Monday, November 9, 2009
Thursday, November 5, 2009
From the archives of Afterall, two supplements to the conversation about Zoe's Unwinding paintings and the "Painting as Model" discussion:
John Chilver on René Daniels, linguistic painter hero
Jan Verwoert's Why Are Conceptual Artists Painting Again? Because They Think It's a Good Idea
Also, see Peter Doig's Studio Film Club paintings here.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
George Lakoff - 'Women, Fire, and Dengerous Things'
Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things is a treasure trove of linguistic examples and a carefully developed model of cognition argued on the basis of semantics. His experientialism places the human act of cognition in the center; his brilliantly presented result is that cognition is vitally dependent on metaphor, which he defines as a mapping of conceptual structures from one domain onto another--a result of particular relevance to literature.
On the Relativity of Knowledge and Truth
"Knowledge, like truth, is relative to understanding. Our folk view of knowledge as being absolute comes from the same source as our folk view that truth is absolute, which is the folk theory that there is only one way to understand a situation. When that folk theory fails, and we have multiple ways of understanding, or 'framing,' a situation, then knowledge, like truth, becomes relative to that understanding. Likewise, when our knowledge is stable and secure, knowledge based on that understanding is stable and secure.
Is such knowledge 'real knowledge'? Well, it's as real as our knowledge ever gets--real enough for all but the most seasoned skeptics." (300)
On the different kinds of cognitive frames
Lakoff argues that experience is made possible and structured by preconceptual structures-- "directly meaningful concepts" roughly the same for all human beings that thus provide "certain fixed points in the objective evaluation of situations". He divides them into basic-level structures and image-schema structures, and acknowledges there may be other kinds. Basic-level structures arise "as a result of our capacities for gestalt perception, mental imagery, and motor movement" and manifest as basic-level categories such as hunger and pain, water, wood, and stone, people and cats, and (perhaps more surprisingly) tables and houses (302). Image schemas are spatial mappings such as source-path-goal, center-periphery, and container. It is out of these basic cognitive tools that more complex cognitive models of reality are constructed:
On literal and metaphorical meaning
The literal provides the building blocks of thought. "Cognitive models derive their fundamental meaningfulness directly from their ability to match up with preconceptual structure. Such direct matchings provide a basis for an account of truth and knowledge" (303). Since the matching is internal--from one concept or cognitive process to another--we do not run into the later Wittgenstein's problem of matching word to thing.
The literal, however, cannot capture the order of all domains. "In domains where there is no clearly discernible preconceptual structure to our experience, we import such structure via metaphor. Metaphor provides us with a means of comprehending domains of experience that do not have a preconceptual structure of their own". Preconceptual structures are thus mapped from source domains onto target domains. This is a particularly elegant result, and fits loosely with faculty theory--although it is not clear that Lakoff himself would wish to make such an extension.
Some examples of metaphors
* Life is a journey (the person is a traveler, purposes are destinations, means are routes, difficulties are obstacles, counselors are guides, achievements are landmarks, choices are crossroads
* A lifetime is a day, death is sleep; a lifetime is a year, death is winter
* Lif is a struggle, dying is losing a contest against an adversary
* Life is a precious possession, time is a thief, death is a loss
* Time is a thief
What is striking when one examines Lakoff's painstaking lists of metaphors is how completely immersed we are in them, and how our thinking is enabled by them. It is perhaps impossible to say many things literally: there are simply no appropriate conceptual primitives. How, for instance, do you speak of the high points in your life literally? The very narrative assumes the metaphorical mapping.
A critique and appreciation
Lakoff's approach of developing a general model of cognition on the basis of semantics has certain inherent weaknesses, in spite of its spectacular results. It cannot be taken for granted that semantic categories accurately represent cognitive domains--language may have access only to the output of other cognitive modules, and their domain-specificity may be partly elided by linguistic categories. For this reason, evidence for cognitive domains must be sought and demonstrated independently of language. However, semantics can be utilized as a way of generating hypotheses about domain-specificity, which can then be independently verified.
The presence of cognitive domains also raises the question of how these came about. Lakoff assumes they flow out of our physical constitution and the nature of the world; a more precise way of speaking about this is evolutionary psychology. A consideration of the environment in which humans evolved would permit us to map the source domain onto a proper domain, and thus generate a more detailed list of properties and entailments. Such historical considerations would also allow us to provide principled answers to which domains do not have their own preconceptual structure: namely, domains that either did not exist in the ancestral environment (agriculture, most forms of technology, civilization) or domains that were not available or significant to survival (microbiology, quantum physics, chemistry).
