The Crux of Minimalism

Hal Foster, in his chapter “The Crux of Minimalism” in The Return of the Real, positions Minimalism as both the crowning apogee of Modernism and also the break from it. According to Foster, Minimalism completes Modernism only to exceed it. He writes:

“We arrive, then, at this equation: minimalism breaks with late modernism through a partial reprise of the historical avant-garde, specifically its disruption of the formal categories of institutional art. To understand minimalism – that is, to understand its significance for advanced art since its time – both parts of this equation must be grasped at once.” (Foster, Return of the Real, p54)

Foster recognizes some of the complexities and contradictions in Minimalism (particularly the extent to which Minimalism claims both phenomenological and epistemological traits). He also warns of anachronistic interpretations. Nonetheless, he draws on a series of binary oppositions to show how Minimamalism is a break from the Modernist ideals championed by Clement Greenberg.

I found myself analyzing Foster's text in terms of these binary oppositions. I wrote down all the pairings I could find. Looking at the list, I thought others might find it useful:

Greenbergian Modernism	Minimalism
“Expansive” and “vanguard” (Greenberg)	“Reductive” and “retardaire” (Greenberg)
Participated in cultural regressions of Reagan-Bush era	Opened up a new field of art
Apparent freedoms	Apparent restrictions
Transcendental space of modernism	Immanence of Dada readymade or constructivist relief
Anthropomorphic images and gestures	Presence of objects
Siteless realm, standing apart on a pedestal or as pure art	Repositioned among objects and redefined in terms of place
Safe, sovereign space of formal art	The here and now
Surface	Site
Topographical mapping of the properties of a medium	Perceptual consequences of a particular intervention
Essential qualities of art	“Extraneous effects” (Greenberg)
An ideological model of meaning and of consciousness	Called “reductive” and “idealist” but complicates the purity of conception with the contingency of perception
Formal essence and categorical being	Perceptual conditions and conventional limits of art
Private meaning and subject	Public meaning and subject
Mental space of idealism conception	Physical interface with actual world
Strictly spatial, entirely present, grasped in a single glance, a transcendental moment of grace	Concern with time and reception, and the temporality of perception.
Illusionist	Literal readings
Objects set in relation to one another	Nonhierarchical ordering of objects to “take relationships out of the work and make them a function of space, light and the viewer’s field of vision” (Morris)
Structural linguistics	Phenomenology (but with a structural underpinning)
I express	I perceive
Categorical imperatives, historicist tendencies	“linear history has unraveled somewhat” (Judd)
Objective painting	Not painting, but a creation of objects
Quality – judged by reference to the canon of Old Masters and great Moderns	Interest - provoked by testing aesthetic categories and transgressing set forms
Normative criticism and aesthetic refinement	Epistemelogical disruption, aesthetic play
Artist as existential creator and formal critic, with access to transcendental sublime	Death or the author, birth of the viewer
Aims to defeat or suspend objecthood	Aims to discover objecthood as such
Discover the essence	Transgress the limits (there is no way you can frame it)
Formal autonomy	You just have to experience it
Sublime “instantaneousness” “which at every moment is wholly manifest”, individual “grace” (Fried)	“theatrical”, “as it happens it merely is” , “the negation of art”, only literalism (Fried)
An act of faith and devotion that compess conviction (Fried)	Avant-gardist atheism (Fried)
Autonomy, belief, conviction, a secret substitute for religion (Fried)	Saps, disrupts, corrupts autonomy, belief, conviction (Fried)
Self critical objectivity	Specific objects
Modernist autonomy based in formalism and disciplines	Literalism, gestalt, perception, situation
Old	New
Purify art of life	Sublate art into life
Preserve	Transform
Posits aesthetic norms and normative examination	Posits functional analysis: investigation of the social and institutional
Normative	Experimental
Refinement	Redefinition
Secure a transcendental conviction in art	Undertake immanent testing of discursive rules and institutional regulations
Seek the essential	Reveal the conditional
Compel conviction	Cast doubt

Diaries of a Young Artist

Dear Diary,

Do you remember I once read Letters to a Young Artist? A great book. It contains twenty three letters by established artists, written in response to a letter from a fictional "young artist" asking for advice. The young artist's letter is not published, so the task of reconstructing it is left to the reader. This makes reading Letters a treasure hunt. The effect is reinforced by the letters themselves, which contain moments of frankness and intimacy, nuggets offered by the older artists to their younger selves. The resulting mixture of personal history, practical advice, and considered reflection make this a classic small book.

