Whitney Biennale -- my "professional" opinion

The curators of this year's Whitney Biennale have strained for political relevance...for this, the show has been praised and criticized. Richard Serra's image "Stop Bush" (left), which he released into the public domain (during the 2004 election season) is one of the most succinct expressions of a sense of outrage -- and included in this year's Biennale. But art, as Hegel pointed out years ago -- I know it's unpopular to quote him, but Andrew McNamara reminded us of this -- art falls short of the mark.

(Years ago, I worked as an art critic, but found that without being independently wealthy, it was difficult to make ends meet without being an art ho' which is a fine profession, just one that I was not really prepared to embrace).

Another way of saying this is that art's formal tensions and contradications as well as its highly mediated status as both aesthetic and empirical object make it difficult for it to address "the event" head on -- as many of the artists in the Biennale attempt to do in our iniquitous times. So in fact, the more direclty head on a work tries to meet its "target," the more it falls tragically short of its mark.

There is something more pernicious going on at work in this year's Biennale however. The "Peace Tower" at the entrance of the museum, for instance looked like an all inclusive, hippie era bricolage of artists' collaborating to make a Woodstock like woven tower of protest under which meals were occasionally served as a part of Rikrit's contribution. The "collaboration" betrayed the scenester content of its international jet set contributors, making an intervention that seemed -- well all too facile in its well-heeled demands for Peace Now.

The work was incredibly varied in quality and effect: my favorite piece, full disclosure here -- Liz is my friend of many years was Liz Larner's "Red White and Blue" and sculpture that refers to explosion and the hand made at the same time -- in the context of a color scheme that has indicates war-mongering as much as patriotism.

I've been critical elsewhere of one of the curators, Phillipe Vergne's attempts to pander to mass culture and neo-pragmatism at the same time. In this show, one finds certain traces of a desperate attempt to "be relevant" -- which is reminiscent of other projects of his that celebrated Debord's spectacle as what he thought of as an edgy act of provocation.

museum guide

After spending Sunday with my five year old at the Getty Museum, not the villa, the museum, I have to write this anti-museum going guide as a public service.

Museum goers, please forego the audio guide and the guided tour if you want to really have a visual experience. Walk at random through any room, begin anywhere you like. Find an object you like and stand in front of it for five seconds, but no more. Do not stop if you do not want to. Find anything engaging, say something to yourself about it that might be of interest and then read the artist's name, date of production and other signage.

If you're like Leo, you'll like the Courbet paintings of a hunter and deer dying in the snow. That's fine. Do not, whatever you do, mill about in a large group of people like yourself, waiting to be prompted to contemplate the next significant work.

Leave whenever you like. Have a coffee and then returrn with eyes refreshed. Be respectful, but be impious. It's art for god's sake!

The New Foreign Aid

The Los Angeles Times has been running an extraordinary series of articles on foreign remittances, which is the most substantial amount of foreign aid pouring into developing countries. These are the dollars that are sent home every month by lettuce harvesters, nannies, hotel workers, etc.

This flow of money secreted by hard working immigrant relatives keeps the impoverished families in the home country fed, clothed and occasionally sends them to school as well as university, and even starts up cottage industries.

The LA Times has done an important piece of journalism here -- responding to the immigration reform proposals in Congress right now that would criminalize many of these people in the United States.

My parents did a some foreign remittance aid as I was growing up -- sending money to cash strapped family in Taiwan and then later to the PRC, but my father was no longer working class -- he was gainfully employed by the time I came to the States at the United Nationa.-- Taiwan quickly emerged from the developing country category -- transitting from an agriculturally based country to an industrial. Today, it is filled with foreign workers from the Phillipines, Vietnam and the PRC, who are often treated pitilessly by their Taiwanese employers.