Moreover, Lakoff's notion of metaphor as a mapping from one cognitive domain to another as "one of the great imaginative triumphs of the human mind" has been echoed by the British paleo- anthropologist Steven Mithen (1996), who has suggested that the transition from Neanderthal man to Cro Magnon is marked precisely by the ability to "switch cognitive frames": the paleolithic blossoming in art may be correlated with the ability to think metaphorically.
Lakoff's proposal on metaphor is a particularly pregnant one for literary studies-- not because ordinary speech is mainly literal (it clearly is not), but because literature is a deliberate forefronting of linguistic devices, a cultivation of special effects. Clarifying what is the source and proper domains of a metaphor promises to throw light on the way meaning is constructed in reading. As for cultural studies, Lakoff's work opens up for the possibility of tracing political and social patterns back to an underlying set of metaphors (see Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Brown (1988), and Boyer (1988)).
It should also be noted that Leonard Talmy, whose early work clearly belonged to the Lakovian paradigm (see the next link), more recently has developed this approach explicitly in the direction of evolved cognitive structures.
On the Relativity of Knowledge and Truth
"Knowledge, like truth, is relative to understanding. Our folk view of knowledge as being absolute comes from the same source as our folk view that truth is absolute, which is the folk theory that there is only one way to understand a situation. When that folk theory fails, and we have multiple ways of understanding, or 'framing,' a situation, then knowledge, like truth, becomes relative to that understanding. Likewise, when our knowledge is stable and secure, knowledge based on that understanding is stable and secure.
Is such knowledge 'real knowledge'? Well, it's as real as our knowledge ever gets--real enough for all but the most seasoned skeptics." (300)
On the different kinds of cognitive frames
Lakoff argues that experience is made possible and structured by preconceptual structures-- "directly meaningful concepts" roughly the same for all human beings that thus provide "certain fixed points in the objective evaluation of situations". He divides them into basic-level structures and image-schema structures, and acknowledges there may be other kinds. Basic-level structures arise "as a result of our capacities for gestalt perception, mental imagery, and motor movement" and manifest as basic-level categories such as hunger and pain, water, wood, and stone, people and cats, and (perhaps more surprisingly) tables and houses (302). Image schemas are spatial mappings such as source-path-goal, center-periphery, and container. It is out of these basic cognitive tools that more complex cognitive models of reality are constructed:
On literal and metaphorical meaning
The literal provides the building blocks of thought. "Cognitive models derive their fundamental meaningfulness directly from their ability to match up with preconceptual structure. Such direct matchings provide a basis for an account of truth and knowledge" (303). Since the matching is internal--from one concept or cognitive process to another--we do not run into the later Wittgenstein's problem of matching word to thing.
The literal, however, cannot capture the order of all domains. "In domains where there is no clearly discernible preconceptual structure to our experience, we import such structure via metaphor. Metaphor provides us with a means of comprehending domains of experience that do not have a preconceptual structure of their own". Preconceptual structures are thus mapped from source domains onto target domains. This is a particularly elegant result, and fits loosely with faculty theory--although it is not clear that Lakoff himself would wish to make such an extension.
Some examples of metaphors
* Life is a journey (the person is a traveler, purposes are destinations, means are routes, difficulties are obstacles, counselors are guides, achievements are landmarks, choices are crossroads
* A lifetime is a day, death is sleep; a lifetime is a year, death is winter
* Lif is a struggle, dying is losing a contest against an adversary
* Life is a precious possession, time is a thief, death is a loss
* Time is a thief
What is striking when one examines Lakoff's painstaking lists of metaphors is how completely immersed we are in them, and how our thinking is enabled by them. It is perhaps impossible to say many things literally: there are simply no appropriate conceptual primitives. How, for instance, do you speak of the high points in your life literally? The very narrative assumes the metaphorical mapping.
A critique and appreciation
Lakoff's approach of developing a general model of cognition on the basis of semantics has certain inherent weaknesses, in spite of its spectacular results. It cannot be taken for granted that semantic categories accurately represent cognitive domains--language may have access only to the output of other cognitive modules, and their domain-specificity may be partly elided by linguistic categories. For this reason, evidence for cognitive domains must be sought and demonstrated independently of language. However, semantics can be utilized as a way of generating hypotheses about domain-specificity, which can then be independently verified.
