Books
On this page I will give a short comment on the books I have read, and also show which books are still on my ‘to do’ list.
Sept/oct 09
Because the gardening genes kicked in (see blog “Paradise haunts gardens ..”) I decided to re-read “Second Nature – a gardener’s education” written by American writer-cum-gardener Michael Pollan. I got it as a gift from a colleague about 8 years ago. This guy noticed my passion for gardening and we got talking about what rights we humans have to interfere with nature. He used to be a gardener of the laissez faire – laissez aller variety where I positively adore pruning and weeding and making order. Pollan discusses this theme very intelligently, and is a great writer into the bargain. Don’t know yet if the book is pertinent to my research. Maybe it will be, as my labyrinth plans for the outdoors lab will involve interfering with nature. Also: will like to spend some time out of doors, the art theory we get in such great measure needs airing every once and a while.
This lead to a re-reading of Asimov’s ‘The Caves of Steel’, first published as a serial in Galaxy Magazine, October to December 1953. I re-read it because it is such a contrast to ’second nature’. In it, the whole population of Earth never sets foot on the ground at all …… It is set roughly three milennia in the future, a time when hyperspace travel has been discovered and a few worlds relatively close to the Earth have been colonised. These worlds are rich and have low population density, Earth is overpopulated and people have decided to live in ‘caves of steel’: vast city complexes covered by huge metal domes. People never go outside, are even positively shocked by the idea of sunlight, wind, direct contact with the earth. Quote, page 217 (my translation): ” Shall we have a look? His nails worked one of the sides of the cube, and a corner of the Commissar’s office disappeared, then lighted up in a strange three-dimensional scene. The scene was displayed floor to ceiling, appeared to extend outside the walls of the office, and floated in a sort of greyish light of a kind that the City’s electricity companies never delivered. Baley thought, with a shock that was half aversion and half perverse attraction: This must be the dawn they are sometimes talking about.”
I managed to get my hands on “Contemporary Art – from Studio to Situation’ , edited by Claire Doherty. Klaas Hoek advised us to read it, but it seems to be out of print, so I went to the library and they managed to un-earth it somewhere. In the book Claire Doherty collected and edited articles and cases studies that inform on ’situated practices’ that have three key factors in common:
- an emphasis on experience of and in a place;
- a new vocabulary that is relational and takes the human society as its base;
- the roles of artists have become redefined as mediators, creative thinkers and agitatiors.Very interesting case studies, underwriting the ideas of the role of the artist not as an object-maker (’canonical forms’) but as a listener, participator and shaper of events, interacting with both space/place and social structure.
Nov/dec 09
I’m also reading Peter Cochrane’s ‘108 Tips for Time Travellers’, have not finished it yet but it’s good to mention it here. It is a book I can really recommend. Peter Cochrane, head of BT’s famous Research Laboratory, takes today’s technology and projects it into the future. Like Jules Verne did, and Asimov. I like his thought experiments, also he’s very well informed about new technological developments in the fields of computer science and communication technology.
Last – but not least – this month I am working through Mika Hannula’s ‘Politics, Identity and Public Space – critical reflections in and through the practices of contemporary art’. “Making a space into a place” is at the heart of the book. Quote, page 13: “This then is the politics of making things become possible – of changing the parameters of a site and situation that, through a conscious and purposeful act, allows or forces something which until now was neglected or denied to have access to the common agenda and the core of social imagination.” This is how a space becomes a place. It becomes so through artistic activity that makes a – general – place into a - specific – place. I also love his “what is it that we do when we do what we do”.
Get this – I am reading again! The language and topics of the art books may be unfamiliar, but its good, meaty stuff to get my teeth in ………
Jan/feb 10
December and January saw me dipping into play theory. First of all the classical ‘Homo Ludens‘ by dutch historicist Huizinga. His ideas on how play permeates culture have been set down in 1938 but are still very much quoted today. See blog to check my notes on his book. The strange thing was that Huizinga’s book was so much easier to read in the english translation than in the original dutch version – his language is archaic….