When I finished Letters, I wrote on my blog that "I would really love to find a book that contains text by artists before they become established." When I saw the sequel, Diaries of a Young Artist, I eagerly purchased it.

I was disappointed.

The second book is far less compelling that the first. It is well written, but the book fell flat. There were few "take homes." It would be easy to argue this is because younger artists have less to say than established artists, but I don't accept this. I think the editors got it wrong.

For Diaries, the editors asked the younger artists to contribute "dear diary" entries - and there's the nub. Many of the artists take the project literally, and write about their daily routines. Consequently, where first book was polemic, the second is prosaic. The trips to cafes, openings, and the doctors office are all very well, and many of the artists write enjoyably. Terrence Koh's entry is hilarious, or offensive, take your pick. But there are far fewer of the reflective and intimate moments found in Letters. The "dear diary" form is too open ended. It did not challenge the artists enough to address specific issues or to reflect on what art is or what it is to be an artist.

Another issue is that the diary form is exhausted by the web, which, with thousands of free art blogs, does diaristic better and cheaper, with video too. A book of diary entries must to do additional work to establish value - but this book contains no additional essays or information, not even bios of the artists or pictures of their work (far more significant in this book than the first, since the included artists are not yet household names).

And a third issue with the diary form. In Letters I believed the established artists wrote in order to help younger artists. It was a generous gesture, so I approached the book sympathetically. But publishing diary entries hints at self promotion more than altruism. There is nothing wrong with this (it is certainly one reason I blog). But it alters how I respond to the book. It sets a higher bar. I found myself more cynical. I expected to get my fifteen dollars worth.

I was primed for disappointment.

I finished the book blaming the editors. I wish they had instead reversed their original project: why not arrange for an established artist to write to younger artists, perhaps telling a story or two and relating issues from their career, and asking the younger artist to propose alternatives, or dream what a career in art could be. The same artists presented in this volume would, I am certain, have responded very differently to this call. The editors, distracted by treasure, forgot the treasure hunt.

Chus Martinez

"The best aerobics for the brain is to see exhibitions" - Chus Martinez

Today: a presentation at CCA by Chus Martinez, currently chief curator of Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), previously the director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein. The talk was refreshingly rich and cerebral. In contrast to Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, a fan of randomness who claimed curating is like being a traffic director, Martinez rooted her museum curating in the conceptual, saying at one point "the museum can only be about one thing: research." For Martinez, curatorial research is a vehicle for revisiting the near past, not for nostalgic purposes, but rather to bring it to the present and ask how it can move us now.

To expand this idea, Martinez turned to philosophy, starting with a YouTube clip of Heidegger from 1969, discussing the future of thought:

"No one knows what the fate of thinking will look like. In a lecture in Paris in 1964, which I did not give myself but was presented in a French translation, I spoke under the title: "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking." I thus make a *distinction* between philosophy, that is metaphysics, and thinking as I understand it. The thinking that I contrast with philosophy in this lecture—which is principally done by an attempt to clarify the essence of the Greek "aletheia" (unhiddenness) — this thinking is, compared to metaphysical thinking, much simpler than philosophy, but precisely because of its simplicity it is much more difficult to carry out. And it calls for new care with language, not the invention of new terms, as I once thought, but a return to the primordial content of our own language, which is, however, constantly in the process of dying off.

A coming thinker, who will perhaps be faced with the task of really taking over this thinking that I am attempting to *prepare,* will have to obey a sentence Heinrich von Kleist once wrote, and that reads "I step back before one who is not yet here, and bow, a millennium before him, to his spirit." - Heidegger

Martinez said we are still trapped in the logic of dialectical thought. The dominant notion of culture remains Adorno's, wherein culture is understood in negative terms as a dialectical defense against the market and capitalism. Click. In this mindset, culture is whatever is antagonistic towards the market, and the museum acts as a shelter, protecting culture from the market.

Taking up Heidegger's quest, Martinez asked how we can move beyond dialectical logic. "What is this future of thinking? How does it work? What do we want with all that?"

One offering is relational art. In an insightful analysis, Martinez noted that the arrival of relational art, identified in Bourriaud's book Relational Aesthetics, was not an accident: relational art arose as a response to the fall of communism. Click. We cannot separate relational art of the 1990's from the collapse of the Berlin wall since, in the post-communist era, artists sought a less negative model of culture, one that embraced participation, a kind of enthusiasm, "a new happiness in a landscape of grayness," "lets do it together."