The presence of cognitive domains also raises the question of how these came about. Lakoff assumes they flow out of our physical constitution and the nature of the world; a more precise way of speaking about this is evolutionary psychology. A consideration of the environment in which humans evolved would permit us to map the source domain onto a proper domain, and thus generate a more detailed list of properties and entailments. Such historical considerations would also allow us to provide principled answers to which domains do not have their own preconceptual structure: namely, domains that either did not exist in the ancestral environment (agriculture, most forms of technology, civilization) or domains that were not available or significant to survival (microbiology, quantum physics, chemistry).
Moreover, Lakoff's notion of metaphor as a mapping from one cognitive domain to another as "one of the great imaginative triumphs of the human mind" has been echoed by the British paleo- anthropologist Steven Mithen (1996), who has suggested that the transition from Neanderthal man to Cro Magnon is marked precisely by the ability to "switch cognitive frames": the paleolithic blossoming in art may be correlated with the ability to think metaphorically.
Lakoff's proposal on metaphor is a particularly pregnant one for literary studies-- not because ordinary speech is mainly literal (it clearly is not), but because literature is a deliberate forefronting of linguistic devices, a cultivation of special effects. Clarifying what is the source and proper domains of a metaphor promises to throw light on the way meaning is constructed in reading. As for cultural studies, Lakoff's work opens up for the possibility of tracing political and social patterns back to an underlying set of metaphors (see Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Brown (1988), and Boyer (1988)).
It should also be noted that Leonard Talmy, whose early work clearly belonged to the Lakovian paradigm (see the next link), more recently has developed this approach explicitly in the direction of evolved cognitive structures.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Disturbing and beautiful pictures of birds with trash in their bellies
http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=11
Friday, October 23, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Nancy Spero 1926 - 2009
“I am speaking of equality, and about a certain kind of power of movement in the world, and yet I am not offering any systematic solutions.”
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Evelyne Axell at Broadway 1602
Belgium Pop artist Evelyne Axell (1935-72) had started her career as an acclaimed theater and film actress in Paris and Brussels. In 1963 she was the female lead in "Le Crocodile en peluche", directed by her husband, the film maker Jean Antoine. The film plotted a daring subject for the time: the problems of a couple in which one partner is white and the other black. Inspired by Jean Antoine's close work with international artists of the late 50s and 60s, Axell decided to give up her acting career and to become a painter. She approached René Magritte, a friend of the family, to tutor her. Magritte - unusual for his reclusive manners - agrees.
In 1964 Jean Antoine directs three ground breaking art documentaries on the rising styles of Pop Art and New Realism: "Dieu est-il Pop?" on the London scene, „L'Aventure de L'Object" (in Paris with Pierre Restany) and "L'Ecole de New York" (including women artists Marisol and Lee Bontecou).
Axell accompanies him to the filming in London, where she meets among the British Pop artists Pauline Boty. In the same year Axell travels to Prague, Vienna and Cracow. She loves Poland and becomes friend with sculptor Alina Szapocznikow who immigrated to Paris in 1963/64. Both women artists exchanged closely with Pierre Restany, the influential critic and inventor of Nouveau Realisme, who promoted their work profoundly.
Highly inspired by the new Pop Art sensibilities she witnessed in London, New York and Paris, Axell started to paint first in oil, developing a repertoire of erotically provocative motifs from a unique – one could say today proto-feminist – perspective. We see this central interest formulated from the very first painting on, and Axell brought it to genuine unfolding in the "Erotomobiles" in 1966. By this time the artist had shortened her name to the gender-neutral "Axell".
Soon she developed her groundbreaking signature technique using new plastic materials like plexi from which she cut the silhouettes of her voluptuous females and self-conscious heroines absorbed in (homo)erotic poses and activities. She enameled these contoured sheets - often painted recto verso - and mounted them on background panels to the effect that the relief-like surfaces of the figures gain a milky, dreamlike quality. Axell’s works have the immediacy of Pop Art with their bright joyous colors, surface concentrated qualities and mediated sexual imagery while they transcend the very same style milieu. She filters Pop Art through a tender, visionary, radically contemporary form of surrealism, - creating a genuinely new dimension of artistic stylization which still today looks unparalleled.
The women in Axell's world – sexually evocative and self contained, their bodies composed to ornamental beauty - become icons of the liberation of the late 60s. Although she exploits central motifs of Pop Art iconography particularly in her early oil paintings, female sexuality in Axell's work fantastically escapes the realm of mass media objectification, one of the main targets of her male Pop Art contemporaries. The female nude appears in their works mostly as ‘pin ups’ appropriated from media and advertising, images of manufactured desire which become in the majority of Pop Art articulation anonymous signifiers of consumer culture. Among the nude female portraits of the circle "The Opalines" - with a wink to Ingres – Axell painted next to "La Tchèque" or "L'Italienne" the gorgeous "Portrait de Yaël Dayan", the novelist and daughter of the Israeli politician Moshe Dayan. Axell who met Yaël Dayan in Paris had a great admiration for the beautiful woman, writer and activist, - the painting being a document of highly conscious female idolatry.
