A new exhibition of paintings and drawings by Guillermo Kuitca, the Argentinian artist, just opened at the Walker Art Center this weekend. I went in to view the exhibition and see the artist interviewed by Olga Viso and Douglas Dreishpoon, two of the curators for the show.

There were a couple of works that caught my attention as I wandered through the gallery before the discussion. In the first gallery there is a smaller canvas that has a large black polyhedra with lighter round ink impressions surrounding. The contrast between the ink impressions and the solid black creates a vivid sense of depth to the solid outline, almost as though the black outline suggests something beyond the canvas, a sense of depth. Upon reading the plaque I discovered that the solid black outline was inspired by a building plan and the round ink impressions come from a ball being bounced upon the canvas.

In the second gallery there is another ghostly piece, this time of a bed painted upon a dark black/blue background. Beds were a common leitmotif in many of Kuitca’s works but this one had the most immediate aesthetic reaction for me. It’s a similar visual effect to the first plan and ball painting; there is a sense of the background receding beyond the surface and the lighter colored bed floating above the canvas.

In the final gallery I was most impressed by the capstone piece, Everything, one of a series of paintings of maps made on mattresses. From afar the picture is an abstract collection of lines; when near the labels of the map appear and the viewer feels a connection to an actual place. In conversation Kuitca said that he often chose for his source material maps that he had no personal connection, with the consciousness in the back of his mind that these maps had a significance for someone that he might never meet but still existed elsewhere in the world.

Kuitca is an unimposing presence in person. He is middle aged with thinning hair that was shaved down almost to his skull, dressed in the de riguer style of the academic/artist of a suitcoat over a button down shirt. There were a couple of interesting themes that came up during the conversation: memory and forgetting, drawing processes, the corrosive power of water, and the canvas as a stage.

Dreishpoon opened by talking about a trove of 3000 drawings that Kuitca rediscovered during the process of creating the exhibition. Most of the drawings were made during 1978-79 before Kuitca moved to his first independent studio. He stored most of the drawings and forgot about them, to the point where he said, in later interviews, that he wasn’t a drawer. Even artists forget about the previous activity or compartmentalize aspects of previous work. At least Kuitca didn’t go so far as Barnett Newman and destroy his early work.

32 Seating Plans is a series work from the exhibition that is more interesting after hearing the method of production. Kuitca downloads the seating plans from opera theaters around the world, alters them in Photoshop, prints them on photo paper, and then puts the prints into shallow pans of water. In the water the inks release from the paper and float free, creating abstract patterns that still retain an indication of their source. The water has a corrosive effect upon the printing.

When discussing one of his early paintings, El Mar Dulce (1986), Kuitca talked about his internal efforts to escape the idea of painting. He didn’t believe that painting had much to say, but he was still a painter, so he had to reinterpret his own canvas as a stage, imagining a bed at the foot of the stage and the actions that preceded the picture, creating a sense of drama where none appeared visually.

It is always a pleasure to listen to artists or authors, creators of any kind, speak or talk about their own work. Beforehand the work is just another object, afterwards the passion and effort that goes into creating is revealed. I’m reminded of how I felt when I first saw Samuel Delany and Giyatri Spivak speaking at an academic conference. I was abashed to see the raw emotion and passion behind literary criticism, and from there any intellectual endeavor. Perhaps this is one reason why the academic conference or the special exhibition will not disappear.

I’ve been reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf this summer. It is a wonderful and brilliant piece of art, part of the high modernist literary flowering from the first half of the twentieth century. The style reminds me of Henry James in many places, but with a smoother syntax. The link to James is the focus on internal dialogue, the thoughts that go on inside each of us when we think about our family; Woolf takes that idea and develops it to a fever pitch. Parts of the book are so good it is almost painful to read.

Which brings me to the emotional reaction to a work of art that I want to write about. It is not a pure reaction to the emotion conveyed by the work, instead it is a meta-reaction to the craft and form of the work that makes me feel as though nothing could ever be written to improve upon this masterpiece. I think of it as a form of despair or depression mostly because I’m comparing my own paltry artistic efforts to this greatness that is standing right in front of me. Even if the passage of writing I’m reading is meant to convey a happy emotion I’m still thinking about the style and the pinnacle of achievement that has been reached by Ms. Woolf or any other artist.

