Tag Archives: philosophy

Amerikka: Cildo Meireles at Galerie Lelong

Posted on by
Amerikka

Amerikkka, 1991/2013

Next week is your last chance to Cildo Meireles’s exhibition at Galerie Lelong in Chelsea. In it, the Brazilian artist’s show-stopping installation Amerikkka draws you into the main gallery space where a rectangle of poised gold bullets loom over a field of pristine white eggs. The eggs are plaster and intended to be walked on. Entering the space between these opposed forces, the threat of bullets overhead and the uncomfortable sensation of walking on eggshells below, puts the viewer in a fragile, vulnerable position. The viewer is a stand-in for society at large, as the title suggests by merging the words “America” and “KKK” (Klu Klux Klan).

IMG_5574

The visual appeal of long, perfectly rows of small things draws one in. Given the solid plaster nature of the eggs, the sense of threat is somewhat stymied. The tilt of bullet-ridden ceiling could be opening up, or clamping down. Is the KKK a current or past threat, something beginning or ending, or per the title, embedded unavoidably in ideas of America? Recent events incline me to the latter interpretation.

IMG_5570

The other works on view are more playful, even when they also reference social problems, such as the recent work Aquaurum. Encased in a vitrine are two tall identical glasses–one filled with water and one filled with gold. Meireles refers to water shortages in São Paulo inn this piece, but it could also be read in terms of duality and the philosophy of perception.

pares impares

Pares impares, 2011/2013

Themes of duality and perception are evidenced in the two large rectangles of starkly different content in Amerikkka, but also in works like Pares ímpares(2011/13), where two sets of identical glasses lay in a vitrine, with cracked lens on one side lit from below like spiderwebs.

Cildo Meireles’s exhibition is up through June 27.

IMG_5568

IMG_5573

Public Art Done Awesome: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument

Posted on by

P1130622

When I stopped in New York on my way home, I headed uptown to see Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, a public art work Forest Houses, a housing complex in the Bronx. The structure started to be built July 1, and the project, now housed, will continue until September 15. This is the fourth of a series of “monuments” Hirschhorn has done that relate to philosophers he loves, but it is not the traditional monument, i.e. some grandiose sculpture.

P1130624

Rather, the Gramsci Monument is a series of plywood pavilions he built with the help of local residents he hired to create to community spaces. Hirschhorn created different areas for a stage, an arts and crafts room, a bar serving $2 cheeseburgers, a computer room, a radio station, a newspaper, and a Gramsci library and museum.

P1130656

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian leftist philosopher imprisoned by the Fascist government. During his incarceration, he wrote the Prison Notebooks. Quotes from it can be seen scattered across the pavilion and also on signs from facing nearby buildings. In all this, Hirschhorn wants to redefine “monument.” What makes the project come to life is Hirschhorn’s continued presence at the Gramsci Monument for the duration of the project, working with staff, talking to visitors, and supporting the daily programming. A typical day could include art classes for kids and a philosophy lecture followed by happy hour. Meanwhile, residents can use the space for its intended purpose or just hang out.

P1130623

So for example, I showed up one sunny afternoon and wandered around, reading the daily newspaper and staring at Gramsci’s prison hairbrush in the museum. As I wandered out toward the stage, I joined a group gathering for the beginning of the day’s talk. It turned out to be Glen Ligon presenting his work, aided by a thick color print out of images and some handfans he had made in case the day was hot. I sat with some people from DIA(sponsors of the work), Hirschhorn and the Forest Hills community president, who made the introductions, and local residents. Children and dogs also joined or ran past, creating an informal, fun atmosphere.

P1130645

I especially like that Hirschhorn will continue to be present at the Monument until the end, when the plywood structure will be dismantled, the computers raffled off locally, and the ephemeral project will be gone. As a platform for Hirschhorn, it is certainly an opportunity for him to educate about Gramsci and the nature of art and to participate in a community. But interestingly he writes about the responsibility of interacting with the Other on a one-to-one level through presence and production, without any focus on outcome.

P1130641

Unlike many participatory projects, I think his attitude takes control and responsibility more into his own hands even as it turns the goals away from anything practical or concrete. It resides in a belief in the transformative power of art, and the importance to himself of making a gesture of love like this regardless of its reception.

P1130647

P1130635

P1130637

 

Can a novelist write [well] philosophically?

Posted on by

“Can a novelist write philosophically?” begins the essay The Philosophical Novel in the NY Times Book Section last week. It’s an old question. The conflict is the long-held (hello, Plato) notion that philosophy is a dry, precise search for truth, heedless of aesthetics while novels tell stories to create illusions and explore imprecise, untrue things. It goes on to discuss philosophers who wrote well like novelists (Nietzche) and novelists who write like philosophers (David Foster Wallace), and whether either of the disciplines suffered for the mixture.

The questions are not unlike the series of lectures bound up in The Naive and Sentimental Novelist (2010) by Orham Pamuk. Pamuk’s love of reading and the craft of writing is a great read, all spun around the famous concept of Schilller: naïve writers write “spontaneously, almost without thinking, not bothering to consider the intellectual or ethical consequences of their words” while the sentimental writer is “thoughtful” and “troubled” and “exceedingly aware of the poem he writes, the method and techniques he uses, the artifice involved in his endeavor.”  The sentimental poet can be called philosophical. Pamuk himself writes–and reads– both naivelly and sentimentally at times. As a reader, he claims we all juggle the same differing mindsets, between the suspension of disbelief and the analytic understanding of what we are reading.

 Friedrich Schiller’s On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature (1795) is a paper on poetic (more generally artistic) theory, in which he as the reflective sentimalisch writer rather envies Goethe, a naive writer who never doubts whether the words that stream out of him are accurate and true. Schiller’s influential oppositional and psychological views have been very influential on later art history criticism and psychoanalysis. Within this dialogue is also the opposition of the Classical and the Romantic

While I imagine the Romantic poet as driven to pour out his heart unselfconsciously, ala Keats, and Wordsworth, Schiller himself felt the opposite. Classical poets like the Greeks were naive writers for whom there was no struggle to reach a natural state. Romantic writers suffered the anguish of trying to recapture their lost ideals, and doubt as to whether their words actually did. So inspired by all these connections, I’m trying to recapture the lost ideal that is my ability to focus on philosophy, and actually site down and read beyond the introduction of On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature. Surely these oppositional groups are more nuanced than they seem, and hopefully a novelist can find the teetering, tottering edge between the philosophical and the story, the naive and the sentimental.