In 1969 Pierre Restany declares Axell’s work iconic for the "sexual revolution in art". The artist’s tableaux speak a new confident, monumental language of eroticism with the potential to please women and men alike and to open new exclusive spheres for female desire, - as she lived her own life free, permissive and adventurous, far out for women artist of the time.
With the late series of works from 1971-72 shortly before her untimely death, Axell reaches a pivotal stage of her work. She realizes the ‘paradise’ circle situating her solitary females in a new setting, - her fantasy of a utopian landscape: close jungle landscapes with toxic vegetation, idyllic waterfalls and exotic animals, an "Eden ripped apart by shock waves from the world of men". At the same time we find here an elegiac vision of nature untouched by environmental destruction becoming a hidden realm for the free enjoyment of female desire. In "L’Herbe Folle" (1972) we see a woman taking a sunbath, her glasses (Axell's signature round fashionable sun glasses and therefore likely a self portrait) dropped beside her. She seems to rest peacefully while the tropical forest framing her body becomes an all consuming protecting and threatening setting. Shortly after Axell dies in a car crash in Belgium.
BROADWAY 1602 presents for the first time in the US a solo show by this outstanding woman artist. The late paradise circle marks the height of Axell's artistic achievements.
FLATLAND by Vanessa Justice Dance
This experimental dance piece, set to the eerie soundtrack of David Lynch's "Eraserhead," opens next week at the Joyce in Soho. I've seen it as a work in progress (my roomates Alli Ruskowski and Kendra Portier star in it), and its utterly stunning. Also very interesting to view the movement/repetition in this work as a continuing vein of Yvonne Rainer's influence on modern dance. Tickets are $18 and are available through www.joyce.org.
—Mollie McKinley
The original edit of the dance, performed at the Judson Church:
Preview for next week's final performances of the piece:
—Mollie McKinley
"FLATLAND casts a surrealist tone with implications of anxiety and beauty. Inspired by Edmund Burke's On the Sublime (1756), this evocative, layered work creates an alluring tension while juxtaposing different forms and mediums (dance, film, animation). The dance hatches a dream-like world of precise and pulsating movement set against white-washed walls and featuring sound from David Lynch's 1977 movie Eraserhead. Considered an open-text choreography, the suggestive work makes layers of association to allow it to be received uniquely by each viewer. FLATLAND further develops Ms. Justice's interest in a poetics based on perception. She is honing a relational approach to choreography where divergent sources of information meet and create a context for interplay." (from vanessajusticedance.org)
The original edit of the dance, performed at the Judson Church:
Preview for next week's final performances of the piece:
Monday, October 5, 2009
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Films by Robert Morris
October 8 – November 21, 2009
The Hunter College Art Galleries, in collaboration with Sonnabend Gallery, are pleased to present Films by Robert Morris, an exhibition featuring 12 films by world-renowned artist and art theorist Robert Morris, Distinguished Professor of Art at Hunter College. On view together for the first time, this selection of films, dating from the early 1960s though 2005, provides a rare glimpse into Morris’s time-based work. These films combine elements of dance, visual art, and performance while exploring formal and conceptual issues that are essential to the artist’s celebrated Minimalist and Post-Minimalist practice. The films themselves are, in Morris’s own words, part of his continuous investigation of “transformation, ambiguity, and non-purity.” The list of films includes: 21.3 (1963/1993), Arizona (1963/1993), Site (1964/1993), Waterman Switch (1965/1993), Waterman Switch Revisited (1965/1993), Gas Station (1969), Mirror (1969), Slow motion (1969), Wisconsin (1969), Neo Classic (1971), Exchange (1973) and Birthday Boy (2005). Films by Robert Morris opens October 8 and runs through November 21 at the Hunter College/Times Square Gallery. All works are single channel with the exception of Gas Station and Birthday Boy, both two-channel videos. Also on view is the sculpture Box with the Sound of its own Making (1961), an early example of the artist’s time-based work.
Times Square Gallery/
MFA Building
450 West 41st Street
New York, NY 10036
(212) 772-4991
Hours: Tues. - Sat., 1 - 6pm
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
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