Source to Self
Professionals of Interest and Influence
It is the custom of scholars when addressing behavior and culture to speak variously of anthropological explanations, psychological explanations, biological explanations, and other explanations appropriate to the perspectives of individual disciplines. I have argued that there is intrinsically only one class of explanation. It traverses the scales of space, time, and complexity to unite the disparate facts of the disciplines by consilience, the perception of a seamless web of cause and effect.
-E.O.Wilson
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge 1998:266
My roommate found a video called "Notes for those beginning the discipline of architecutre" by Michael Meredith, professor of architecture at Harvard University. This mock-dialogue is all too familiar. The setting is a table in front of an audience where two characters hold a conversation about the current state and future of architecture. The individual leading the conversation is an overzealous, overconfident, commanding figure who asks a series of roundabout questions, gives his own roundabout answers to his questions, and constantly cuts off the responses given back to him. On the other side of the table is a rather pathetic professor of architecture character (Michael Meredith) donning a neck brace and New Balance shoes to emphasize his defeat. Anytime the confident character says the word architecture it is censored from the audio with a curse-word beep. The professor rarely responds with anything but a timid, forced, and ambivalent answer of “yes…well no…some would say that…there are many different…” which are all inevitably cut off by the questioner, to the relief of the professor and audience.
For me this is not just a conversation about -----------, it is an unfortunately accurate dramatization of any academic conversation between a student seeking purpose and the institution which seems to have lost its own. To say that a conversation is held between the two is a stretch. To say that either character left the conversation caring about what had just happened is a stretch. When I do research on ------- or talk with people specifically about ------ or even hear the jargon of ------ used at length to contextualize -------- within the frameworks of -------, I start to feel like the table between the two professionals.
What is valuable for me is the natural history of human beings, our evolution through time and space, the places we live and the relationships we develop; our relationship to insects, to the ecosystem, to altruism and to mythology. I am interested in the influence of architecture and industrialization, the problem of professionals, creativity and a humane way of speaking. I want to talk about why we should all cook more, why windows are bad for people, why we should be more comfortable killing food, and why we don’t have to make beautiful things. I want to talk about the bored faces in our classrooms, the weather outside, and how to live well in a failing economy. I want to talk about why we should stop traveling and why we should travel more. I am fascinated when everything fits, when it is all relevant, when we can’t avoid talking about the problem. I can confidently say that --- does not cover the bases alone.
Maybe this is nothing new, and certainly this paper acknowledges the value of our influences beyond the --- world, but I want to emphasize that this paper will be structured as a “web of cause and effect” rather than a linear progression. And so I will first give credit to E.O. Wilson, who I just quoted, for his profound and extensive work on the nature of human beings, ants, and why we need a radical shift in communication between the academic disciplines. I was once a Biology major, then an English major, dabbled in Film and Media Studies, then I got all caught up in Anthropology, and now my investments lie in Art, Architecture, and Education. What I want to be when I grow up? A farmer of farms. I think that a farmer should know all these things too.
A German fighter pilot crashed in a desolate region of Russia in 1943. A nomadic people pulled in from the snow and wrapped the pilot in felt and fat to return him to life. This biography of Joseph Beuys may sound extreme, and may not even be true, but is important to see what drama and heroism comes with the story of an empowered individual. This performance artist went on to heal communities in the 60s and 70s with felt and fat and a message of universal human creativity. While the --- world may have been the only audience ready to digest his fat and felt and dead hares and live coyotes, Beuys did make monumental progress toward a cross-disciplinary, open, free education of --- to anyone who should choose to study; but has left artifacts of coded rhetoric in art museums that are not the accessible, open, socially energetic works that empower individuals outside of the --- discipline.
Beuys’ art work is kind of gross, I mean it looks gross, with dead animals and lead and huge amounts of fat. It is rusty metal and old clothes, cold steel and strange tools. The aesthetic of Beuys’ work is specific and not necessarily beautiful. To make the personal decision to stop making beauty was a bit of a process. I too have the need show people something, something significant or even monumental that can bring a community together and let us sigh together in satisfaction. I want to make something, something physical tangible and visible. That is why I started making art in the first place.
Robert Smithson and Andy Goldsworthy, Skip Schuckmann and Matthew Barney, all worked in such a way that encouraged me that art making did have a voice that continued to resonate for me. I could consume myself in the entropic metaphors and non-site references of Smithson and shout my message in or out of the gallery to an audience with open ears and nodding approval. I could make beautiful way points all over the world or sacred spaces for my loved ones or even rekindle the mythic cannons that have shaped our human belief systems. But this art that I was coming to know, this fascinating inspiring art, was still ---
Christo was pivotal for me because he may have pushed me over the edge. The work of Christo impressed me for some time because of its beauty and grandeur and communal investment. But seeing his work on display in the gallery was a bit of an eye opener. His extensive drawings and maps and samples of the off site work were redundant and cheap. They were the same thing, over and over again, slight variations in sizes of a graphic representation of the feature he was making, made to look similar to a design plan. But they were all the same, very obviously only made to sell. The massive “Christo” sign to the opening shadowed the hundreds of people involved the project. What caught my attention was the black and white photo-documentary that went with the show. I did not really care what Christo had made, it was just another beautiful thing that pales in comparison to any geological phenomenon.
