a working writer's compromise?

in order to give myself something to do (and to avoid post-graduation panic), i decided to apply for and take on a job as a korean "cultural reporter," specializing in art exhibitions. the work is fairly lightweight: around two articles a month, posted on a special section of the organization's website.
here's the catch(?), though. the organization is actually funded by the korean government, created to spread knowledge about korean culture in new york city. they organize a variety of events every month--celebrating children's day, traditional dance performances, film screenings, and art exhibitions in their own gallery space.
my first assignment? writing about their current exhibition.
if my two years at the mfa art criticism and writing program taught me anything, one thing  i took away from it is to see and think about art in a critical manner. of course, this doesn't mean i have to have a problem about everything, but rather to see and think very carefully, to take my time, to be attentive. seeing and thinking about art is a balancing act of allowing the work to appear, while also taking note of the inevitable appearance of my own cognitive associations. writing about art is another difficult process; i must stay respectful to my experience with the art (what it did to me, so to speak), what i believe the work to be doing vs. (or in conversation with) what i think the artist may have intended, and enact all of the above in what i deem an appropriate combination of all of the above.
so now, working for an organization with a clear agenda (shit-talking about korean culture is no-go, i assume), i find myself beginning this first assignment in a conflicted position. my first thought after viewing and thinking about the show: this thing is the worst show i've ever seen in my life.
everything about it is wrong. it is supposed to be part of an ongoing archival project, so material such as letters, sketches, posters are expected. but the resulting presentation appears more like salvaged garbage from a hoarder's den that had been haphazardly picked out without much consideration and thrown onto the wall. clearly they wanted to fit as much as possible in their small space, and most walls have the lazy clumped-together labels for the work--the kind that has outlines of the mounted work with numbers, then a list of titles and names underneath. this can be alright, but a bit tiring when a single wall contains about 20 different things, all about the same size. a good portion of them are also ripped out pages of mediocre articles, most in korean.
other things:
the wall text is all crooked,
there is an exhausting number of spelling mistakes and missing punctuation marks,
very few of the work in each time period (their "themes," beginning with the 1950s) had been actually created during that time, but in the 1980s or 1990s, some as late as 2009,
arbitrary use of the label "korean-american" (the hyphen, i also have a problem with) without defining what this is (as far as i know, only one artist was actually a u.s. citizen, and some did not even stick around for very long but returned to korea after a few years),
eurocentrically contextualizing text explaining each "theme" that not only has nothing to do with the actual work displayed, but also reduces the work of these poor artists to being "results" of their influence by american movements that were alive when they first entered the states.
and the list goes on.

so then how do i maintain my integrity as a writer? the only answer seems right now to be bullshitting: emphasizing some great aspect of the show that will take me a good deal of effort to find. or, just going the very dry, reporting route: this, this, and this are here. the end.
i have a feeling i'm going to produce some really shitty writing for this job.

crumbling atlas

when i finally emerge from a winter-long sleep, i usually find it very difficult to leave the house "just because" the weather is nice--there must be a destination containing some element that is "useful" or "relevant" or conducive to "productivity." so i make extensive plans (which i rarely adhere to, except maybe a very small fraction of it). the other day, i decided to look up the public art installations along the high line at chelsea, and used it as an excuse to enjoy the sun. of course, i didn't bring with me the exact locations of anything, nor did i remember whose art was there. nevertheless, i passed by a few that i didn't find interesting enough to stop me in my tracks. then, there it was: el anatsui's broken bridge ii, 2012.
it probably helped that it was large. spanning 37 by 157 feet, it is supposedly the largest piece made by the artist. anatsui is a nigeria-based artist, born in ghana in 1944. he is known for making large-scale work with recycled materials. the work in question is made of mirrors and tin that cover maybe the entire top half of the building on which it has been installed.

from afar, the work resembles a blown-up section of a map. one can discern three groupings of mirrored surfaces in the midst of densely packed sheets of rusted tin. the sleek mirror reflects the clear blue sky, while the uneven surface of perforated tin evokes a rough terrain. the young trees lining the path make it difficult to get a clear view of the entire work, but through the spring green and blossoming pink, a peak here and there provides a closer look. hiding behind the colorful barricade hovers the massive atlas, holding steadfast to the top of the building, its pieces crumbling away toward the bottom.
the sheets are surprisingly thin, in contrast to the heaviness that their deep, earthy brown color conveys. the strips criss-crossing the two canals in the center and right sway with the riverside wind at times. yet the sheets exude a sense of mortal obstinacy: some parts wrinkle like old leather or aging skin, some are raised like stubborn scabs. the rows of rectangular sheets waver between an unsettling close-up of elephant hide to red brick tiles of a roof, lining the top of a house some place warm, perhaps.

