Content, Process & Methodologies The Vessel March 2015
McLuhan and the Absurd Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has many reasons of which the head knows nothing. The Theater of the Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about. In the seventeenth century world the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print clichĂŠ
Simultaneity - intuition c/p/m as one “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” Virginia Woolf That Blake’s annotations of Reynold’s Discourses conclude “The man was hired to Depress art” makes perfect sense when you know, as a recent paper points out, that depression suppresses intuition (Impaired intuition in patients with major depressive disorder Carina Remmers1,*, Sascha Topolinski2, Detlef E. Dietrich3 and Johannes Michalak1.)
Creativity as an evolving flow of magical thinking, which maps the process of consciousness folding back in on itself A game of tag between each jumping off point. The art-venturer intuitively packing a talisman from a previous anecdote.
We could evolve Art as continuum Each work is a specific response with a trace of all previous endeavour “More specifically it is in art's apparitional quality or phenomenality (das Erscheinende) that the collective essence breaks forth because apparition goes far beyond the mere subject. The memory trace of mimesis unearthed by every art work, among other things, anticipates a condition of reconciliation between the individual and the collectivity.� Adorno TA
I am a strange loop Internal hendiadys dialogue as process and content
McLuhan The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy Constant process of folding in upon itself. Response to “the onesidedness of the present� C.g. Jung
metaphor “As the Western world has invested every aspect of its waking life with visual order, with procedures and spaces that are uniform, continuous and connected, it has progressively alienated itself from needful involvement in its subconscious life.” ― Marshall McLuhan, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting
Realty
“…participation is important as a project: it re-humanizes a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalist production.” Claire Bishop Lecture for Creative Time’s Living as Form Cooper Union, New York, 2011
Orpheus is advised to use the underground
The Rebel, “Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.�
The limits of linear literacy The phonetic alphabet gave us an eye for an ear This results in separation of the absurd "If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity. This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation."
Absence and Trace
Salverda talks of how Lucebert would “experiment with words and images, sound and Rhythm even syntax of language.” Quoting Lucebert he reveals this was an attempt to restore “the primordial power of the word freeing it from the stifling consensus of what is acceptable”.
Asger Jorn on Michaux “the problem of the limits of language dividing people” by “turning to the creation of a graphic poetry, a picture idiom, where letters or characters are not bound to concepts that risk limiting poetic flow.”
• “In Michaux’s humanism, man is artistic, Faustian, demonic‑divine, homo ludens, a great player, a human being who embraces all other human beings from the beginning of time, in the history of man, a human being who calls nothing “inhuman” that has been done, thought or said by humans – a human being who opens all doors. Michaux is an Odin.”
Henri Michaux – Asemic poetry "messages from his inner space."
張顛 (Zhang the Madman)
Literacy Iain McGilchrist discusses our ability to imagine communication without words, “we are trapped inside a culture that is so language determined and so language dependant that we cannot imagine it any other way.� There is nothing outside the text
scapegoat
Lucebert He asserted that the Netherlands was ripe for a repetition of “the dadaistic and expressionistic experiment” and claimed that the experimentalists were the first literary “nudists”. The inspiration for this metaphor was drawn from the Flemish poet Paul van Ostaijen, who wrote in 1920 in The Feasts of Fear and Pain, “I want to be naked / and begin.”
INtegration “The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.� Marshall McLuhan Media as the New Nature 1969
John Cage If I ask the I Ching a question as though it were a book of wisdom, which it is, I generally say, "What do you have to say about this?" and then I just listen to what it says and see if some bells ring or not.
Follow your heart synchronicity as strategy
undecidables
The cusp
Roger Cook intro to RA schools 2009 when you strive to make life a work of art, you are not the cause but the conduit: the cause comes from the outside” “The unspeakable stress-pitch of selving that artists seek to express is not, however, to be confused with egoistic individualism, for it ultimately leads to an ascetic transmutation of any reductive sense of self.”
“Derrida’s reflection on the trace … poses the question of the origins of intersubjective responsibility” The Trace in Derrida and Levinas Or as Elonora Carrington put it, “you don’t Bettina Bergo Université de Montréal do art , it does you”.
germinal To remain open to the meaning and context of the space I find myself in. To integrate From the start outside myself and open to the world Ponty
Being Singular Plural, Jean-luc Nancy “the communality of the common through the separation of the singular”. in a splintered world, we must address the splinters. —Clifford Geertz