Notes for Gotes

On Beauty

2013-04-27T15:27:00.001-04:00

From the academic fraud article in the Times this weekend:

Stapel did not deny that his deceit was driven by ambition. But it was more complicated than that, he told me. He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive. “It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth,” he said. He described his behavior as an addiction that drove him to carry out acts of increasingly daring fraud, like a junkie seeking a bigger and better high.

The relationship between aesthetics and ethics spectacularly uncoupled.

But then, this hits a bit closer to home:

In his early years of research — when he supposedly collected real experimental data — Stapel wrote papers laying out complicated and messy relationships between multiple variables. He soon realized that journal editors preferred simplicity. “They are actually telling you: ‘Leave out this stuff. Make it simpler,’ ” Stapel told me. Before long, he was striving to write elegant articles.

Listening for the Sound

2013-01-03T17:54:00.004-05:00

Auscultation: The action of listening, with ear or stethoscope, to the sound of the movement of heart, lungs, or other organs, in order to judge their condition of health or disease.

Monster

2012-12-29T13:31:00.001-05:00

Carnival

2012-12-28T20:04:00.001-05:00

Nice (if a little old) piece by Irina Sandomirskaja on the anti-Putin protests in Russia.

Farewell to the political winter

GO!

2012-12-27T01:47:00.000-05:00

Mind's Eye World

2012-12-26T16:34:00.000-05:00

What a great image for a NYT piece on schizophrenia by Matt Dorfman. Louis Sass describes the mental state of schizophrenics as the "mind's eye world." (Paradoxes of Delusion) What he means by this is that unlike the classic psychoanalytic understanding of schizophrenics as people with poor reality-testing and wish-fulfillment notions who are developmentally regressive and primitive, "like the child of age five or younger to whom everything seems real," actual schizophrenics exhibit such characteristics of self-consciousness or solipsism as distance or irony toward their own delusions and a system of "double-bookkeeping" (you may be trying to poison me, but I will still eat the dinner you serve). "It is, to be sure, a self-deceiving condition, but one that is generated from within rationality itself, rather than by a loss of rationality."

New Technological Advancements

2012-12-26T12:27:00.000-05:00

Just received a spam message with the subject line "Ellen Degeneres Weight Loss." The internet is reaching a new level of creepiness.

One thing I'm fairly sure of...

2012-12-24T17:37:00.004-05:00

This is the last winter break I will spend working on my dissertation.

Turtle Excluder and Bycatch Reduction Device

2012-12-23T01:35:00.003-05:00

Escape cover
Grid
Square mesh window

Demersal Trawl

2012-12-23T01:34:00.005-05:00

Warps
Otter boards
Bridle
Headline
Ground rope

Midwater Trawl

2012-12-23T01:34:00.002-05:00

Otter boards
Headline
Weights

Trawling

2012-12-23T01:33:00.002-05:00

Danh Vo at the Renaissance Society

2012-12-23T01:23:00.001-05:00

"I was never interested in persent[ing] myself as just a unified thing that does one kind of work. I think as human being[s] we work differently and we have different side[s] of ourselves. I thought maybe that would be a good situation now to present these kinds of differences." --Danh Vo in conversation with Hamza Walker about his show Uterus at the Renaissance Society.

The entrance to the Renaissance Society had become a corridor with back-lit niches containing letters from Henry Kissinger to the newspaper columnist Leonard Lyons. Time and again, Kissinger thanks Lyons for providing tickets to a ballet of show or for thinking of him, even when Kissinger had other things to do, like contemplating the situation in Cambodia. The letters date to the late-1960s and early 1970s, while Kissinger was carrying out a secret bombing campaign in that country.

The corridor opens out to the large, vaulted space of the Ren itself, hardly containing anything at all. To the left, in the corner, some boxes printed with gold and red ink, containing a somewhat off-puttingly fragrant bouquet of pink and white lilies; a wooden box enclosing plaster casts of someone's lower legs and feet; some glass shelves displaying a few sketches, a blonde hair piece, a letter from a gallerist describing a medieval wooden sculpture of Joseph.

At one end of the gallery, a strange assemblage atop a makeshift wooden pedestal: a piece of carved wood topped by plastic packing material topped by a piece of cast bronze. The sickly feeling that the wooden piece, sawn to reveal its cross-section, was the very medieval Joseph described in the gallerist's letter on the nearby shelf. In another corner, between some windows, a photograph of a pensive boy looking out a window demonstrating how he pops his shoulder blade out like a wing. Further down some rough bronze wedges melted down from a refused commission. At the other end, an scattering of iron traps, the kind with teeth that you see ensnaring cartoon animals in cartoon woods.

Anectodes. Points of reference. Sculpture. Vietnamese Danish conceptual artist. Artifacts. Relics. Things coming apart and reconstituting. "I was never interested in persent[ing] myself as just a unified thing..."