Then I discovered Caillois – a french intellectual who took up where Huizinga left of. His book ‘Man, Play and Games‘ dates from 1958 and gives examples of an astounding number of varieties of ‘play’ – and a way to classify them- see blog.
Now I am trying to make this a trio – there is an anthropologist named Sutton-Smith who wrote ‘The Ambiguity of Play. I quote from a review of his book in this blog. Have ordered the book and have started reading it. Later: have finished it. Good thing I’m reading it now (May ‘10), I’m able to fit it in better with the theoretical framework I am establishing. Sutton-Smith (I’d die for a last name like that .. so British, though the guy is an American) fits contemporary play theory into a framework of seven ‘rhetorics’ : Play as Progress, Play as Fate, Play as Power, Play as Identity, Play as the Imaginary, Rhetoric of the Self, Play as Frivolous. A quote from page 6: ”Although most people throughout history have taken for granted their own play, and in some places have not even had a word for it, since about 1800 in Western society, intellectuals of various kinds have talked more or less systematically and more or less scientifically about play, and have discovered that they have immense problems in conceptualizing it. ” His book doesn’t go into the way ‘play’ can be used in the art world, which is a pity for me because he is really good at giving both an overview of an (academic) discipline and critique of it at the same time.
Another important find was Critical Play - Radical Game Design by Mary Flanagan. She does go into the history of ’artistic play’ and has given me a lot of examples of artists using dolls, board games, word play and locative games from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Not great on theory but a wonderful overview of artistic strategies since the 1900’s.
The Radicant by Bourriaud is great on the question of identity – played, constructed, bought, assumed. Radicants are plants that make roots wherever they happen to touch the ground, like ivy. The book deals with questions of nomadism, being an immigrant, the rootless condition of many modern artists. What standards to judge art by if the ‘old’ are exposed as being western-white-male ones. Everyone to be subjected to the same global norms, or is cultural diversity to be taken into account. Whose culture, what diversity? More questions than answers, but very, very interesting. Re-read ‘Relational Aesthetics‘ too. Same subject, slightly different approach.
Feb/may 10
Over Media Theorie – taal, beeld, geluid, gedrag - Arjen Mulder. The book that has had the most impact on me this year. Accessible text, which is a bonus, sense of humor, which is a bonus also. Very interesting ideas, fun speculations. I never really thought about the effects of media on the mind, but Arjen made me do so.
‘Play” forms may very well be effective for people that have ’digital mindsets’. This is not a mindset that favours the discrete, the binary 0 and 1 opposition, but a mindset that likes fields of opportunities better than positions of certainty. People with ‘digital mindsets’ wonder why it is relevant to have one opinion, when there are so many that are available (page 182). The digital consciousness doesn’t take position but tries out different positions – plays with positions and opinions to see which will suit a given set of circumstances best. See blog ‘tutorial’.
Book for the Electronic Arts - also by Arjen. Great book, full of interactive play and games. Both the artistic use of technology and the technological approach to artistic preoccupations are dealt with. Illuminative insights into why there electronic arts and more traditional arts have difficulties with each other.
Also finished Wade Davis’ One River: explorations and discoveries in the amazon rain forest. An amazing book about two generations of plant hunters and exotic drugs experimenters in the Amazon region. I thought I’d better meet with the extremes of exploration, as I encourage explorative attitudes in my work. A simple way to loosen up peoples minds would indeed be to administer drugs, but this has the disadvantage – apart from being illegal – of being very much a one-way street. I like patterns and networks of possibilities. I dislike hangovers. So.
Macht en Verlangen by Erik Bolle - can’t honestly say that I read it, as to me it was more dense than an advanced calculus book ever was. It is his thesis and deals with Nietsche cum suis and their influences on the thinking of Foucault, Deleuze en Guattari. I learned more about philosophers ways with words, and yearned for a good old least-squares adjustment.
