Icar vol1 ed01

THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER FOR ART IN EASTERN IOWA

IOWA CITY ARTS REVIEW OCTOBER 31, 2012

WEEKLY CALENDAR

CRITIC EVENT PICKS

ONGOING EVENTS

Two performance events in particular look promising this week: the Dance Gala, which

Holding Ghosts: Photographs and Film, work

continues its run through the weekend and

by Sarah Phyllis Smith. Art Building West,

the Midwestern Composer’s Symposium,

through November 4

a series of concerts bringing together composers from around the Midwest. Carl

Recontextualize, by Christina Byrne.

Ernst’s talk, “How to Read the Qur’an,”

Drewlowe Gallery, Studio Arts Building,

engages the great religious poem at the heart

through November 4

of so many political issues. I’m also looking forward to Sarah Smith’s photographs and

The Struggle Within, by Dereck Lum.

film at Art Building West, and the new

Ark Gallery, Studio Arts Building,

exhibition of paintings and drawings at the

through November 4

Times Club at Prairie Lights.

Black Magic Witches Picnic, by JoAnn

DANCE GALA 2012

Larpenter Sinclair & Dawn Frary. Douglas

Jennifer Muller’s signature piece “Speeds”

and Linda Paul Gallery, Englert Theater,

premiered in 1974 at Alice Tully Hall in New

through November 6

York City and continues to be re–staged throughout the world. Now the legendary Ms.

Luminous Iowa: Recent Oil Paintings, by

Muller has brought “Speeds” to Iowa City for

Genie Hudson Patrick. Hudson River Gallery,

Dance Gala 2012. The Dance Gala features a

through November 10

wide variety of work in addition to “Speeds,” in including several world premieres.

Fish nor Fowl, by Ken Dubin and Ty Smith.

Times Club at Prairie Lights,

Midwestern Composer’s Symposium

through November 30

The Midwest has long been a haven for

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 31

composers of challenging new music, and the Midwestern Composer’s Symposium provides an opportunity to take stock of advanced

Black Magic Witches Picnic, by JoAnn

musical developments in the heartland. The

Larpenter Sinclair & Dawn Frary, reception

concerts on Friday and Saturday are designed

from 5:30-7:30pm, Douglas and Linda Paul

to give a window into the state of composition

Gallery, Englert Theater

at the four participating Universities:

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 1 Film Colloquium: Spaceship: Art, Politics and Survival, 7:45 PM 232W Adler Journalism Building Dance Gala 2012: Space Place Theater, Thursday, October 25 - November 4 The Struggle Within, by Dereck Lum, reception 6-8pm, Drewlowe Gallery Brett Anthony Johnston reading, 7:00 PM, Prairie Lights Bookstore

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 2 Holding Ghosts: Photographs and Film, Art Building West, Reception:

Cincinnati, Indiana, Iowa and Michigan.

EDITION 1 VOLUME 1

CARL ERNST For many Americans, the Qur’an is difficult to read, its organization obscure, its messages cryptic or even threatening. This presentation considers chronological readings of the original sequence of its delivery, exploration of its links to earlier writings, and clarification of the central points of its symmetrical compositions in order to provide readers with new tools for comprehending an undeniably important religious document.

Sarah Phyllis Smith I encountered a bar called “The Johnson’s” in the East Village a number of years ago, complete with faux wood paneling walls, taxidermy deer head, and Bob Ross-style landscape paintings. While good fun, the parody of Midwestern life was not exactly kindhearted. Smith’s evocative photographs of similar material, by contrast, conjure a sense of the lives that inhabited such spaces.

Instead of keeping their distance from these spaces, Smith’s work offers insight into the people that formed them.

“Fish nor Fowl” by Ken Dubin and Ty Smith The curator promises an exhibition that envelopes absence, presence, and everything in between. While these might be ambitions slightly larger than the walls of the Times Club at Prairie Lights will hold, the work looks engaging and I look forward to stopping by the new installation.

Friday, November 2, 5:00 - 7:00 PM.

Festival of Contemporary Music: Midwest

Screening of the film “Sacandaga” at 6 PM

Composer’s Symposium, 10:30 and 3:30 pm, University Capitol Center, and 7:30 pm at

How to Read the Qur’an, by Carl Ernst, 5 pm, E105 Adler Journalism Building with an additional reading at 7:00 PM,

Riverside Recital Hall

SUNDAY NOVEMBER 4

Prairie Lights Bookstore Public Space One hosts - SOUP Microgranting, Festival of Contemporary Music: Midwest

Ps•z 120 North Dubuque, basement of the

Composer’s Symposium, 7:30pm, Iowa

Wesley Center, 7:00 - 9:00 PM,

Memorial Union

$10 Cover

UIMA First Friday: Spirit of Drawing, by Julie

MONDAY NOVEMBER 5

Johnson, 5-7pm, hotelVetro

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 3 David B. Heunsinkveld and Peter Hoehnle reading, 4:00 PM, Prairie Lights Bookstore