on the other hand, the panels of mirror (obviously) appear strikingly sleek and industrial, not unlike the facades of other newly erected buildings in the neighborhood. yet, not entirely--it avoids the monotony of a clear-cut factory look through its slightly uneven surface. the various (and very faint) dips and rises give the impression of a living body of water, an occasional chelsea breeze rippling across it. the mirrors coexist with the surrounding skin-earth--at times contesting it in vehement contrast, at others in harmony like a placid lake cradled by its surrounding landscape.

on a clear day, the mirrored panels--especially those on the far left, unobstructed by bending strips of tin--provide an oasis in a bustling city, in the busy traffic of the springtime high line. but the waters will reflect a gray sky on an overcast day. and during the night, they, with the cracking rust, be swallowed up by the indiscriminately indifferent darkness. here, human products--hand-made and industrial--bend to the natural cycles of time. how long will they last? probably, as long as our pride allows them.

installation on view until summer 2013
chelsea high line (along 10th ave), between 21st and 22nd streets

marxist snippet of thesis: legitimization of participation

"gangnam style" is such old news, but since psy is still around in the media with his new song, "gentleman," i suppose my interest in the first is still relevant.

one of the issues that i spend a length of time discussing in my thesis are the terms of access into "stardom."

global success = success in the "west" = success/acceptance by american hollywood

these are the eurocentric standards of the global music industry, the u.s. or u.k. billboard charts being THE goal, whereas other regional (korean, mexican, polish) billboard charts are deemed inferior.
both hollywood and those outside of it perpetuate these standards.
occidentalism exhibit A: the korean pop industry. poorly mimicked american pop from decades prior, selling plastic sex objects moving mechanically in sync, etc, etc.

how does one gain acceptance by an industry run by white men?

1. conformity to their ideas of accepted representation.
for asian men, this usually means a self-deprecating asexual clown, a.k.a. not sexy or attractive or serious whatsoever, since any of those would pose as a threat to the careful set up of brad pitt being the hot guy.

2. legitimization by insiders.
in hollywood at large, this means, again, white men, or powerful ladies (by pop cultural standards), or powerful rappers. with psy, this has been done through tweets by scooter braun (justin bieber's manager), t-pain, britney spears, etc.
even just the acknowledgment of his existence by western media grants him this legitimacy, such as psy's appearances on the ellen degeneres show, cnn, chelsea lately, etc.
hip-hop is different, but similar. it's not run by white men, but if you're asian, you still have to prove your own worth. same with women.
in the case of hip-hop, psy was not granted legitimacy.

here is an excerpt on this section about legitimate participation (particularly in hip-hop):

Psy’s physical appearance may not conform to the reductively homogenous standard of beauty applied to Korean pop artists, but his American education—in part at a musical institution—must have contributed to his acceptance by his record label and mainstream audiences. Similarly telling is the greater magnitude of respect he has earned from Koreans after having “made it” on a “global scale” with his concerts with Madonna and in Times Square during New Year’s Eve. Innumerable blog posts congratulated Psy for the song’s success and hosts of Psy’s Korean television appearances frequently referred to Psy as a “world star” with a mix of reverence and envy. Various Korean media reports have also lauded “Gangnam Style” for drawing greater interest to the nation and its culture. This is the reproduction and perpetuation of Eurocentrism through consent on a global scale. If we accept Louis Althusser’s words that “ideology hails or interpellates individuals as subjects,” the construction of the subject becomes complete—and the ideology successfully reproduced—when the individual—the Asian Other—affirms mutual participation. Koreans adhere to standards that always deem them second best, yet wonder why their music fails to receive attention from Western audiences.

The international embrace of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” in part legitimatizes the “universality” of Hollywood’s standards, as exemplified by its musical composition: remove the Korean lyrics, and it is nearly indistinguishable from popular European or American electro-hip-hop (think LMFAO, whose music in the past years had been a standard in nightclubs). Yet Psy’s “Gangnam Style” has thwarted these measured filters of Korean marketers and gained popularity through YouTube, a quasi-democratic, ostensibly unmediated platform.