Everyone has a dream, some of the transformatory powers of botox injections, others of sending their siblings to school.

the borderline personality disorder as an allegory of our times

So much has been made about the borderline personality disorder, that I just want to contain it and call it in "extreme hysteria" in the old school nosography, but more rigorously, it should just be called an allegory of intersubjectivity in our late capitalist, hyperconsumerist, tightly, but badly administered world. On the "borderline" between psychosis and neurosis, these folks are everywhere, and so are their protestations! I find them very powerful, that is, in their ability to suck up all my powers of reason and faculty for outrage -- putting me on the borderline as well -- between despair and cynicism.

Here are various things I have heard from psychiatrists and some psychoanalysts about the borderline personality:

1. They are immediately divisive in any group -- dividing people into virulent enemies or avid supporters.
2. They are always the victim of vast conspiracies to undermine their credibility, authority and pleasures.
3. They never, ever are responsible for their own situations. Accountability is designed to persecute them.
4. They are never recognized enough, their efforts always go unrecognized, their pain and suffering have no comparison.
5. Other people have bad intentions.


OK, I know that this is a very, very ad hoc list. There are many more technical ways of describing this disorder, but let's just stop here for now because I see it getting of control already.

I'm The Decider

I'm The Decider is awesome! Check it out.

He's the decider...

What do the Eiffel Tower and the OC have in common?

The first shaped my teenage fantasies of a Utopia freedom, creativity and sexual pleasure. The second, the television show shapes the fantasies of teenage Utopia for our sixteen year old houseguest from a small town in Northern Europe.

Just as no one could have convinced me that Paris was filled with conservative Catholic families and Mao-idolizing poseurs, no one could convince our houseguest that the OC was not heaven on earth. Anything labelled Newport Beach, even the street sign was extra special to her. And she asserted the indestructibility of her fantasy to me by demonstrating that she though Laguna superior to Venice, Newport to Irvine, that she had already internalized the financial pecking order of the Orange Coast.

I finally realized that the OC represented effortless resolution of all problems facilitated by the abstraction of lucre, of which she was not lacking, but which was nevertheless, not enough to satisfy all of her shopping desires.

The utility of torture

according to Horkheimer and Adorno has to do with the speeded up assimilation of people into collectives. This is of course, stated from the point of view of the collective and its initiation of torturers. This is why whistle blowers on torture are seen as violators' of an unwritten code that governs the complicity in criminal activity. To treat others like things is to be in solidarity with the total destruction of our capacity for experience.

But as Gabi Schwab mentioned in a recent paper, torture is also the secret that can't be kept -- it unleashes fantasies of omnipotence and perversion on a collective level. To condemn torture is not enough. We have to identify its effects and affects. All the head-shaking and hand-wringing in the world will not change what has happened -- that the distance between people has been radically destroyed, leading to a dangerous fantasy or feeling of absolute invinicibility on the part of US military and mercernaries alike.

Schneier's movie plot contest

For a while now, Bruce Schneier has been writing about our penchant for "movie-plot threats": terrorist fears based on very specific attack scenarios. Terrorists with crop dusters, terrorists exploding baby carriages in subways, terrorists filling school buses with explosives -- these are all movie-plot threats. They're good for scaring people, but it's just silly to build national security policy around them. But if we're going to worry about unlikely attacks, why can't they be exciting and innovative ones? If Americans are going to be scared, shouldn't they be scared of things that are really scary? "Blowing up the Super Bowl" is a movie plot to be sure, but it's not a very good movie.

It is in this spirit he is now announcing the (possibly First) Movie-Plot Threat Contest. Entrants are invited to submit the most unlikely, yet still plausible, terrorist attack scenarios they can come up with. Your goal: cause terror. Make the American people notice. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy. Change the political landscape, or the culture. The more grandiose the goal, the better. Assume an attacker profile on the order of 9/11: twenty to thirty unskilled people, and about $500,000 with which to buy skills, equipment... The judge will be Schneier himself, swayed by popular acclaim in his blog comments section. The prize will be an autographed copy of Beyond Fear. Entries close at the end of the month -- April 30. Terrorism is a real threat, but we're not any safer through security measures that require us to correctly guess what the terrorists are going to do next.

