Chapter 100: The Pequod, of Nantucket, meets the Samuel Enderby, of London
I saw the Moby Dick exhibit at at the CCA Wattis Institute today. Loved the Rockwell Kent illustrations.
“Shame on you.” Friday morning in the rain. KTVU coverage (with a familiar face).
This video includes a great discussion on the growing privatization of public education with Bob Samuels, president of the UC American Federation of Teachers.
Video from November 17 – a discussion with Laura Nader, professor of social cultural anthropology, Ananya Roy, Professor in the Department of City & Regional Planning, Blanca Misse, UC Berkeley graduate student and organizer, and Michael Cohen, lecturer in American studies and co-chair of the Solidarity Alliance.
snippet of the work at my show last night
I ran across this startup through a mass email from an art acquaintance. The model here is the pledge drive. I tried to wrap my mind around it as being just another type of art patronage but my mind would not wrap. I kept thinking of something my old grad school art professor used to say to students who asked him how to make it in the art world: “Do your work and get a job.”
Painters Painting by Emile de Antonio (available on itunes) played on IFC a couple of weeks ago and I was reminded of how extraordinary it is.
Just came across a new project by the Van Gogh Museum which includes a series of books and a website with all 902 letters from and to Van Gogh – annotated, illustrated and searchable.
Here is the Guardian article.
Here are some notes I took at the panel discussion in Doe Library, UC Berkeley Tuesday afternoon:
Each panel member reacted to Viola’s work followed by general discussion and audience questions.
Greg Niemeyer: opened with a reference to embodiment by holding up a small reddish-brown, cloth-covered first edition book of Pascal writings (1670) and reading a passage about the void between infinity and nothingness. On Viola’s work: focused in time, build up to miracle. Quoting Viola from last night: “A miracle is about forgiveness.” “Artists detoxify things.”
Alva Noë: Says perception is not something in us, it is something we achieve. We can always learn new degrees of awareness/sensation. Describes experiencing a Viola piece for the first time in NY – the idea that sometimes you come across a work of art and you don’t get it. It is closed to you. For him it was revealed in time as he discussed it with the friend who was there with him. The work reveals itself through change in the viewer (transformation) shared in conversation. The purpose of art (and also philosophy) is to provide an opportunity for the process of bringing the world into focus actively – for consciousness. Finally Noe has an issue with a quote from Viola the previous night, “Being alone is the ground zero of being…” Noë says we are never alone. We are always already in a community.
Viola: Video is a modeling of ideas – it is not material. On being alone: he quotes Da Vinci: “If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself…”
Noë: Socratic dialog as transformation. The space of dialogue is essential to working art. Think of art “not as the act of a hero but a consciousness that comes out of a dialogue.”
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