However, YouTube, too, operates on social and technological algorithms: the choices its users make depend on the patterns of their previous viewing history (accepting or rejecting YouTube’s “recommendations”), as well as their larger socio-political and cultural contexts. The notion that Psy’s music video for “Gangnam Style” could have been viewed by any YouTube user anywhere in the world is merely a theoretical one. The video circulated mostly among Korean (and Korean American, Korean Australian, etc.) users upon its release. It spread rapidly outside of this circle only once it somehow came to the attention of, then was shared by, an American celebrity on Twitter. It is reported that rapper T-Pain was the first Western celebrity to share the video with the comment, “words cannot describe how amazing this video is.” This was followed by Justin Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, who asked “HOW DID I NOT SIGN THIS GUY!?!??!” as well as Katy Perry and Britney Spears, who each have more than 23 million followers. These celebrities’ Tweets dispersed the video to millions of users, legitimizing it as worthy of attention.

Western media’s treatment of Psy’s global rise follows a predictable Cinderella story arc: before having been “discovered” by an American audience, he was a non-entity, his decade-long career and success in Korea of little importance. This is the “muteness imposed on the Orient as object” of which Said speaks: “What was neither observed by Europe nor documented by it was therefore ‘lost’ until, at some later date, it too could be incorporated by the new sciences of anthropology, political economics, and linguistics.” This, of course, is not restricted to Psy or those outside of the American domestic sphere. Only once Hollywood—as reigning ideological producer—names it does any object assume form.

Hip-hop began as a subcultural movement, giving voice to a narrative outside of the dominant language of mainstream American pop culture (until it was inevitably swallowed up by that same mainstream). Especially during the height of hip-hop’s popularity in the 1990s, many excluded from the dominant culture gravitated toward the perceived freedom of expressive possibilities provided by this alternative platform. Hip-hop presents itself as a more democratic culture, with acceptance based on pure merit. Freestyle rap battles, an essential element of hip-hop, serve as the tests: individuals compete with one another before an audience, testing their verbal prowess through improvisation. The winner gains respect and acceptance through the crowd’s consensus.

Yet hip-hop erects a parallel elitism. As an alternative culture, the genre frequently sets itself in opposition to white mainstream culture. The oppositional tendencies of the movement become distorted in some contexts as a black-white dichotomy. Blackness becomes the center of hip-hop’s power structure.

            The Chinese American rapper Jin gained initial acceptance into mainstream hip-hop through on his own merit. Jin appeared before a national audience in 2002, when he won the “Freestyle Fridays” rap battles on BET’s show 106 & Park for seven weeks in a row. His consecutive wins demonstrated his worthiness before the hip-hop community, and, in 2004, he became the first Asian rapper to release a solo album under a major record label in the United States. The Rest is History reached its peak at spot number twelve on the U.S. Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart.

In order to market Jin to a wider mainstream audience, Ruff Ryders, his record label, needed to legitimize the Asian presence in a culture dominated by African Americans and Hispanics. Jin went through typical legitimatizing routines, appearing in other Ruff Ryders videos while fellow artists appeared in his. And then he went further, repeatedly addressing his own Asianness in his songs as a preemptive tactic (he released “Learn Chinese” as his first single) and emphasizing his affiliation with the highly regarded Ruff Ryders by releasing a song explicitly titled “I’m a Ruff Ryder.”

            Jin paved the way for other Asian rappers to enter the national scene, but even the more recent success of Far East Movement in 2010 was met with mixed attitudes about the group’s Asianness. All of its members always wore sunglasses at the beginning of their mainstream debut—in their music videos, live performances, and other media appearances. Some fans’ glimpsing the eyes behind the glasses offered predictably shocked responses—“They’re Asian?!” Many Asian followers criticized the sunglasses as a device to “hide their eyes because they’re ashamed [of their race],” which some admitted may be a disadvantage to the group’s career. Far East Movement’s more mainstream pop electro-club sounds, however, kept at bay protective antagonisms from hip-hop’s traditionalists.

Psy’s “Gangnam Style”—with similar mainstream dance sounds—followed the immense popularity of Far East Movement’s single, “Like a G6.” By the time Psy’s video appeared, it was a little less strange to see an Asian music entertainer who did not explicitly formulate his American presence around his Asianness. But remember that Psy’s visual humor was the driver, not the musicality of the sounds. If being granted visibility in Hollywood requires participation on its terms, Psy’s access indicates that the manner in which the video portrays Psy agrees (at least to some degree) with an image of an Asian man deemed acceptable by Hollywood.

spring = rebirth, or something..

