoft Word does not write. Thought takes place in the complexity of dissensus, where we leave behind labels like "designer", "coder", "user" and "product".

Ultimately, it is about what works. In software, I've seen teams that adopted rigorous methodologies only to crash and burn, and teams who followed almost no methodology who then thrived and excelled. In my experience the methodologies that work best are those which start with modest claims and a lightweight infrastructure, provide a barebones of management scaffolding, and then slip into the background. The more sophisticated, complex, ambiguous, ambitious or vague the methodology, the more steps there are, the more room there is for debate about the methodology itself - all of which is time taken away from getting it done.

Will design thinking stick? It is probably too early to say. But, even if we question the label, or wonder at the efficacy of the methodology, we should agree with the intent of design thinking: our goal is to expand human-centered approaches across our organizations and companies. Meanwhile, back to the moshpit.

LED Lighting

Flexible LED lighting from Elemental LED

My friend Bob referred me to Kick Lighting and to Elemental LED. They both sell LED lights on flexible rolls that can be powered with 12v. I haven't quite figured out what to use them for yet, but I was really impressed by the sample Bob showed me. The LEDs and control circuitry are mounted directly into a flexible circuit strip. You just tape it up somewhere, plug in 12v and you have light. You can get small power dimmers too.

Avatar 3D

Zoe Saldana plays the warrior Neytiri in "Avatar" (from NYTimes)

I went to see Avatar 3D IMAX today (NYTimes review here). It is the best visual smorgasbord I've seen in film in a while, with an astonishing level of attention to detail, especially in the nature scenes. The film takes 3D visual effects to a new level. I loved the flora and fauna, and thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of the film. However, ultimately the film left me disappointed.

The story contrasts a dystopian military-industrial society with a utopian primitive-natural society. The military-industrial society consists of entirely bad guys, people out to exploit purely for profit. Meanwhile all of the natives are constitutionally good - there are no liars, cheats, thieves, cowards, drunks, slobs or lazy aliens. Straddling these two, a tiny group of heroes must decide where to take a stand.

The two societies collide and then bounce apart. In the end (spoiler alert) the men with their machines exit, and the heroes join the "noble savages" to return to their graceful state in harmony with nature.

This is a massive rewriting of colonial histories, one that pretends we can close pandora's box and return the gift of fire. Bring back the Dodo, let the natives win, Cameron suggests. Nice idea. Of course, we know the men with machines will be back with bigger guns and better bribes. And at least some of the natives will discover they have more leverage if they switch from warriors to miners and traders. Isolationism is only a temporary solution.

We expect nostalgia and fantasy from Cameron, whose previous films include Titanic and Aliens. Cameron's films rely on binary oppositions, on WW2 narratives of good and evil. But today these binary oppositions seem faded and naive. We crave stories that embrace the both-and world of globalization and post-colonialism. We want characters who deal with the gray slushy middle ground of issues like integration, assimilation, control, and liberation. Avatar's making is a case in point - the film's astonishing 3D visuals are only possible because of technologies born out of the military-industrial complex the film aims to critique. We live in the circular, the meta and the post. Our stories must live there too.

The criteria of curating

Fridericianum - site of Documenta (link)

I went to a presentation at CCA by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator for the next Documenta. Erudite. Talented. Charming. Her talk made my blood boil. Carolyn claimed that she does not "select" artists for her shows. She repeatedly rejected that word. "Addition" she said, "I work through a process of addition, not selection." She said she adds artists in a way that is very chance driven, through random encounters that would lead her to work. Her shows, she claimed, were formed in this happenstance of accumulation.

I appreciated Christov-Bakargiev's effort to distance curating from the image of an all-knowing judge who selects the best work with a kind of pre-planned foresight, like a scientist performing selective breeding. But her model of chance-based addition presents its own problems. The word "add" is suffused with positivity. It glosses the unavoidable: the calculus of curating is far more subtraction than addition, since there is always less space than art. Curating inevitably involves rejecting some artists that would otherwise fit because there are other artists who otherwise fit... in other words, selection. The word "add" projects mathematical neutrality, not the shopper adding products to their shopping basket. And the idea of a curator of Documenta who "randomly" discovers artists struck me as very optimistic about the neutrality of chance. Invite a curator to your art school, pay a stipend, and see if the curator perhaps randomly meets some of your MFA students.

I left the talk hungry for criteria for curating that escape the toxicity of pluralism, without resorting to Iron Chef. Then I remembered that I'm an artist. Thank goodness I don't have to worry about that.

Aethetics after the Postmodern Turn

This public symposium looks like it will be really great:

Saturday, October 17, 2009, 9 am
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
1111 Eighth Street, 9:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

A select group of philosophers, art historians, cultural critics, and artists examine the status of aesthetics in discussions of contemporary art. What can the discipline of aesthetics, with its roots in the 18th and 19th centuries, contribute to the analysis of contemporary art? What role do philosophical ideas play in creativity? What can reflection on feelings of beauty and sublimity contribute to studio culture?

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

9–9:30 a.m. Coffee & Continental Breakfast

9:30–10 Welcome & Opening Remarks
Joseph J. Tanke
Mark Breitenberg, Provost
Rachel Schreiber, Director of Humanities and Sciences

10–11 The Identification of Aesthetics and Politics in Rancière
Emiliano Battista, Jan van Eyck Academie

11–12 The Case of the Aesthetic Regime
Joseph J. Tanke, California College of the Arts

12–1 World Modernisms: The Case from Indian Modern Art
Pradeep Dhillon, University of Illinois

1–2 Lunch

2–3 New Games
Pamela M. Lee, Stanford University

3–4 What Is Art?
Frederick M. Dolan, California College of the Arts

4–5 Aesthetic of the Cool: The Life and Times of an African Artist
Robert Farris Thompson, Yale University

5–5:30 Short Break

5:30–6:30 Keynote Address
Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art
Alexander Nehamas, Princeton University

Looking at Art

Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times Visitors at the Louvre: some engage directly with the art while others take pictures of pictures.

