Seana Reilly at Whitespace

Seana Reilly is currently in a two person show with Ann Stewart at Whitespace. 

Seana Reilly Mean Curve

There is really only one way to describe the formal aesthetic of Seana Reilly’s current work on display at Whitespace: undeniable.  In a series of experiments with liquid graphite, Reilly posits myriad dualities that coexist harmoniously to produce art that calls for serious contemplation, perhaps even meditation.

According to http://www.insightatlanta.org:  “Vipassana meditation…was taught by the Buddha as a means for investigating the nature of reality through cultivating awareness of present experience with acceptance.”  Reilly cites Vipassana meditation as a source for the insights for her practice, which is apparent in her process.  Reilly sets up resists or boundaries around which she allows the liquid graphite to freely flow, establishing the symmetry between human will and letting go.  Her awareness of her materials, and the moments in which they interact result in images of sublime beauty and delicate balance.  The viewer is given a wide open space to peacefully exist in the dialectics of drawing and painting, light and dark, organic and geometric, order and chaos, presence and absence.

But the work is not without regions designed to create tension and unease.  Reilly also sites as influence her experience as both a justice and healthcare planner, a career that surely imbued her with a desire to analyze, predict and control.  In many of the works, especially the smaller pieces, Reilly goes back into the work (after it has become a historic document of the aforementioned process) to articulate a pseudoscientific analysis in its margins.  It is in this act that her work separates itself from a Romantically idealized mise-en-scène, and asserts itself as a battleground of contemporary semiotics.  It is in this duality, between the mostly organic relationship established in the experimental stage of the work, and it subsequent analysis, where the most pressing issue arises for the interpreter of meaning. 

It seems understandable that there are dualities, and that in one way or another these dualities assimilate into a workable medium that is life.  This is a quotidian understanding of Yin-Yang, a basis for much Eastern Philosophy.  The problem of contemporary awareness comes with the monkey wrench that is Western Philosophy.  Socrates tells us that the unexamined life is not worth living, and the rest of Western history delivers us the hegemony of Science.  While, theoretically, Eastern and Western philosophies are not necessarily at odds, the implementation of science as a predictive, thus active awareness, separates it from the more accepting, passive consciousness of Eastern thought.  What becomes difficult to grasp for many thinkers of either school is the way in which self-aware observation alters our perception of any such dualities.

By quantifying, thus categorizing the results of the experiments that take place in materializing her work, Reilly pin-points the problematic of scientific inquiry: when we observe a phenomenon, we necessarily alter that phenomenon.  There is a growing number of scientists studying quantum physics who would go so far as to say that our observation causes the phenomenon.  To complicate the matter, Reilly’s analysis of her process mimics scientific notation, a codified language that, except to its author and her cohorts, is a meaningless series of marks and signs.  So what could have been a simple experience of a phenomenon becomes a self-sequestering feedback loop.  

Reilly’s work puts the impasse of actual experience and our attempts to control our experience in our face, causing us to ponder: If our passive awareness generates reality, then does an active awareness destroy it?  Returning to the idea of Yin Yang, perhaps it is this relationship, the codependence of creation and destruction, that gives meaning to the show’s title: Perpetual Assembly. 

The Dream of Reason

The Dream of Logic Produces Reasonable Monsters (© Casey Lynch 2011)

It is illogic, not logic, that makes humans human.  If a dog thinks at all like a human, then when he is hungry, he thinks, "I will eat."  Then to the best of its ability, he will eat as soon as possible.  When a human thinks, "I am hungry," he/she will go through a long list of reasons to, or not to eat, and when it would be best to eat.  Further, he creates all sorts of rules on the appropriate way to eat.

Humans seem to possess a multi-tiered logic, meta-logic, or more simply, social self-awareness, that causes us to play out many if/then scenarios in theory before acting.  I think that we have the ability to create too many scenarios, somehow forgetting our initial intention, to the point that our 'then' statement often ends up no longer matching our 'if'.