long time no write.
for the past few months (the entire winter) i have been in hibernation, namely with a very specific occupation: my thesis.
i have not seen much "real art" in a very long time, but instead have steeped myself in various seemingly trivial media: twitter feeds, celebrity news and interviews, youtube videos.
all regarding psy's "gangnam style."
yes, i am supposedly an art critic, and i wrote my thesis about psy.

here is a little q&a that a thesis seminar leader requested from each graduate for our introductions at the thesis presentations:

1. THESIS PAPER TITLE

2. QUESTION IT ASKS/SEEKS TO ANSWER (THESIS)

3. HOW DID YOU BECOME INTERESTED IN THE TOPIC

4. WHAT IS A HIGHLIGHT FROM YOUR TIME AT SVA (PERSONAL OR COURSEWORK RELATED BOTH FINE!)

5. IS THIS THESIS SUBJECT MATTER INDICATIVE OF YOUR OTHER CRITICAL INTERESTS/ AND WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ARE A FEW OTHER CRITICAL TERRITORIES YOU'RE INTERESTED IN?

my answers:

1. Investigating the "Gangnam Style" Phenomenon: Global Eurocentrism, Asian Masculinity, and Psy

2. How is it that, despite attempts by Korean pop marketers to break through to the Western market, Psy was able to gain such a scale of international recognition? Does he subvert the existing order or reproduce it?

Through YouTube, Psy's "Gangnam Style" seemed to have bypassed the usual filters of K-pop marketing and Hollywood access, but ultimately still required legitimization and conformity to accepted representations of the Asian male in American media. The visual nature of the source of popularity in the so-called West motivated me to look at the video from an art critical perspective--I found that although the video does present him as a self-deprecating, safe figure, it contains elements of audience identification (familiar to an American/Western audience) and thus does not allow Psy to be a completely strange laughing stock.

3. I have been a personal fan of Psy since his debut in 2001, so I started watching interviews, following the "Gangnam Style" news as soon as it started in 2012. Increasingly, I noticed in his Western TV appearances (American, Australian, etc.) that his interviewers treated him like he appeared out of nowhere, like a loser who just randomly posted something on YouTube (like Justin Bieber) and became famous through that. I felt a sense of injustice regarding the larger scheme of how this global hegemony of Hollywood works. Psy has had a successful career in Korea for over a decade, respected by Koreans as the king of concerts. I wanted to examine what particular aspects of the video feed the Eurocentric agenda and whether it presents possibilities for subverting that agenda as well as the similarly distorted criteria that the K-pop industry imposes on its marketing tactics for the American market. (To K-pop marketers, "Western" is basically synonymous with "American.")

4. When I realized that I suddenly lost all my baby fat. (Around when the very first semester was ending, to be exact)

5. Yes, I am generally very interested in examining images and aesthetic production in their larger political contexts. "Fine art," I have long accepted as inevitably belonging to a set of asymmetrical power relations, and I believe many will not dispute that, but I find it often more pressing to address image production in popular media, let's say, because they are dispersed more widely for consumption, and many accept them without thought. An image does not have to be specifically labeled as "propaganda" to be imbued with interest and a specific agenda. Everything that is "set out into the world" contains an agenda. I am interested in whose agendas these are, what they consist of, how they are distributed, and why/what purposes they serve.

i will post a peak, or perhaps summary, of the thesis at a later time as i prepare my presentation.

needless to say, i got a lot of shit for investing my entire winter in psy, while i'm sure others writing about "actual art" received very little antagonism. i still stand by my choice, and the process has been immensely rewarding, though disheartening in terms of the representation of asian masculinity in american media.

more to come.

trivialities

some thoughts on keeping a journal:

I have kept a journal ever since I was seven. With very few exceptions, I have written in it everyday, even if it is just one sentence. I go through a ton of pens and paper; half of my closet is densely packed with remnants of these daily scribbles. In the past, when I finished a notebook, I would sometimes hesitate before adding it to my colossal collection—Do I really want to add another book of trivialities to take up even more space?—then remember how fond I am of my colorfully illustrated volumes from my childhood and my newest one would be spared.

Once every year or so, I wipe the dust from their covers and look through them. The older, the better: writings grounded too close to my present are not as interesting as the testimonies of an existence that I have lost long ago. I find patterns, an aspect of the whole that I could not see in the moment. From seven until nine, they were mostly sticky images pressed onto paper with cray-pas that would still cling to my twenty-five-year-old fingers; the text was mostly an explanatory accompaniment. From ten to fourteen, words slowly start to take over most of the page and the images come as an afterthought at the end of each entry. Age twelve also marks a shift from writing entirely in Korean to entirely in English. By age fifteen, images disappear altogether, but there still must have been some interest in the journal as something visual, as I would often use ink in various colors (or maybe it was just trendy to use brightly colored ink at the time). From age sixteen to seventeen, images reappear briefly, but as “ideas” supplementing my angry manifestos. From eighteen on, only black ink, all text, mostly legible and neat handwriting, coherent and full sentences. There is also a shift back to writing in Korean, with occasional English words or phrases.