Back in August, Michael Kimmelman wrote a piece in the New York Times titled At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus. In it, Kimmelman argues that few people look at art slowly any more. He observes:

"Almost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute."

He then goes on:

"At one time a highly educated Westerner read perhaps 100 books, all of them closely. Today we read hundreds of books, or maybe none, but rarely any with the same intensity. Travelers who took the Grand Tour across Europe during the 18th century spent months and years learning languages, meeting politicians, philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and paint..."

Needless to say, according to Kimmelman, today we have lost something compared to earlier times. But his comparison is bizarre. He compares an earlier "highly educated Westerner" with today's general readership ("we"). His highly educated Westerner can only have been an ultra-wealthy gentry, since in Victorian times high-brow books cost far more than most could afford. One book of Wordsworth's poems cost as much as 100 pigs, for example. Meanwhile, we (the rest of us) read voraciously even then. Miners in the 1920s are documented reading 80 books a year on average. Not the 100 classics that Kimmelman refers to, but far more populist fare. In other words, plus sa change...

What irks me most about Kimmelman's article is that his main claim is that we don't look carefully anymore - but what he actually demonstrates is that journalists don't report carefully any more. Kimmelman makes no attempt to back up his opinion with any scientific research, cultural or social studies, consultation of experts, referencing of scholars, citing of statistics etc. In short, he practices precisely the kind of intellectual skimming he derides in art lookers. This is simply journalism on the fly. The difference between Kimmelman and his target, the lazy art tourist, is that he is writing front-page articles for the NYTimes.

(As an aside, many of the arguments from Krugman's article on Horse Race Reporting apply here).

Do people look at art more rapidly today? To answer that, we would need to know how long the average art goer spent in front of each artwork in previous decades. As far as I am aware, this data does not exist. They didn't use closed-circuit TVs in museums 100 years ago. Anything we say must be speculation.

There is a deeper problem. The "we" that we are talking about has changed. Art audiences have risen dramatically in the last few decades. For example, the Tate Modern is the second most visited destination in England today. That is a lot of eyeballs. Do we look at art differently? Or is it instead that different people are looking? What was a fairly self-selected group of serious art lovers has become "diluted" by a more diverse group of people visiting museums for many reasons. In other words, perhaps the apparent increase in people wandering around museums casually is not a cognitive change in our visual attention, but simply a reflection of a broader and more diverse population of artgoers.

These questions are beyond Kimmelman, who prefers unsubstantiated statements. He writes "Cameras replaced sketching by the last century." Which is like saying "TV replaced radio by the last century." It sounds good. So does my radio, by the way, which works great today. Sketching is still with us. Is it any more or less "normal" than it was 100 years ago? Again, answering that question in a meaningful way requires far more of an investigation than Kimmelman provides.

Kimmelman identifies the digital camera as the enemy of looking. Is that really the case? Why not target postcards, also? After all, they too enable art visitors to think "I won't bother looking, I can always buy a postcard." The argument about digital technology is inconclusive at best. Clive Thompson in Wired Magazine recently wrote a profile of Andrea Lunsford. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford. She recently conducted a survey of over 14,000 writing samples and concluded that, rather than killing writing, technology has created "a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." I can think of no reason why Lunsford's observations would not also extend to the visual.

Upcoming- Fall 2009

This autumn is beginning to look quite full. Besides teaching at CCA I have three art events:

Overlap

I have a piece in Overlap, a group show at Elga Wimmer gallery. Here's the info:

Overlap - Extending beyond edges and boundaries in art & architecture
August 27 - September 19, 2009 (Tuesday - Saturday noon-6:00pm)

Opening Preview: Thursday August 27th 5:00-8:00pm
Opening Reception: Wednesday September 9th 6:00-9:00pm

Art and architecture are often portrayed as distinct, even opposing fields, though they share many material and conceptual practices. The invited artists and architecturally trained designers share interests in generating forms, pattern, and geometries through tactile material processes -whether hand crafted or through the use of computational technology. They often incorporate an awareness of codes or conceptual layers in their work as well as new generative methods and modes of production. The intent of OVERLAP was to begin with these commonalities, and provide space for indefinable qualities to emerge, hinting at something new.

The participants in the show are 4-pli/Associated Fabrication, John Monteith, Jon Meyer, Kelsey Harrington, Myles Bennett, SOFTlab, THEVERYMANY, yo_cy, and Ziad Naccache.

Curated and produced by Kelsey Harrington & Christine Yogiaman

Governors Island Art Fair

I will be installing Farm Yards stickers on September 5th during the afternoon at Governors Island in New York, as part of the Governors Island Art Fair.

The Governors Island Art Fair - over 150 artists

The art fair is open weekends, September 5-27, 11am-6pm. See here for more information on visiting the island.

San Francisco Open Studios

I have a new studio in San Francisco, and will be participating in the San Francisco Open Studios, October 24 & 25, 11am-6pm. My studio is at 900 Tennessee, unit 18. Here is a flickr set of Unit 12, which is quite similar.