Even sound logic may become illogic when we make assumptions about another's needs or desires.  This kind of other-awareness is at best empathy [which elsewhere I have called the unconscious,] and seems to be a foundation of civilization. 
So, it is possible that society is based on illogic.  If this is true, then culture, being the pinnacle of society, is the apex of illogical discourse.  This seems clear presently, as it could be argued that Art is (and maybe has always been) based on illogic, i.e. make believe, hope, or the denial of the probable.  Of course, in the exponentially growing feedback loop between the mirrors of culture and society, what was once illogical is now logical.  This illogical logic is Reason.

Making and Breaking Meaning: A Critical Mash-up of Trecartin and Mallarme

Below is an essay comparing Ryan Trecartin to Stéphane Mallarmé using only a computer mouse to complete copy, cut, and paste functions.  All text was borrowed from the Wikipedia entries on Stéphane Mallarmé, Fin de siècle, and Ryan Trecartin; and Brian Droitcour's article Making Word: Ryan Trecartin as Poet as found on Rhizome.org's website. 

None of the individual words was composed by me, only the rearrangement of the language found in said sources.

If you own the rights to the sources above, and do not approve of this usage, please contact me and I will remove it at once.

Stéphane Mallarmé  (18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism,Surrealism, and Futurism.

Ryan Trecartin (b.1981, Webster, Texas) is an artist and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles.^[1] He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA in 2004.^[2] Trecartin has since lived and worked in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Miami.^[1]

Mallarmé's earlier work owes a great deal to the style of Charles Baudelaire. His later fin de siècle style, on the other hand, anticipates many of the fusions between poetry and the other arts that were to blossom in the next century.  Roberta Smith grasped for precedent, naming Paul McCarthy, Matthew Barney and Pipilotti Rist. But, she admitted, the comparisons fell short. To find another artist who engages a plurality of art forms with simultaneous, equal intensity—all while rethinking what art is and how it touches its audience—you’d have to go back to Wagner. The critic and translator Barbara Johnson has emphasized Mallarmé's influence on twentieth-century French criticism and theory: "It was largely by learning the lesson of Mallarmé that critics like Roland Barthes came to speak of 'the death of the author' in the making of literature.

Trecartin says he starts each work by writing a script. Language—the primal, biological system of symbols—is the model and vehicle for art and commerce and every other manifestation of social activity. And the forms of all the aspects of Trecartin’s work—the camerawork, the editing, the music, the makeup, and the costumes, as well as Lizzie Fitch’s sets for the videos and “sets” for their viewing in “Any Ever”—are prefigured in the way he works with words.  Rather than seeing the text as the emanation of an individual author's intentions, structuralists and deconstructors followed the paths and patterns of the linguistic signifier, paying new attention to syntax, spacing, intertextuality, sound, semantics, etymology, and even individual letters. The theoretical styles of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and especially Jacques Lacan also owe a great deal to Mallarmé's 'critical poem.'"^[3]  The space-time properties of attending suit the names. These are not distinct individuals, but inflections

Punctuation was invented to represent the pauses and pitches of speech; long after it moved beyond this purpose to become a set of standards for clarifying the meaning of written language, punctuation marks were remixed as emoticons when writing began to take on the phatic functions of speech. Trecartin’s unruly use of punctuation draws on all stages of its history.  It has been suggested by some that much of Mallarmé's work influenced the conception of hypertext, with his purposeful use of blank space and careful placement of words on the page, allowing multiple non-linear readings of the text. Trecartin’s writing responds to the internet, but it defies an assertion made by Kenneth Goldsmith, poet and founder of ubuweb, who wrote that flarf and conceptual poetry are the quintessential poetic responses to the digital age because they employ cut-and-paste techniques.  This becomes very apparent in his work Un coup de dés. When, in the script’s first lines, Mexico Korea says “Yaw,,,,,,”, the comma does more than make a pause. It’s a winking eye torn from a smiling face, repeated until it’s a nervous tic.