I always wonder what the trajectory would have been like if I had not moved to States. Would I have so readily and viciously cast out images from my daily meditations? Regardless of the fact that it was infinitely uncomfortable to convey my thoughts in English, once I came here, I insisted upon writing all my entries in that broken grammar and consistently incorrect spellings. My obsession with mastering those cruel and foreign words deemed all else as secondary. In the beginning, the image afterthoughts were a treat after a grueling one-hour of writing three sentences—drawing felt free without the constraints of grammatical and syntactical rules—but I eventually seemed to have found these treats a luxury I could no longer afford; a sense of dire urgency took over when kids continually teased me at school and I could still not speak back.

Voluntary silence can be empowering, but an involuntary one scars for life. I imagine it must feel something like a singer suddenly losing her voice from an accident. The developed consciousness is there but speech is no where up to that level. Thus my journal became both the training and battle grounds with language. Rather than that of negotiation, the relationship has long been my attempts to conquer it, subordinate it, thrust it in the position at my mercy. This is one reason why anger so permeates my language; it has given me power, but only after so much pain and sacrifice.

Now I call my journal writing “meditations.” Though it always has been both, to some degree, it is no longer a tense site of struggle but a calm place of refuge from all outside noises. It is a place where I can finally hear and feel myself. Call it a present inwardness, to modify Marilynne Robinson’s term. When my main battle was with language, I did not notice a significant disparity between the life as I lived it daily and the times of reflection while writing, as life was the writing, the language. But as I grew older, I found my journal a necessity, a means by which I could confirm my own existence. Otherwise, I still feel, I would become swallowed up by the world, both by those of the physical and cyber spaces.

Navigating the physical space of New York City, to say the least, can be overwhelming. Every sound, sight, smell, feeling competes for my attention: too much to hear, see, smell, feel at once, but I try. I try to take it all in patiently, one at a time, but most times, it requires an incredible proficiency at multitasking.

Hence all the ears plugged into a device. Music isolates a person into a single sensory experience, or, at least, foregrounds all the others. Music is the bubble, the refuge from the aggressive excess of what happens outside. When we turn up the music, we choose what assaults our ears. I bitterly laugh when I think about the popular media reports in the early 2000s of studies on the dangers of loud music on headsets and psychological consequences of creating this bubble. Because mp3 players were only the smallest fraction of a much larger phenomenon that has, over the years, grown monstrously out of control at an alarmingly accelerated rate.

When this single-channel sensory refuge expands into a double or even triple—that is, when the device provides not only music but visual and other information—the space shifts from acting as the cozy, dark corner of a closet to a fully outfitted bomb shelter. Smartphones indicate this expansion of alternative space: not only can we shut off the sensory surplus around us through music, but browse through pictures, read news articles, play games, communicate via social media networks, and so on. Mobile access to the internet is the ultimate expansion of this previously bounded refuge into infinity. We can never exhaust the possibilities of activity in cyber space: there always exists another universe, another galaxy that we have left untouched but we know exists.

It is so easy to get lost in the virtual world, especially by leaving the body behind. I associate presentness with my body; I need to see, hear, smell, touch, taste, to know I am still here. I sometimes get the impression that words on the internet are like floating, disembodied ideas. When I see my hand moving over my journal, I know my words come from me. It is my voice, with my handwriting, which, otherwise, a digital device would convert to “Arial” or “Times New Roman.” This daily writing is my way of fetching my words back to myself as a physical being; no one else but I, in this time and space, could have produced them. I need this solitude, the brief moment of present inwardness. Only then do I feel safe from external sensory assault while I reclaim my receding body from cyber space, and can remind myself how much I love and hate the language that now confirms my existence.  

ivory tower

a heavily academic paper which i thought i messed up but for which i received fairly decent feedback.