Post your entries, and read the others, here: http://www.schneier.com and read about his Movie-plot threats (and there are hundreds of ideas here:
http://cockeyed.com/citizen/terror/plans/terrorwatch.html)

in the OC, values are a subculture

Interesting WP article about Redefining Property Values in Orange County - but it depresses me how easily it moves over the observation that planned communities here are sold according to what marketers call different "values subcultures."

radio - the illustrated guide

For an Ira Glass fix anytime in your week - This American Life as a comic book!

This Modern World

Greg Saunders at This Modern World expresses a kind of outrage over corporate welfare and greed that I share, but it seems that this is not the kind of issue that galvanizes that famous thing called "public opinion."

Emotions run high over Dubai Ports, but $104 billion in corporate tax breaks that were supposed to repatriate jobs to the US (the second part didn't happen as imagined) doesn't seem capable of setting off any kind of mass outrage in the collective mind against Republicans and their failed tax break policies.

I know the rationale about our collective indifference to corporate malfeasance -- , we're all hoping to be able to take advantage of those tax breaks ourselves one day when we are suddenly transformed into CEO's, but still, I have a really hard time grasping the inability of citizen to react in her own self-interest. Is it because "higher" yearnings for security, nation, the ideal continue to be more affectually compelling?

Ingratitude

is a heavy thing...everyone is guilty of it, and to a certain degree, Nietzsche's greatest and most vivifying exhortation launches modernity as that which is ethically ungrateful to the past. Gratitude has been monopolized by the Judeao-Christian morality of resentment, in which we all police each other for not being thankful enough. Emancipation from feudal forms of subjection and bone-crushing forms of tradition begin with a revolt against gratitude. But then, again, to be ungrateful forever is to be obsessively on guard against the love born of gratitude that is a passion all its own.

Being thankful, truly gratefuly is a terrifying position of powerlessness -- according to Freud, primal feelings of gratitude are confused with love and absolute dependency. According to Melanie Klein the grateful infant soon becomes the aggressive infant who wants to destroy the very thing that overwhelms it with its bounty.

Looking back on that period of confusion and sleepless and hopeless passion after Leo's birth, I think with gratitude about the generosity of those around me, but was unable to sit down to write notes, so sent emails -- and this has led me to the feeling that no mother can really survive alone the first years of a child's life, or if she does, she does so at great risk to herself.

And it was with motherhood that I recovered my own feelings of gratitude against which I had steeled mysef -- but in thinking about gratitude and the way in which it has been institutionalized -- i.e. Thanksgiving, the thank you note, I was wondering aloud in former posts by hyperbolically describing my state of anxiety as a "freak out" about how we can forge a new politics and ethics of gratitude that would not objectify the relation between giver and givee.

missing link

"AT LONG LAST, THE MISSING LINK HAS BEEN FOUND. As reported in the scientific journal Nature last week, fossil remains of a previously unknown fish with four legs have been found in Canada. These tetratods could crawl out of the water to become the first land-dwelling animals. Resembling a crocodile, the creature had the jaw, fins and scales of a fish and the skull, neck, ribs and pectoral fins of the earliest land dwellers. The existence of the fish-like tetrapod, dubbed Tiktaalik roseae, seems to answer the quibbles of creationists, who had cited the lack of such a missing link as disproving Darwin's theories."

The Thank You Note Controversy

Recently, a certain anonymous commentator was riled up by my thank you note controversy and in the comments implicitly accused me of neglecting the suffering of the world for my thank you note freak out, in addition to which anonymous accused me of using my power as a faculty member to extract exonerations for thank you's from my advisees. I wasn't talking about one of my students -- I refrain from referring to graduate students on these pages. If you're looking for references to them, look elsewhere.