Two things dawned on me. The process of making and the process of finding beauty were two different actions that I want to separate. What I want to make is that community in the black and white photographs, that dialogue, those meetings where group decisions and logistics are made and prepared for implementation. I had been doing that for some time, but it was not art. What I decided I wanted is to bring this community together not to start a business or institution but to find beauty. Making art, to an extent, assumes making beauty. My art work is to separate our creative making from finding the beauty that is already existent in the land; an ideal that Beuys may have encouraged as well.
I had been working with Maggie O’Brien for some time to further our Leave No Trace programming at the college. After last semester’s show, right before I went home for break, I met with her and Larry Vote to talk about the next step. We discussed programming in the Andaman Islands and the Himalayas, working with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and National Outdoor Leadership School. We talked about what the school could do, what we needed to get rolling, who to pull together as a group to lead the project. Finally we talked about Chancellor’s Point. That is how I realized that the work I was doing with LNT was really what I wanted to be doing in art. The influence my art could make would not compare to the scope of this programming, not to mention I love programming.
I started hitting architecture books hard, how to design spaces environmentally, without a footprint, alternative living situations. I needed Chancellor’s Point to be a space where indoors and outdoors is permeable, where insulation was sparse. My art would need a hearth; it would need protection from wind and rain. I wanted us to live there, live in the art, live in the ecosystem, without distinction. I was learning about the failures of institutional architecture, about the failures of modernism, about the “terribly inhuman architecture” that has plagued our communities. Despite all the arguments I had read about all of the terrible things architecture has created, including numbing ambiguity, I could not find a way to design the renovation of Chancellor’s Point where I could say, “this needs to be this way”.
To my elation the text book of a very important class I am enrolled in gave me clarity. The Old Way of Seeing is the text for Peter River’s Post and Beam in an Age Gone Modern museum studies class. This may be the single most important book I have read this year. As I started to learn the trade of 17th century timber-frame construction I read about the plight of the professional architect, about how our homes used to be measured to our bodies and cut to the size of the trees. This was when I learned about vernacular architecture. I found out what I needed at Chancellor’s Point, I needed a classroom that the students would build themselves, I needed a vernacular classroom.
In art I truly found a voice that resonated with my own in this mission during a Curation and Activism conference where a number of artists and curators talked about how their work could accomplish activist goals. Two points stuck with me. Activist artists and artists who work toward similar goals as civil service often have to deny the label as an artist in order to be regarded without its baggage. Some may ask how a pretty thing can help homelessness or the AIDS epidemic. Second, the institutions of art education (or should I say --- education) are inherently limiting for their students creativity. We cannot be as innovative as we could be if we were not operating in a standardized institution that has not changed for generations. But this is not only ---. This is, E.O. Wilson and I believe, the condition of all our academic disciplines. Unitednationsplaza and Night School are two projects by Anton Vidokle who spoke at the conference on these issues. These are "exhibitions as school", temporary institutions for discourse on social progress.
I see my work now along a similar course to the projects of Anton Vidokle and other artists/activists or curator/activists. What I seek to promote with my work is the facilitation of creativity and natural engagement through alternative educational environments that question the nature of institutionalized education.
I make art because art wants me to make. I make art because people want to see what art I make. I don’t make art because I don’t want to sell people beauty. I don’t make art because I don’t want to have the baggage of being an artist. I want to be a farmer of farms because on a farm it doesn’t matter if we are artists or biologists. We will all be creative and we will all find beauty.
Bibliography
Borer, Alain 1997 The essential Joseph Beuys; edited by Lothar Schirmer. Cambridge, Mass : MIT Press
Hale, Jonathan. 1994. The old way of seeing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Meredith, M., Meredith, M., Fenster, D., & Nordstrom, D. 2006. Alternate ending 1 The glimmering noise. [Baltimore, Md.]: YouWorkForThem, LLC.
Smithson, Robert 1996 Robert Smithson, the collected writings; edited by Jack Flam. published Berkeley : University of California Press
Vidokle, Anton 2007 Night School The new museum. http://museumashub.org/node/48
Vidokle, Anton 2009 Unitednationsplaza Introduction http://www.unitednationsplaza.org/
Wilson Edward O. 1998 Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge Random House NY