Sublime Tactics and Political Domination:

the Radicalism of Schiller’s Education as Emancipation

It is impossible to speak of the sublime without a discussion of politics: that is, the power relations between the perceiver and perceived. Immanuel Kant describes the sublime as the feeling invoked within us when we look upon something that is “large beyond all comparison” and that gives our eyes the illusion of perceiving the idea of infinity (Kant 103). By likening this feeling to one felt by the Christian god, Edmund Burke describes its effect in similar terms: “whilst we contemplate so vast an object […] and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him” (Burke 68). The object of the sublime is awe-inspiring and terrible precisely because our sense cannot possibly grasp it all at once; before it we also strongly apprehend the inadequacy of our sensibilities and imagination. In other words, we feel that we are at the mercy of the object that overwhelms us with its vastness.

Longinus, in possibly the first extensive exposition on the topic, devotes his work to the analysis and application of these mechanisms in practical speech—specifically, in political oration. The author’s primary interest in the sublime is its potential to exert power over the listener. Among the various other stylistic techniques that the author considers, what he calls phantasia, or visualization, is an especially potent weapon. This is because this particular technique specifically targets is the imagination; “when combined with factual arguments,” Longinus writes, “it not only convinces the audience, it positively masters them” (Longinus 223). Misleading them and concealing all these devices is key to this mastery: the author punctuates his discussion of the different tools and methodologies with frequent reminders to prevent the audience from becoming aware of their use, as knowledge would disperse the illusion (Longinus 231). Indeed, Kant condemns oratory precisely because of its basis on deceitful manipulation. He calls it “the art of using people’s weaknesses for one’s own aims” and that it “is unworthy of any respect whatsoever” (Kant 198).

For Burke, obscurity plays a significant role in the feeling of sublime. He likens the source of fear and terror to that of darkness and tales of ghosts and goblins. We fear uncertainty, what we cannot apprehend in its completeness while also “[i]t is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions” (Burke 61). It is from this double effect of fear and respect that the sublime derives much of its power to dominate us.

In this equation, then, the other side of fearful ignorance is omniscience. If the object of the sublime is not a natural phenomenon but a person, the situation becomes a dominant-subservient relationship that often results in a systematized political economy. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punishment, 1975, argues that Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon functions on this political relationship between knowing and unknowing. The architectural design of this prison structure places a single surveillance tower surrounded by a circle of individual cells. The person in this tower—protected from gaze by Venetian blinds and angular wall—receives an unobstructed view into the activities of every inmate, while the inmates, on the other hand, are denied any view into the interior of the tower, let alone each other’s cells. Foucault writes that “Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable” (Foucault). The only knowledge that the prisoners have is the fact of their being watched; they know nothing about the identity of the watcher or whether the watcher is even inside the tower. The inmate “is seen, but does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject of communication” (Foucault). This partial knowledge is the ingenious aspect of Bentham’s creation: only a glimpse and denial serves to maintain control on a psychological level.

In natural occurrences of the sublime, there is a second part to the initial feeling of subservience: the feeling of the imagination’s inadequacy is quickly succeeded by an affirmation of our power of reason. Kant describes the two-step process as a kind of sacrifice in the name of morality, the object of humanity’s perpetual ambition toward a higher purpose. Thus, the sublime is a negative pleasure: only after we feel that “the imagination […] is depriving itself of its freedom” do we receive the affirmation of our “supersensible power” which surpasses that of anything in nature (Kant 129, 131). The experience is more rewarding because of the deprivation, as it is “one that serves our inner freedom” by revealing our moral potential (Kant 131).

When this second part—the reward that “expands the soul”—is removed, only deprivation remains, and the sublime becomes exploitative power (Kant 135). In his analytical, Kant inserts a brief critique of the government and religion for doing precisely this:

That is also why governments have gladly permitted religion to be amply furnished with such accessories: they were trying to relieve every subject of the trouble, yet also of the ability, to expand his soul’s forces beyond the barriers that one can choose to set for him so as to reduce him to mere passivity and so make him more pliable (Kant 135).

This gesture disciplines the masses to make them more manageable. In a sense, it is the containment of a multitude into finitude, the opposite of an untamable sublime. Friedrich Schiller, too, criticizes this reductive strategy of state control: “Compelled to disburden itself of the diversity of its citizens by means of classification, and to receive humanity only at second hand, by representation, the governing section finally loses sight of it completely” (Schiller 41). Like so many inmates in Bentham’s Panopticon (number 42, number 43, number 44...), the demystified and generalized citizens become interchangeable parts under a few that hold the knowledge and power of the sublime’s full spectrum.