Martinez again raised Heidegger's challenge: how do we move beyond this enthusiasm, to a future of thinking?

She cited as one inspiration Deleuze's last book, Pure Immanence (see review). Martinez noted that traditional philosophies based on the transcendent produce a divide: Some objects are so powerful that they overwhelm thought, producing only experience. Click. With other less powerful objects, thought is superimposed on the object, but transcendent to it - Martinez referred to this as the October syndrome. Deleuze offers a third possibility, pure immanence - not thinking about (i.e. superimposing thought on an object) but thinking through an object.

Deleuze's theory aims to be an empiricist's riposte to rationalism and idealism. Deleuze argues that underlying rational thought there is a plane of immanence that unifies concept and experience. But Pure Immanence is evasive and incomplete. Click. What does it mean to "think through", for example?

Martinez offered imagination as a way to formulate the conduit between object and thought. Martinez distinguished imagination from fantasy. Where fantasy is static, like a frozen image that you hold in your head, imagination is active. It is speculative.

Martinez she said a freaky question is: can you imagine talking about love but using a technical language, not the language of love? Can you superimpose a logic within another logic? With this, Martinez turned to writing. She claimed writing is an immanence exercise. Fiction, she said, empowers imagination, it is an expanding act. She told the story a studio visit she had with an artist who mentioned having written a novel. This spiraled into a project (a project, she noted, not an exhibition) where she collected novels by over 200 artists and presented the collection in a reading room at MACBA. Click. Click. These novels are not published literature and therefore become something else - a "power weapon" to open a space for speculation. Someone asked "who reads them?" Martinez said "nobody," but quickly countered that she had read all the books in the collection.

*

As an artist, I found it curious to hear an art curator linger on writing. For a while it blotted out everything else, distracted as I was trying to grok how a collection of fiction which nobody reads could be the future of thought. Where does this leave art?

Later, revisiting (to use Martinez's word), I thought about the ground that was covered. What Martinez presented was a well-rehearsed theoretical track from the Frankfurt school - Adorno and Heidegger - to Deleuze. As Martinez noted, these are not new ideas.

Click. What was much less rehearsed in Martinez's talk was her use of media. Throughout the hour, Martinez showed images, sometimes pausing on one image for a long time, other times flicking through several images quickly, almost casually. Sometimes the images synchronized with what she was saying, other times not. On occasion she looked at an image and explained what the image showed. Other times not. At one point she opened a PowerPoint deck with 150 slides and started clicking through the images. "Powerpoint slides all look the same" she said, shuttling through ten images of past shows. "This was our John Cage retrospective."

And on Heidegger, Martinez showed an 8 minute video in German with no English subtitles. Afterwards, she pointed out that she knew the words by heart, but wanted to read them to us - so she opened a Word document and read the English translation. In a short moment, then, a YouTube clip; Martinez's citation of her memory of the text; a Word document showing an English translation of the text; and her performance of the Word document out loud.

This was new for me. Curators often have a reverential attitude towards images, and are more casual towards words. Martinez was the opposite. She signaled that media images are not the art, could never be the art. Media and memory fold together in complex ways that cannot be trusted. Language is more reliable.

I left with two questions.

First, although Martinez argued for expanded thought, I felt in many ways her presentation remained hermetic, focusing on the French and German thinkers who appear in all art curricula. To expand thought, isn't it now time to move to the diaspora of thought beyond the tradition of the European? I wondered about cognitive philosophy, particularly recent research on embodied cognition, or tribal thinking, as powerfully articulated by Donna Haraway.

Second, although Martinez flirted briefly with pure immanence, her presentation was fundamentally an epistemological enquiry - her central question was "what about the future of thought?" She stressed the individual thinker, and talked about alternative logics. But why thought, logic, language? What about the ways that art performs as phenomenological, ontological and communitarian activities? These today seem far more significant, yet remain less represented than epistemologies of art.

At one point, Martinez said "The best aerobics for the brain is to see exhibitions." I think this sums it up. It is not enough to see slides of exhibitions in a lecture hall, to hear words or see images. Media produces alienation. Instead, we must carry our brains (literally, not only our minds) to the exhibition itself. Doing so produces aerobics, a group body-brain activity. The importance of community and body were implicit throughout Martinez's talk, but rarely foregrounded.

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.