Category: theory

Seeks out the edges of things, of understanding

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“Art seeks out the edges of things, of understanding; therefore its favourite modes are irony, negation, deadpan, the pretence of ignorance or innocence. It prefers the unfinished: the syntactically unstable, the semantically malformed. It produces and savours discrepancy in what it shows and how it shows it, since the highest wisdom is knowing that things and pictures do not add up.” –T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, 1984.

Epigraph of Sue Graze’s essay for Concentrations 17: Vernon Fisher, Lost for Words, Dallas Museum of Art from January 23 – April 17, 1988.

Our tasks

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Imagination, justice, beauty, art, misery eradication, repair and mend (what has been torn or a torn world), wisdom (“cold frugality of the wise”), openness to the world (in harmony with it), finding meaning in life, tending to friendship, cultivation of happiness.

Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.

Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays.

via Popova. Also, Camus on meaning, Weil on attention as grace and generosity.

In the present

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“What is still to be achieved is the struggle to grasp the surface effects of the present through concepts that articulate the abstract forces that produce them, forces that are not eternal and are not an essence. It can’t be done by means of words alone. Words have to connect to everyday life in all its vulgar glory and idiocy, and right at the point where the emerging forces of production are shaping that everyday life, [d]riven perhaps by quite distinctive forms of class struggle and experience. The means to live and endure otherwise may already have come into existence, fettered though they are by outmoded relations and forms.”

Mckenzie Wark’s The Struggle to Live in the Present in Verso blog.

Capital Is Dead .

Feminist Art Coalition

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Feminist Art Coalition, a platform for art projects informed by feminisms*. FAC fosters collaborations between arts institutions that aim to make public their commitment to social justice and structural change. It seeks to generate cultural awareness of feminist thought, experience, and action.

Notes on Feminisms, a series of newly commissioned essays : Saidiya Hartman – The Plot of Her Undoing .

Participating Institutions, includes Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) with My Body, My Rules, October 9, 2020–May 9, 2021. and Women Photographers International Congress, a symposium, November 19–20, 2020, led by Aldeide Delgado.

“Working collectively, various art museums and nonprofit institutions from across the United States will present a series of concurrent events—including commissions, exhibitions, performances, talks, and symposia—over the course of three months (September–November) in the fall of 2020, during the run-up to the next presidential election. This strategic endeavor takes feminist thought and practice as its point of departure and considers art as a catalyst for discourse and civic engagement.

Motivated by the ethical imperative to effect change and promote equality within our institutions and beyond, these collective projects will advocate for inclusive and equitable access to social, cultural, and economic resources for people of all genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, classes, ages, and abilities. This cooperative effort stages a range of projects that together generate a cultural space for engagement, reflection, and action, while recognizing the constellation of differences and multiplicity among feminisms.“

Resources.

Walter Rodney’s ‘Groundings’

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Via Verso, On Walter Rodney‘s concept and practice of ‘Grounding’ as Critical Pedagogy by Kevin Okoth.

“A collection of public lectures held by Rodney in Jamaica and at the Congress of Black Writers in Montréal, Groundings provides a pedagogical framework for intellectuals fighting to undo the epistemological distortions of imperialism.”

“To truly ‘ground’, Rodney believed that the revolutionary intellectual must go anywhere to reason with their people. […] ‘I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of black people were prepared to sit down and listen’, he writes. ‘It might be in a sports club, it might be in a school-room, it might be in a church, it might be in a gully […] – ‘dark dismal places with a black population who have had to seek refuge there. You will have to go there if you want to talk to them.’ […] For Rodney, the revolutionary Black intellectual cannot hide in the university and challenge the status-quo within the boundaries of academic respectability. These intellectuals, he argued, do not pose a threat to the neo-colonial elites; only when these same intellectuals break out of academic isolation and engage in the mutual exchange of knowledge with those struggling on the ground, do they begin to challenge oppressive and exploitative systems of power.”

Liberty and Love

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Maria Popova on Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mills via Adam Gopnik‘s A Thousand Small Sanities:The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.

“With an eye to the perilous erasures with which history is often rewritten — history, I continue to insist, is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance” – Popova

“Recognizing that intimate life is an accommodation of contradictions, they understood that political and social life must be an accommodation of contradictions too. The accommodation was their romance. That meant that social accommodation could be romantic, too. Love, like liberty, tugs us in different directions as much as it leads us in one. Love, like liberty, asks us to be only ourselves, and it also asks us to find our self in others’ eyes.” – Gopnik

There are echoes of blackness’s moral underpinnings, here, as found in Moten and in Glissant.