The key to reclaiming power and freedom, then, lies in a reinsertion of mystery, chaos, and complexity. Since its beginnings, modern science as well as philosophy seem to have acted from a vengeance, a vehement mission to strip all things of their obscurity to lay them bare under the glaring light of rationality. Condemned and openly scorned are ideas of the sacred, spiritual, and subjectivity. Certainly, demystification soothes anxieties resulting from uncertainty, but it is questionable whether we are happier human beings in our comfort of supposed knowledge, as the pinnacle of this hierarchy—that is, reason over sense—seem only to be a privilege of a small minority.

Schiller, in On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795, argues that happiness comes with freedom, and these in turn are not frivolities, but absolute necessities for the betterment of society. He blames the hierarchy of reason over sensibility—often championed in the name of progress—as the source of the degenerate and selfish state that he sees in his contemporary world. Forcefully imposing order onto citizens only has a limited influence. Instead of a hierarchy, he calls for a balance of these two apparent dichotomies, that is the only way that could produce a perfect and complete being.

An aesthetic education—in contrast to a rational-centric education dominant during his time of writing as well as for us today—cultivates both aspects of a human being and thus emancipates both. The suppression of either, that is, “[p]artiality in the exercise of powers […] inevitably leads the individual into error, but the race to truth” (Schiller 44). Though generally regarded as two conflicting poles, their penchant for either extreme make Christianity and philosophy guilty of the same crime: “The old principles will remain, but their will wear the dress of the century, and philosophy will lend its name to an oppression which was formerly authorized by the Church” (Schiller 47). Choosing either or will always keep people in chains, merely bearing different names. The problem, then, must be addressed on the fundamental level, that is, education.

Freedom from the oppression of either can only be achieved through beauty and art. Thus through this solution, the figure of the artist—or genius, according to Kant—and the very process of artistic creation emerge as emancipators. To Kant, the creative process empowers the maker through its freedom:

the imagination ([in its role] as a productive cognitive power) is very mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it. […] We may even restructure experience […]. In this process we feel our freedom from the law of association […]; for although it is under that law that nature lends us material, yet we can process that material into something quite different, namely, into something that surpasses nature (Kant 182).

In other words, the process not only allows us to feel our own freedom in the moment, but also opens up possibilities of freedom in the future by restructuring experience into something new, untethered by the constraints of our given structure of reality. Here, Kant forms the modern conception of the mysteriously gifted artist, with originality—creation of the new—as “the foremost property” that cannot be learned, nor passed directly onto others because “he himself does not know” (Kant 175, 177). The artist/genius, veiled in mystery, assumes a god-like power, that can only wield its fullest potential through proper training and education. Schiller essentially calls for an education that will shape every human being into an artist, who can take full advantage of his/her potentials to free themselves and the whole of society: “Beyond question Man carries the potentiality for divinity within himself; the path to divinity, if we may call a path what never reaches its goal, is open to him in his senses” (Schiller 63).

Of course, this power, too, has potential to abuse and manipulate. However, what is so pertinent about Schiller’s educational proposition is that such a balanced education will breed noble human beings. To successful results of this education, abuse of power to dominate others would not be desirable; in fact, it would be repulsive to do so. Since a noble disposition cannot be taught or imposed, a person must wish him/herself to reach this state. Hence, the aesthetic education would drive each to voluntarily seek a moral life because he/she recognizes it as his/her higher purpose to attain.

Schiller’s proposal has not only the attainment of truth and the freedoms of individual citizens at stake; it is, most importantly, a way to maintain order in society. According to him, happy and harmonious individuals lead to a happy and harmonious society, which essentially must be an egalitarian society. “[S]ince the way to the head must lie through the heart,” only when freedom is granted will an individual wish to act nobly, not merely act out of obligation (Schiller 50). “A noble spirit is not satisfied with being itself free; it must set free everything around it,” and the result becomes a cooperative and productive society (Schiller 111). Freed from constraints and passivity, the individual wills him/herself to activity and order emerges naturally (Schiller 124). In a language that strangely resembles the optimism of early Communist writings in our modern history, Schiller declares that in an aesthetic State, knowledge becomes not just for the few, but the “common property of the whole of human society” (Schiller 139). The power of the sublime, then, returns to Kant’s two-fold definition: from shrinking in fear, we rise again in defiance to meet that power and to surpass it.

Works cited:

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. ed. James T. Boulton. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1968. Print.

Foucault, Michel. "Panopticism." Discipline & Punishment, 1975. Foucault.info. Web. 04 Nov. 2012. <http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism.html>.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub., 1987. Print.