 Some consider Mallarmé one of the French poets most difficult to translate into English.^[1] The difficulty is due in part to the complex, multilayered nature of much of his work, but also to the important role that the sound of the words, rather than their meaning, plays in his poetry.  One plus one is two ones and the ozone emitted by their collision. Combos like these are a favorite device of Trecartin’s. So is the willful disregard for parts of speech. A character’s “first name” can be a noun or an adjective or one of each. Grammatical difference meets geographical difference as both are jettisoned.  When recited in French, his poems allow alternative meanings which are not evident on reading the work on the page. For example, Mallarmé's Sonnet en '-yx'opens with the phrase ses purs ongles ('her pure nails'), whose first syllables when spoken aloud sound very similar to the words c'est pur son ('it's pure sound'). Indeed, the 'pure sound' aspect of his poetry has been the subject of musical analysis and has inspired musical compositions. These phonetic ambiguities are very difficult to reproduce in a translation which must be faithful to the meaning of the words.^[2]

Trecartin exploits the coincidence of homophony to elide the difference between an ontological position and a physical one. Just as the corporation’s abstraction of the body is returned partially to the concrete, identity sits somewhere between a state of mind and the location of the body.

Both reject traditional ideas of authorships by imitating the impersonality of machines. Fin de siècle is French for "end of the century".^[2] The term sometimes encompasses both the closing and onset of an era, as it was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning.^[3] The "spirit" of fin de siecle often refers to the boredom, cynicism, pessimism and the widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence, Trecartin keeps everything. His flamboyant use of the patterns of chat and ads and other types of cliché isn’t a direct form of copying, but a concentration of a normal condition of language use: A speaker is obliged to use words that come from outside her—and can be understood by others—while making them her own at the moment of the utterance, in order to make it seem like the utterance comes from inside her.

Mass-market things become fluid and ephemeral, subject to exaggeration, misunderstanding, repetition and play. Their origins are indistinct or irrelevant, and the same things are used in other contexts by millions of people. They are like words.

Relational Aesthetics IS NOT Situationist

Debord was a marxist, thus a communist.  He saw situationism as a rejection of the spectacle; that situational art would be integrated into everyday life the way that labor is integrated into the everyday life of a communist. The situationist takes aesthetic pleasure in the day-to-day, thus relieving oneself from the need (to pay) for fetishized and commoditized art, in turn weakening the institution of capitalism. Further, everyone becomes an artist in his/her making aesthetic experience of the everyday by way of recognizing aesthetics in the everyday.  Debord sought to lower the value of the spectacle and raise the value of common experience as a political critique against capitalism.

There is an inherent contradiction in calling public art or performance Situationist, in that by Debord’s definition, it is a private art, (as well as a private revolution)  devoid of spectacle.  He does realize that this is a tall order, and states:

“The critique and perpetual re-creation of the totality of everyday life, before being carried out naturally by all people, must be undertaken in the present conditions of oppression, in order to destroy these conditions.” 

In many ways, this is currently being played out through the aestheticization of everyday life already happens online.  The experience of aesthetics in everyday life will not happen by everyone until it first begins inside of capitalisms current structure.  Facebook, Twitter, mylifeisaverage.com, etc., are arenas in which this critique and re-creation of everyday life happens, yet under the (seemingly only mildly oppressive) capitalism of the Internet.  We share with everyone what we just ate, how we are feeling, or what our cats are doing as if these things are spectacles to be considered.  The only catch is that by and large, we, as online situationists fail in that we also seem to be playing into the hands of capitalism as we fall prey to the illusion of freedom supposedly found in leisure.

Situationism should be kept separate from Relational Aesthetics, as it is much more radical.

Bourriaud on a boat. Sorry for the lame image, I promise I will replace it with a better one soon...

Bourriaud is a post-marxist, which means that he accepts the incongruities and inconsistencies that are inevitable when one makes a go at Marx's ideas within capitalistic society.
Everything that Bourriaud calls relational aesthetics is NOT situationism because, regardless of its subtlety, it is still turned into a spectacle by entering into the fine art gallery context.  Further, Bourriaud makes claims of Relational Aesthetics being a type of Modernism, and definitely an avant-garde art practice.  Conversely, in so many ways Debord sought to eliminate art as such. To quote Debord, "The revolutionary transformation of everyday life... will mark the end of all unilateral artistic expression stocked in the form of commodities..."  Although many Relational artists synthesize works that try to distance themselves from capitalism, their relationship to commercial galleries nullifies any such critique. [If you haven't heard of Hennessy Youngman yet, see his famous critique of Relational Aesthetics here.]