Read Brilliant Orange by David Winner – a book about Dutch football between 1960 and 2000. Deals with the Dutch mastery of space both in real and in psychological terms, applied to the football field. A true page turner – wish philosophers would write like this. They’d probably get kicked out of their profession if they did, or have problems being taken seriously. Anyway, the book deals with with I have come to call ‘meta-perception’ ’perception’ and ‘immersed perception’ and has a lot of interesting quotes.
Van Eyck, the playgrounds and the city – Stedelijk Museum, Liane Lefaivre and Ingeborg de Roode. This was a real find, too. I based my Experiment no 007 on van Eyck’s work. His positions as an artist, curator, architect and writer are discussed intelligently and with appreciation in the book, focusing on the playgrounds he designed for post-war Amsterdam. The book is also the catalogue for the exhibition the Stedelijk Museum did about van Eyck’s work in 2002. The exhibition at the Stedelijk presented the playgrounds – undervalued from the beginning – for what they really were: a way of healing the scarred tissue of post-war Amsterdam. A surprising number of playgrounds is still there – I visited them. Very little of van Eycks original design is still in place, very few of his play objects survived, but still…
The Situationist International - - Simon Ford. Good but not great. I got bored by the extensive discussion of the group’s internal politics, and could have wished for more discussion about how the Situationists were situated within the political and art discourses of their times. Also Debord is (unintentionally I presume) depicted as a mini-Mao, weeding and pruning his group into extinction for reasons of ideological purity. Nothing playful there.
Arts and the creation of mind – Elliot Eisner. Good but not great, again. It deals with art education and not, as I had hoped, about the psychology of creating a mind through art.
Artscience: creativity in the post-google generation - David Edwards. Nice little book about interdisciplinarity, mainly cross-overs between the arts and the sciences. As I am one of those that have a foot in both camps, very interesting read. Scientists believe in the proven and the peer-accepted. Artist subvert. In some people – sure hope I am one – crossover learning sparks innovation in culture, industry, society, research. Nice cases, very good read.
Met open zinnen- Ton Lemaire. “With open senses’ – have started it but not finished yet. Deals with the relation we have with nature, the landscape, the earth. Main theme is how we use our senses to orient ourselves in the world. Can’t seem to get through it at the moment, his style is somewhat elaborate.
Gaming – essays on algorithmic culture by Alexander Galloway. Now here is a fellow mind, an exact thinker on the subject of computers used for gaming. Exellent essays, learned a lot. He considers the video game as a cultural form, demanding a new interpretative framework. Then he develops this framework, using examples from film critique for instance. He links the philosophers I have been wrestling with to the world of philosophy, and so makes me cover new ground. A quote from page 100: “Flexibility is one of the core political principles of informatic control, described both by Deleuze in hes theorization of ’the control society’ and by computer scientists like Crocker’.
Rembrandt’s eyes by Simon Schama. Amazing holiday reading, Rembrandt left so many self-portraits, painted at every stage in his life. His is a ‘merchandised’ face – met everywhere, a recognizable presence in galleries across Europe and North America. Nonetheless, the man himself remains a puzzle. Rembrandt was a difficult man and a great risk taker in life and art: his aspirations to a bohemien Amsterdam lifestyle bankrupted him, and he died in relative poverty.
Schama gives a lot of intelligent detail about the influences on Rembrandt, for example the 80 years war of liberation against Spain, protestants against catholics, also writes about Rubens, the italians versus the flemish painters et cetera. So interesting! Great to read about how painters were trained in those days. An example: they were made to sketch eyes for weeks and weeks, then graduating to other parts of the body until they could draw a human anatomy practicallx from memory. HKU, eat your heart out!
Still on my book list ( a crazy number of books, I know. Then again – I like reading) :
Art&D Research and Development – Arjen Mulder
Situation (documents of contemporary art) – Claire Doherty
Participation (documents of contemporary art) – Claire Bishop
De Vergankelijkheid (On Decay) – Midas Dekkers