I talked about this a bit with my friend Chris on Wednesday and he described a similar experience reading If On a Winter’s Night by Italo Calvino. I’ve never finished that Calvino book but I’m not surprised at the reaction to his work as well as Woolf’s. The two of them are some of the best writers of the past 100 years.

There are times when I’ve felt a similar emotion with other, non-literary works of art. Some of the paintings by Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack, or Claude Monet have had a similar effect upon me. It seems to happen less often with music, perhaps because I don’t play music as much as I write or paint. Part of this despair depends on my knowing just enough about how difficult it is to achieve such a successful work of art. If I don’t know much about making music then it’s harder for me to judge when someone is truly performing or working at the epitome of their field.

Mention of the word field makes me think that this despairing feeling could be applied beyond art to other endeavors where one meets or encounters people working at the very edges of the accomplishable. But one still has to have enough experience and background to be able to recognize success.

Nina Simon the author of The Participatory Museum and the Museum 2.0 weblog was in the Twin Cities this week to promote her book at an event hosted by the Walker Art Center. I was already at the Walker to give a public tour and decided to stick around and listen to what Nina had to say which was a good decision.

Simon spoke for half an hour about her work on encouraging participation by museum goers. I enjoyed her pragmatic, design-centric approach to the problems of encouraging participation and collaboration which showed off her engineering background.

She said that the typical museum is visitor agnostic. It is designed to give the same information to a 10-year old and someone with a Ph.D. The labels on the exhibits are the same for both visitors. But does this really make sense, especially in a world where technology and design are capable of so much more?

Simon advocates for three transformations of the museum:

1. From destinations into places for everyday use.
2. From trusted sources of information into trusted hosts for social experiences.
3. From places for seeing and exploring into places for making and doing.

Why don’t maker workshops and hackerspaces take place at science museums? Do the directors of the museums realize that these groups exist? Do the hackers bother to ask the museums for space or support? What about stitch and bitch groups who meet in coffee houses? Why shouldn’t they meet in a museum (or a library)?

I think the most important thing that Simon talked about was the reminder that “to participate socially you have to invite individually.” I can see this having significant repercussions for computer supported collaborative work, open science, and almost any commons based project that is taken up. My own experience from running book clubs, experimental courses, attending conferences, and more verifies her admonition.

She elaborated on all three of her transformations with examples drawn from various museums and libraries across the nation. Simon emphasized the need for design to interact with and respond to the community. An idea that works at one museum may not work at another if the infrastructure and the maintenance costs are not taken into account. If the Worcester City Gallery gets visitors to vote on their favorite paintings the success may be due to the ongoing responsiveness of the museum staff as much as the novelty of using voting to get visitor feedback.

I also liked her overall point that design constraints are sometimes useful. If you give the audience a completely blank page you may be disappointed by the lack of response. But if you constrain their activity in a useful manner you may be surprised by how much feedback you receive. Sometimes people need a seed from which to grow their participation.

This list of 10 reasons why people conform to social pressure prompted me to dig into the drafts and publish my last post “Another Privacy Experiment.”

A cursory search at Google Scholar shows a lot of material to wade through about the interaction between social conformity and privacy.

An old idea (2008) from the drafts folder that I’m posting now. A related post back in 2008.

Two people are interviewed by a single person. During the interview the interviewer tells the subject a private piece of information about a third person, called X. Three conditions: shares information without comment, tells subject not to share information, pays subject small amount ($10-$20) to not share information.

Then the subject is interviewed by another person, perhaps at a later date. The second interviewer asks this person what they know about X. Who among the three conditions will share the information divulged by the first interviewer?

Other variables to throw in - X is a public/non-public figure, information shared about X is trivial/non-trivial, X is in a position of authority/weakness.

I just finished re-reading The Myth of Sisyphus for my philosophy book club. It has been almost twenty years since I last read it. When I read it before I thought it was brilliant, a cri de coeur for everyone to go out and live an authentic life. Today it doesn’t feel nearly so effective. No doubt some of that is due to changes in myself but there are still some exogenous factors that seem worth exploring.

My first theory was that Camus is too tied to a specific time and historical setting. He wrote in the middle of World War Two, a war that almost defines the absurd. As Adorno once said, there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. For an existentialist there can be no life that doesn’t consider suicide and face the absurd universe head on after the searing experiences of World War.