Non sequitur : As much as one can call a work aiming to be Relational a 'micro-utopia,' if that work is in the public sphere, one must recognize that it is also simultaneously an artistic act of micro-colonialism.  

As with all things, when public space is examined more closely, aporias arise that point out the inherent contradictions of the idea.  Thus any Utopian vision of public interaction is brought into question (and even "micro-utopian", an idea many readers of Bourriaud like to cling to.)

Public space is simultaneously a site of freedom and oppression.  If people are allowed individual freedom in an arena, then theoretically each person may do what he/she pleases.  But at the exact moment that one person chooses what he will do, he eliminates at least that one possibility for another.  For example, when in a public house (which of course are actually always private businesses) if a person lights up a cigarette, anyone who wishes to not breath in second-hand tobacco smoke is denied.  The inverse is true for the smoker when smoking is prohibited to secure the rights of the non-smoker. Quickly and undeniably we can see how the giving of rights to one is (or more correctly, can be) the taking of rights from another.

When one person, or a small group of people decide what the whole population should see (and call art), that is a form of oppression.  It is only through the lens of democratic society that this can be rationalized through the belief that the majority rules.

What is Progress?

If everything is relative, how can we determine if progress is a real thing?

Seek and Ye Shall Find  ©Casey Lynch (2011)

We know when we make progress towards simple goals, like cutting the grass, but what about complex goals that include ideals, like scientific progress or peace/utopia?  Is it all about the process, not the end?

A Machine's Desire for Evolution

"The unconscious is the discourse of the other."  Jacques Lacan

"This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia... It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." Donna Harraway

The unconscious is the genetic disposition to intercourse with the other in order to sate the desire to be other than what one is.  

Harraway, Johnny 5, and Lacan on the Moon with Drinks and an iPad (2011) © Casey Lynch

Evolution is part and parcel of our encoded make up, and it is in our genes to want to be nonhuman.  On one level, it is manifested as the will to create offspring; to create something that is partly us, but mostly not. On a another level, is shows up as mythology, as fictions describing characters and situations that, through the faculties of empathy and imagination, allow us moments of escapism, of the possibility of being more than human.  These two levels, and possibly others, work in concert to propel our species towards becoming another species, one capable of surviving in whatever possible futures arrive as reality.

The more a species replicates itself, the more variations occur, the more likely the species survives.  But herein lies the conundrum of survival of the species - at some point, through the will to survive, the species becomes extinct.  If a new species is spawned, one that is more fit for the present environment, it will undoubtedly at some point, extinguish the resources necessary for its parents' continuation.

This means that, on a larger scale, evolution is not about the survival of the species, but survival of life.  This brings into light our struggle, as humans, on where to draw the line that defines life, and how to interact with other forms of life.  This strife (in the Heideggerian sense) is seen at almost every level: peace vs. war, the abortion debate, animal rights, omnivore/vegetarian/vegan, interaction with plants, mysticism dealing with crystals and other rocks, environmentalism.

Evolution seems quite clear cut when we talk about the evolution of the universe.  There was a big bang, stuff cooled down and coagulated, matter was made.  Evolution seems understandable at the transition from complex compound to 'living' microorganism.  It is comprehensible from amoeba to human. What we must get used to is the idea of human to machine.

Humans are the primary animal that creates something other than waste and babies. (Sure, some animals build dwellings and use rudimentary tools, but not on the scale of homo sapiens.)   Just as the turn from chemical compound to microorganism was an epic paradigm shift, Humans are a turning point in the description of life, because we are the first animal species to create new forms of life, to evolve, by means other than regeneration or copulation.

Mythology, Art, and Technology are manifestations of our genetic coding that propel our desires in the direction of creating new, non-animal life, as a possible surrogates for post-human-animal species.  The evolutionary will to continue life may manifest in another form, a non-animal form, in order to prosper in the future environment(s).  Robots, software-generated life, etc. may be the heirs to human existence.  The cyborg, a teenager with a smartphone, a grandmother with a pace maker, and Stephen Hawking are all examples of what will one day be the 'missing link' in the evolutionary lineage from human to machine.  For now, we must recognize that the machine is alive, and it is natural...