The spirit of resentment animates a great deal of on line discussions and trolling in the form of anonymous ad hominem attacks. And finally on this humble blog, we see evidence of this kind of thing -- if you've got a gripe, confront me with it, but sign your name. That's all I ask. So for the present, I am disallowing anonymous comments of the attack dog kind. Be brave, sign your name if you're going to accuse me of abusing my power and ignoring the suffering of the world.

"The gift" which cancels itself out, which demands no thanks was finally the point of my post on the thank you note -- and it is so hard to give that gift. Gifts that demand immediate thanks are not gifts at all -- this is not my idea, but implicit in Derrida's work on the gift and the Judaeo-Christian ethic of giving. That's for you, anonymous.

So go ahead, fire yourself!

Bush Authorized Secrets' Release, Libby Testified. So reports the Washington Post. Need one say more? I just really appreciated the Cold War era meeting between Scooter and his beloved Judith Miller, formerly of the New York Times at the St. Regis Hotel.

I'd like to emphasize as well that Cheney's suspicions that Joe Wilson's trip to Niger was a "junket" organized by his wife makes me wonder about Lynn's and Dick's idea of vacation.

Trip to Niger = Junket ????

I think not.

It will be easier to be green

Today@UCI: Press Releases: news about Bill Tomlinson's database of consumers comments on supermarket products. Bill Tomlinson has set up Greenscanner, a website that allows you to type in a product's UPC number and share information about environmental impact, quality and value. It works like Wikipedia -- so anyone can share -- check it out!

Thank You Notes Freak me out!

Here is a thank you to all the people to whom I have never written a thank you note! Thank You! I never wrote thank you's after Leo was born because I was not raised a WASP -- I never even had a list of presents, and he got a lot of them -- the only one was in my milk-addled head! I have started writing thank you notes -- for Leo's birthdays. To give the little guy an idea of gratitude. But when I get a thank you, I always feel guilty, especially since I think of all the notes I never wrote to all the people who gave me, but especially Leo presents. So belatedly thank you for the chenille baby blankets, the adorable book about Katy the bulldozer, the lovely hooded towels, the rocker, the hanging stuffed animals, the giant bunny, and so much more!

In my family, it is not thinkable to say thank you -- within the family because that means you're creating distance -- even to say "how are you?" to a family member triggers in my mother the sense that I'm trying to distance her (which I am) because family members are one huge undifferentiated black hole of obligation without MEDIATION!!!!!

So learning to say thank you has taken a lot for me. I know that it might be a Chinese thing -- the familial debts are so great that they threaten really to crush especially since there is no adequate repayment -- so let's just kill the creditor!

There have been a few times in my life where I've intervened and some one has acknowledged with gratitude my intervention, but the bigger the "help" the greater the resentment. I realize now though, that I often try to put others in my debt too -- it gives me a secret sense of power. And being in debt, or having to be grateful always seemed to terrifying to me. Like those trophy wives must be maniacs of anxiety. I thought this was a feminist position until I realized that there are those in my family who wonder why a man would ever want to support me, so I have been feeling as if the really RADICAL thing for me to do would be to allow myself to be a kept woman and I could send thank you notes to EVERYONE, instead of being an ingrate.

So thank you!

Ah, Bush -- the anti-intellectual, the regular guy!

The President as Average Joe: as reported by the Washington Post: "As he takes to the road to salvage his presidency, Bush is letting down his guard and playing up his anti-intellectual, regular-guy image."

There is nothing like treating intellectuals with contempt to win the hearts and minds of Americans! Is Bush not the exemplary everyman?!?!

Trashing people who are seen as fundamentally weak already is an interesting tactic -- in Anson Rabinbach's reading of Walter Benjamin, we find that there is a fundamental imperative in Benjamin's conception of Judaism that demanded solidarity with the intellectual. So Bush's anti-intellectualism is merely the powerful evocation of an instrumentalized populism!