Longinus. On the Sublime. trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe and D. A. Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.

Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. trans. Reginald Snell. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004. Print.

ruins of yesterday/tomorrow

Leonardo Drew at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Sept 6 - Oct. 12, 2012

Here is a man who loves making things. So much so that he created an entire world out of them. And this must be what people mean when they say art has the potential to envision an alternate reality: Leonardo Drew, at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., has paved a window into a strange civilization that bears an uncanny resemblance to our own.

I use the word civilization because his massive constructions (both standing or wall-mounted) manifest undeniable traces of human industry and skill. A quick glance might suggest an impression of an arbitrary assemblage of found material (especially the charred and painted barricade), but a second look definitively rejects this initial impression to one’s embarrassment: his work is the result of such careful and painstaking labor that it appears almost neurotically obsessive. One can imagine Drew’s eyes burning up in pain as he sits in his studio for weeks, months, years, diligently cutting plywood into hundreds of perfectly two-by-two squares or one-inch-long splinters, then placing each piece, anointed with a dash of glue, into their own spot part of one giant, densely packed sculpture. I think of Yayoi Kusama hypnotically carving out circles on her canvases for days, or your grandma sewing away at another one of her quilts.

The installations also exude a kind of ghostly grandeur of ancient ruins. The striking element is the work’s pastness: this extinct community no longer exists, but there is no doubt that they did. One can perceive their mark not only through the pure scale of the remnants (the space of the gallery barely provides adequate room to contemplate the entirety of a given work from a distance), but also through the confident assertion of their power: imposing barricades tower over the viewer, phallic forms raise their manes and roar at the passerby, the intricacy of the work indicate discipline and pride of the maker’s own craft. The viewer navigates the space of the gallery with the fascination of exploring The Natural History Museum and their display of artifacts, perhaps from our own lineage. The wall sculptures’ intrusions into our space excite us like an encounter with the (fake) giant whale or a shark’s head: their presence is awe-inspiring but we constantly affirm that the immobile structures pose no actual threat. We can still regard them from the safety of our own positions.

But it is our imagination that causes the most tension: who were these people and what happened to them? They had a magnificent respect for the natural world—barely altered tree trunks and roots twist and turn out of their fixed spots, the man-made splinter pieces assume pulsating organic forms—yet it was a time after plywood’s invention and the sure signs of industry, such as the bolted pieces constructed from exact measurements (Number 159, 2012 is starkly aluminum). Some wall pieces, made mostly of flat rectangular or square cuts of plywood, read like blueprints of a city to be built or reconstructions of existed sites. In Number 162, 2012, for example, pieces of thick, hand-made paper provide a base for a gridded city bordered by a monstrous black forest; outside of the human habitation lie suggestions of water (smeared blue paint) and hills, along with neat groupings of rusted cotton and solidified mud. The city grid is a tactic employed to maximize space for a large population; yet these people leave untouched the gnarling forest—clawing its way into the viewer’s space—that seems capable of swallowing up the city itself.

Drew’s work is full of such strange juxtapositions: the dichotomies of our contemporary world—nature vs. industry—exist side by side, a condition that is increasingly difficult for us to imagine. In purely formal elements, too: from a distance, his large splinter pieces give the illusion of being plush and even inviting (starfish/flower-like Number 160, 2012), but an examination of the actual materials proves otherwise, not to mention the violently perpendicular eruptions of longer pieces from the wall. We live in an age of the modern globalized city, where nature is clearly marked off (parks, gardens, potted plants) from central human activity. Dichotomies exist almost like a necessity.

But there is another layer of strangeness. This civilization seems to have been built using remnants of a people that have existed prior to it; the materials could have been the discarded or destroyed materials of another begone age. For example, a substantial portion of Number 161, 2012 utilizes visibly broken wood that have not been cut into perfect measurements like many of his other works. Yet this site, too, is what remains as an evidence of its own past, abandoned in middle of construction. At the end of its trajectory into the inner gallery space, the structure seeks the support of a wall while the large beams that might have provided that role lean against another. The result is a double removal of time: we see both a corpse and the ghost that haunted it. But that ghost—could it have been from somewhere in our time? The attempt to assign Drew’s people to a specific point in our known history consistently fails us; ultimately, we only end up in exhaustion after fruitlessly spinning around and around, chasing our own tails.

But there is a way to accept this world: by rejecting a linear history. Drew allows us to escape the rigid structure of cause and effect—where we know all that’s been said and done—into a floating concept of time, where anything could be said and done, and perhaps has been already.