Then I considered that his argument is only effective for those who are ready to accept it. Perhaps there is a certain psychological state that the reader needs to be in to see the full force of Camus’ arguments. Maybe this is why the absurd seems like the perfect adolescent philosophy. See Holden Caulfield and Paul Goodman. Another group that seems particularly receptive to the absurd message are the religious. The form and style of the Myth of Sisyphus reminds me a lot of the mystical writings of various Christians like Meister Eckert or Pseudo-Dionysius.

My next thought, and the one that feels closest to a possible answer, is postmodernism. Perhaps Camus and the absurd are a relic of the modern era when there was a general consensus, a grand narrative, of enlightenment and human melioration to believe in. Although Camus rejected the meaning of human life he was living at the end of a time when a meaning to human life was still a live question. Today, in the postmodern world, there is no consensus that meaning exists.

On the one hand this may be considered to be the triumph of Camus’ existential absurdism, everyone is now in the middle of an absurd world that seemingly can’t be escaped. It is the impossibility of escape that makes reading Camus so difficult. The idea of revolt against the absurd seems woefully underdetermined. I guess this means I need to keep reading The Rebel if I really want to find an answer.

From John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology by Larry A. Hickman

“What, in Dewey’s view, constitutes responsible technology? This book is an attempt to suggest some answers to that question. By way of review and conclusion, it may be said that Dewey rejected what I have called “straight-line instrumentalism,” or the view that neutral tools are brought to bear on ends that are valued for reasons external to the situations within which those tools have been developed. Drawing on the metaphors that accompanied Darwinian evolutionary theory, Dewey argued that human beings are organisms within nature and that their tool use is one of the developmental edges of natural activity. Tools and artifacts are no more neutral that are plants, nonhuman animals, or human beings themselves: they are interactive within situations that teem with values.

Responsible technology involves for Dewey the choice, the implementation, and the testing of goals that arise from those situations. There is no need of divine intervention to point the way, and the quest for absolute truth constitutes an impediment. Values arise out of inquiry, and once they are refined by inquiry they are brought back to the situations from which they originated in order to ascertain whether they are appropriate. Tools that are utilized in choosing, implement, and testing enter into the articulation of ends, or things to be done, modifying those ends as the need arises. Evolving ends demand the modification of existing tools. Responsible technology thus remains flexible because it must accommodate changing situations. In addition to being resilient, responsible technology is redundant: it does not allow undue risk, and it backs itself up, both in terms of parallel development and in terms of the establishment of plateaus as possible fallback positions. Responsible technology is not so much radical as regenerative.” (202)

Cognition in Practice, by Jean Lave, 1998

“So far I have described a series of dichotomously polarized issues that have sustained limitations on debate between paradigms and disciplines over a considerable period of time. I have yet to describe the sources of the coherence with which the issues reinforce on another. They take their shape, the great divides formed, in terms of a positivist epistemology which specifies a series of assumptions on which they are based: rationality exists as the ideal canon of thought; experimentation can be thought of as the embodiment of this ideal in scientific practice; science is the value-free collection of factual knowledge about the world; factual knowledge about the world is the basis for the formation of scientific theory, not the other way around; science is the opposite of history, the one nomothetic the other ideographic; cognitive processes are general and fundamental, psychology, correspondingly, a nomothetic discipline; society and culture shape the particularities of cognition and give it content, thus sociocultural context is specific, its study ideographic; general laws of human behavior, therefore, must be dissected away from the historical and social obfuscations which give them particularity. These propositions entail one another in complex ways. To challenge any one of them draws the rest into question as well. A quest for better understanding of everyday cognition in context that questions conventional relations between the socially organized world, culture and cognition — and hence the whole field of assumptions — is unavoidably, therefore, a fundamental epistemological question.” page 87

A quotation:

From the movie My Dinner with Andre

ANDRE: Well, I think that’s right! You know, it may be, Wally, that one of the reasons that we don’t know what’s going on is that when we’re there at a party, we’re all too busy performing.

WALLY: Un-hunh.

ANDRE: You know, that was one of the reasons that Grotowski gave up the theater. He just felt that people in their lives now were performing so well that performance in the theater was sort of superfluous, and in a way obscene.

WALLY: Hum!