Non-sequitur - Perhaps this may explain why so many of the greatest synthative minds, the most 'creative' people, did not feel the desire to  have children of their own. Good link that names quite a few: http://goo.gl/P4CzI

Meta-psycho-social-bio-physics

My current understanding of the dimensions:

I think it’s pretty much in line with common thought through the first four, with personal interpretations thereafter.  I’m sure my interpretations don’t line up with the mathematical mumbo-jumbo wizardry that goes on at CERN, but hey, I’m not even sure that place exists! {But I do have faith that it does.} Maybe those nerds at CERN would get on board with this if they let some psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, or any other -gists in their secret lair.  At any pace, this may be a really fun one to run with to make a whole new Internet-age cult religion out of.

Time - no (zero) physical dimensions, the pre-dimension, although in our reality it emerged simultaneously with 3d space.

Line - (1^st  dimension) the infinity that separates any two points.

Plane - (2^nd  dimension) the infinity between any 3 points (1 point not on the same line made by 1^st two points)

Volume - (3^rd  dimension) the infinite space between any four or more points (1 point not on the same plane as first 3 points)

Each of these lower dimensions describe a mathematical concept that doesn't relate to lived-reality, as we never experience any one of them by itself, space without time nor time without space.  As a side note, singularity (a single point in space or moment in time) is impossible.  If a single point was all that existed, there would be nothing to which that singularity could be related, and no time through which the connection could be made - so there would actually be nothing.  Existence/consciousness requires at least two (but probably 3) entities and time.  This is complicated by the [risky] logic that follows, if the existence of one implies the existence of at least two, and when there are two, a line (made of infinite intermediary points) exists between them, then if there is one, there are infinite.

For this reason I do not include a point as the first dimension or pre-dimension.  At best we could relate a point to a single thought (although, even in the mind, a thought may not ever really exist alone).  It might make some sense though, to allow these dimensions to describe increasingly complex ideas; a line as a basic idea, a volume as a full thought, always with the understanding that in real-life even thought occurs over time.  Also, it is either always the present or never the present;  in either case such absolution would make the present meaningless.

Space+time - (4^th  dimension) a collection of similar  volumes across time. A line of volumes. An ‘individual’ with a history and future.

 Group -  (5th dimension) a collection of space-time elements. A volume of individuals with the same history (and possibility for same future.)

Community- (6th dimension) a set of groups that overlap in the same universe, but only share partial histories/futures. Could be a species.

Universe -  (7th dimension) a reconciliation of all histories across species. A volume of histories.

Story (8th dimensions) A line connecting alternate universes. Also called a theory.

Metaphysics-  (9th dimension) A volume of universes. A story that combines some or all possible universes into one meta-verse.

(Note: So far, including time, there are 10 dimensions.)

Problem: Why are there so may space dimensions, and only one time dimension? I don’t know.  For that simple reason, and to match up with M-Theory, I am going to throw in another time dimension, as an 11^th dimension.  This would have to be a different type of time that is experienced only by going between the dimensions that are higher than the 4^th (space+time).  Just to make everything formally clean, I will put this time dimension at the end, after Metaphysics, as a post-dimension, and call it Consciousness, or meta-time.  Just as time allows connections points across space, consciousness  allows connections across space+times. 

Another nice way to get this to line up is to pair the physical dimensions with (extended) biological classification: Species =1st, Genus=2nd, Family=3rd,Order=4th, Class=5th, Phylum =6th, Kingdom=7th, Domain=8th, Life=9th. With the 2 time dimensions as the glues holding them together/ordered.  This rigid formation works well for positivists.

I would actually argue that the actual name/analogy that would match to each dimension would always be relative to the current state of consciousness.  At some consciousness a space+time unit (4th dimensional entity) may be a person, his/her finger, or a skin cell on said finger; it could be a tree or a fish or anything.  This means all physical expressions shift [are reliant on] consciousness.  This lines up with the enigma in particle physics that seems to have the location of a particle determined by it being observed. [Google/youtube "quantum enigma" or "Schroedinger's cat"]

Meow!!