Salgado Maranhao and Alexis Levitin reading, 7:00 PM, Prairie Lights Bookstore

IOWACITYARTSREVIEW.COM

IF AN ARTIST CAN’T BE WRONG, WHAT CAN HE BE? WRITTEN BY BRIAN PRUGH At Public Space One’s Works in Progress festival this year, Kenneth Goldsmith read from his work-in-progress, a modern American version of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. The Arcades Project is something of a literary anomaly: it is a collection of texts about 19th century Paris taken from a wide variety of sources (from high literature to street signs and advertisements), collected, ordered, and meticulously cited. Goldsmith’s project retains Benjamin’s general structure, modified to accommodate texts written in 20th century New York City, and dispenses with citations.

He plans to continue work on the project until it reaches 1000 pages (the length of Benjamin’s manuscript), at which point it will be finished.

His reading from the unfinished manuscript was delightful; through his selections and comments on those selections, the performance allowed the audience to “read with” Goldsmith—to follow “what is interesting” in the volumes written about New York. Authorial interventions (in the form of diary entries) interspersed within the texts revealed aspects of his thinking about the nature of the project, his processes, and his own reflections on what his choices will, in the end, produce. But there was a subtext to many of the reflections—a position that emerged from some of his more provocative statements—that is problematic, and that casts a shadow over the glittering, seductive edifice constructed by his poetry. It is this problematic position that I wish to address in this review.

At one point in his presentation, Goldsmith made the claim that “An artist can’t be wrong.”

It is a statement of the by now familiar art-

...in our age, which not only does not know what it needs, but which no longer demands anything, but takes what it gets, and so perhaps deserves it; where every indirectness is dime-a-dozen, and any weirdness can be assembled and imitated on demand—the thing we must look for, in each case, is the man who, contrary to appearance, and in spite of it all, speaks.

--Stanley Cavell, “On Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation,” 1967

for-art’s sake mantra, and could be seen as a

On Goldsmith’s account, this freedom from the

kind of necessary condition for the possibility

strictures of truth and the moral law is what

of avant-garde experimentation. But it also

makes art great, powerful and important. The

advances a radical (and I will maintain

audience member who challenged Goldsmith

untenable—or if not untenable, then at least

was attempting to call him out on the shaky

uninteresting) thesis about the relationship

grounds of that claim. An objection to

between art and life.

Goldsmith’s position might be framed in the following way: the agnostic cannot be wrong

During the Q&A session after his talk,

because he refuses to make an assertion—he

Goldsmith was challenged by a question

fails, that is, to say anything at all. The amoral

from the audience, which suggested that his

agent cannot be wrong because his activity

assertion that “An artist can’t be wrong” was, in does not amount to an action—he fails to do fact, wrong. Now, there are two primary ways

anything at all. Art that really matters says

in which we talk about someone being “wrong”: something (even if that something cannot be In the first case, one could be mistaken about

articulated in words). It also does something

the truth—being wrong in this case amounts

(however difficult this might be to describe). If

to having said something false. In the second

the artist cannot be wrong, the degree to which

case, one could have committed an immoral

art says or does anything at all is problematic.

act—one could have done some moral wrong.

If an artist cannot be wrong, it becomes very difficult to imagine why art matters.

In fielding the question, Goldsmith addressed the second case. He answered that art was

For the purposes of fleshing out the position

a-moral: that is, art does not exist within the

lurking behind Goldsmith’s poetic approach, let

realm of moral value. To be amoral is to exist

us suppose that it is possible that the artist is

“beyond good and evil” (to borrow Nietzsche’s

engaged in some third kind of activity, outside

phrase), in a conceptual framework where

of the realms of truth and moral value. In

good and evil do not exist. The degree to which

order to get a sense of what this kind of activity

such a morally neutral sphere of activity exists

would look like, let us consider the nature of

is debatable, but one could certainly make an

his project. What Goldsmith takes himself to be

argument that, for instance, one’s move in

doing in composing his poetry—his task and its

a game of chess falls into that category. The

difficulties—might be described in the

question here is, does art?

following way:

But this is not the only question; Goldsmith

The whole secret lies in arbitrariness. People

also claims in his statement that “an artist can’t

usually think it easy to be arbitrary, but

be wrong” that art exists outside of the realm

it requires much study to succeed in being

of truth—outside of that which, in principle,

arbitrary so as not to lose oneself in it, but

can be known. This of course makes sense if

so as to derive satisfaction from it. One does

considering a fictional story: an artist cannot

not enjoy the immediate but something quite

be wrong about an event that happens in a

different which he arbitrarily imports into it.

fictional character’s life. There is no “reality”

You go to see the middle of a play, you read the

against which to test his assertion, as there

third part of a book. By this means you insure

would be if the author described a historical personage. By asserting that an artist cannot

ARTICLE CONTINUED ON INSERT

be wrong, Goldsmith places the entirety of the artist’s activity within this category of things neither true nor false—outside of the knowable as such. It is more than being outside of the things that we do not know: the artist, on Goldsmith’s view, makes no contribution to knowledge at all.