ANDRE: I mean, isn’t it amazing how often a doctor will live up to our expectation of how a doctor should look? I mean, you see a terrorist on television: he looks just like a terrorist. I mean, we live in a world in which fathers, or single people, or artists, are all trying to live up to someone’s fantasy of how a father, or a single person, or an artist, should look and behave! They all act as if they know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves at every single moment. And they all seem totally self-confident. Of course, privately people are very mixed up about themselves. [Wally says “Yep.”] They don’t know what they should be doing with their lives. They’re reading all these self-help books…

WALLY: Oh! God! And I mean, those books are just so touching because they show how desperately curious we all are to know how all the others of us are really getting on in life, even though by performing these roles all the time we’re just hiding the reality of ourselves from everybody else. I mean, we live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other. I mean, we usually don’t know the things we’d like to know even about our supposedly closest friends! I mean…I mean, you know, suppose you’re going through some kind of hell in your own life, well, you would love to know if your friends have experienced similar things. But we just don’t dare to ask each other!

ANDRE: No! It would be like asking your friend to drop his role.

WALLY: I mean, we just put no value at all on perceiving reality. I mean, on the contrary, this incredible emphasis that we all place now on our so-called “careers” automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority. Because if your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career, well, it just doesn’t matter what you perceive, or what you experience. You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead, in a way. You can sort of turn on the automatic pilot! You know, just the way your mother’s doctor had on his automatic pilot when he went in and he looked at the arm, and he totally failed to perceive anything else!

ANDRE: Right! Our minds are just focused on these goals and plans. Which in themselves are not reality.

I just want to juxtapose two recent readings by Charlie Stross and Timothy Burke on organizations and institutions. Burke sets up the problem as the key issue of the twenty-first century.

but it really seems to me that the political problem of the 21st Century is not a problem of markets or capitalism, not of the state, not of ideologies or religions, but of institutions and organizations. Loosely speaking, what doesn’t work about government as a whole is also what doesn’t work about a local religious charity. What doesn’t work about financial capitalism is what doesn’t work about the Chamber of Commerce in a small town.

Why have executives at for-profit and non-profit institutions enriched themselves so greatly over the last twenty or thirty years? Is there any way for oversight to actually improve the situation?

The subtle problem that organizations and institutions pose to contemporary life is that people who live inside an institutional culture often are so sensitive to the nuances of the way things work, the limits and possibilities of change within the institution, that they let problems and failures slide or pass. No one wants to be that guy, the one who rants about everything. And that’s what often happens to someone inside an institution who blows the whistle on a bad practice or a growing issue, because that often ends with that person in a kind of internal exile, and in that circumstance, a loss of a sense of proportion is all but inevitable. Everything will come to look suspect or corrupt.

Stross poses the problem in the form a science fiction scenario: how would you design the society of a generation starship that is going to be traveling through space for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years? None of our current institutions have ever lasted that long. Even long lasting institutions, like the Catholic church or Japanese monarchy, have changed.

Consumer capitalism along our current model simply won’t work as a way of running a long-duration generation ship (the failure modes are lethal and non-recoverable). Communism (or rather, Leninism) has a slightly better prospect, but is still a long way from optimal. Monarchism is just a pretty word for “hereditary dictatorship supported by military caste”. What are the alternatives? And what do we need to consider when designing a society that can survive for a 500-1000 year voyage in a bottle without exploding?

It’s not hart to twist the generation starship scenario slightly and end up with Bucky Fuller’s Starship Earth. The problem of building a long-term starship is parallel to the problem of building a long-term lifeworld here on Earth. Both Stross and Burke agree that our current institutions aren’t up to the challenge.

Burke concludes his musings:

Institutions work best through and are safeguarded most by strong cultures of professionalism, loyalty, and honor. Institutions are most at risk from parasitic infiltrations which adroitly use professionalism and loyalty as shields and weapons, who act like cancer cells, turning healthy structures into diseased ones. Problems of cultural maintainance and cultural creation are the hardest of all, because they can only be worked upon through incremental action within culture, with a humble sense of the immediate horizons of plausible transformations.

But the fate of institutions can’t just be left to them alone, because even the least of them has some kind of consequential social and economic power. If we need to think about how to live better within our institutions, we also need to think about how to act more wisely towards the institutions of others, to concern ourselves with their workings and when necessary, find smarter and more humane ways to intervene in their affairs and even to shut them down. The tools we have aren’t up to it, and the habits we have even less so.