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IF AN ARTIST CAN’T BE WRONG, WHAT CAN HE BE? CONTINUED...

By this means you insure yourself a very different kind of enjoyment from that which the author has been so kind as to plan for you. You enjoy something entirely accidental; you consider the whole of existence from this standpoint; let its reality be stranded thereon.

The whole secret lies in arbitrariness. People usually think it easy to be arbitrary, but it requires much study to succeed in being arbitrary so as not to lose oneself in it, but so as to derive satisfaction from it. One does not enjoy the immediate but something quite different which he arbitrarily imports into it. You go to see the middle of a play, you read the third part of a book. By this means you insure yourself a very different kind of enjoyment from that which the author has been so kind as to plan for you. You enjoy something entirely accidental; you consider the whole of existence from this standpoint; let its reality be stranded thereon.

In conversation after the lecture, Goldsmith maintained that the content of what is written is much less interesting than the circumstances

surrounding the reading of a text: the way that a reader switches from one text to another, medium (Internet or otherwise) in which the person encounters the text, the thoughts and expectations that a reader has when engaging with it. In short, he is interested in how the text is experienced in ways external to the content of that text. His project is concerned, then, with addressing the “life” outside of the reading—the structure of the experience of reading in the 21st century.

I characterized the nature of Goldsmith’s approach as I did in order to make its substance more apparent. My characterization is both anachronistic and suggestive: it is a description of an approach to life called “The Rotation Method” by the aesthete, A, in Either/Or, Soren Kierkegaard’s 1843 pseudonymous work (presented here in the 1944 Swenson translation, p. 245). I chose A’s description of his approach to life because I think it fits Goldsmith’s stated project. Kierkegaard antedates Goldsmith by 150 years, thus revealing that Goldsmith’s attitude and approach to texts, while on the front end of today’s avant-garde, is not exactly new. More importantly, it creates a connection with a way of life—an existential possibility—that is defined and dismissed by a serious philosopher.

While the persona of A is not a caricature per se, he is conceived of as an extreme instantiation of an existential possibility that is both immature and pernicious. A is the personification of an underdeveloped soul whom Judge William, the other significant voice in Either/Or, tries doggedly to bring to reason. The structure of Either/Or is designed to cast into relief the deep problems and inconsistencies in A’s way of life and selfconception. It is designed to make the reader distrust A and desire not to be A—but it contains within itself the recognition that there is nothing

that can be done to change A, if A does not desire to

is nothing new about Goldsmith’s position; it is,

change. A, within his own self-conception, cannot

in fact, as old as Kierkegaard’s articulation of it

be wrong.

in Either/Or, and certainly older—and it does not represent progress over Baldwin’s 1962 position,

Now, it seems problematic (to me) that one

but rather a spiritual regression to a less developed

would want, in one’s art, to explore the horizons

existential state.

of possibility of a 150 year-old stereotype of a vacuous, juvenile form of life. It is a project directly

The difficulty with art that consciously drops out

opposed to, for instance, James Baldwin’s account

of the realms of goodness and truth is that it easily

of the responsibility of the artist in his 1962 essay

drops out of the realm of life altogether. Insofar as

“The Creative Process”:

it does this, it ceases to matter at all. The diversion that it provides, in the name of art, from the very

There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to

things art is in a position to help us know and do is

be created, mines to be exploited, children to be

a diversion for which, I would maintain, the artist

fed: and none of these things can be done alone.

is culpable.

But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest; so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human place.

Baldwin’s idea of the artist’s responsibility and purpose is ineluctably tied to the realms of truth and moral value: there is perhaps no place where it is easier to be wrong than in one’s knowledge of

KENNETH GOLDSMITH REVISITED

oneself, and if it is the artist’s duty to illuminate the wilderness of himself, and if he is wrong in knowing that which he is attempting to illuminate, that failure of knowledge becomes, in turn, a moral failing of the work. For Baldwin, the goals of an artwork are both gnostic and moral: the work helps us to know truly and to act more humanly.

Goldsmith’s rhetoric would have us imagine that this is just another way in which the mid-century ideal of the tortured artist has gotten things terribly wrong—that it has obscured a more genuine understanding of the nature of artistic creation that we can see more clearly now in 2012 than Baldwin could in 1962. But this is an empty claim: there

CO-CREATORS: BRIAN PRUGH AND HEIDI WIREN BARTLETT AND A SPECIAL THANKS TO DAVID DUNLAP