Point/Counterpoint

2012-09-07T20:48:00.001-04:00

People, I present you with the most awful thing in the world, courtesy of captain birthday. Behold:

This is Tauba Auerbach's RGB Colorspace Atlas, and my apologies to the diligent creators of this 8"x8"x8" doorstop of a book, but there is something so unsettling and terrible about it that I can hardly look at it. It is truly an unheimlich object. Now, I have never held this object in my hand, but looking at it, it seems unwieldy and difficult to handle. Unless it is made of that super-light paper that they used to use for those mass-produced and abridged versions of the great books (which would give it a whole different pop sensibility...), it looks like the spine might break under its own weight and flipping through it might be an exercise in confronting one's own clumsiness. The there are the colors. Oh, the colors! Ok, confession: I've always found that Photoshop color wheel absolutely maddening. I can never pick a color to my liking, because you only get a tiny pixel of it, never a good, satisfying expanse of color to examine. Then, there's the idea that every imaginable color can be incapsulated in this thing. I understand that it's supposed to make it seem sublime or whatever, but it just makes me sad, the way that digitization levels everything analog. Thinking about this more, this is the most melancholy object I can imagine and it makes me wish I lived in the good old analog 1960s. Or 1860s. Or hell, the 1460s! A time when mixing rainbow-colored paints was a truly infinite and awe-inspiring activity.

Jan van Eyck, The Annunciation (detail of Archangel Michael and the Virgin), 1434-6.

Counterpoint from Captain Birthday:

Ha! Well, while i do like the open-endedness implied in the annunciation rainbow, i have to say that that painting as a whole is really creepy! First, there's the weird facial expressions, which is probably just a historical thing, but that angel is downright sinister, what with his curling sneer and his stick! And poor Mary seems to have a lazy eye. And then there's that typical Christian hand gesture she's making - halfway between "stop!" and throwing up her hands in dismay. The Annunciation has been my least favorite part of scripture for a long time, because really, WTF, God?

anyway, in defense of the color atlas...I see it as not melancholy so much as kind of dorky and earnest - like that other doomed project of completion that nonetheless has a special place in my heart: the encyclopedia. The unwieldiness (unwield?), like the unwieldiness of Funk & Wagnall's, is like the fatness of a gourmand- there's just SO MUCH amazing food in the world, and you want to try all of it! Open up to any page, and learn about something that some random culture-expert thought was important! I do wish the color atlas weren't so slick-looking (meh to the minimalist cube), but it makes me feel more "awww" than "aargh."

But then again, I always loved color wheels of all shapes- paint chips, crayon boxes, and even this:

Gerhard Richter, Color Fields. 6 Arrangements of 1260 Colors (Red-Blue-Yellow), 1974.

I just think they're pretty, and never really thought that grids/catalogs threatened infinity...for me they always suggested possibility, because there's always an infinite number of colors between two colors (like the distance between 0 and 1).

Reading about madness

2012-07-29T23:51:00.003-04:00

Reading about madness for Chapter 3, just had this thought:

Why does advice literature about love always conceptualize relationships as a set of rational choices centered around communication when experience shows time & again that love is a form of madness? Do you ever wonder about this?

Archive conundrum

2012-03-05T15:51:00.006-05:00

So, would you say the condition of this artwork from the archive is..."good"? "fair"? "fragile"? It's for the database. Love my job.

Nikolai Kolzov, Leonid Tishkov, Poland, 1981. Lint, dust, crumbs, hair.

And yes, I do think this work is xenophobic.

I may be easily angered...

2012-03-04T20:44:00.004-05:00

but in the case of Rush Limbaugh's recent comments about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, I wouldn't say I'm over-reacting when I say this is TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE, OMG WTF?!?! WHAT IS THIS COUNTRY COMING TO???

So it was pretty satisfying to receive the first response from one of his advertisers that I'd emailed to complain, informing me that they are no longer supporting the show. Because their mission is "to delight our customers with fresh and long lasting flowers," not to spread hateful speech in the public sphere. Good to know. Wonder what they thought he was doing before this? Surely not delighting us with flowers, that's for sure. Looking forward to more emails like this one.

When all else fails...

2012-02-21T01:18:00.002-05:00

do your taxes.

I don't understand

2012-02-18T10:38:00.005-05:00

why men in robes and funny collars who get up in public and say such silly things as "I oppose birth control" get any more of a hearing than anyone else irrationally proclaiming that they don't want somebody else to do/have/say something that they are entirely free to do/have/say. I mean, I start to foam at the mouth when people talk loudly on the phone in public space. I don't think anybody should make more than 500K/year for anything, ever. I think that state universities should not pay for college sports. Why doesn't the newspaper put my objections on the front page? Why does some guy's opinion of what goes on in women's uteruses deserve column inches??? Seriously, can somebody explain?

where else?

*okay it just occurred to me why this deserves column inches: it is crazy and people need to know that this sort of insanity is happening so we can be prepared when they take away the pill. Uh, carry on.

The Glencairn Plays

2012-02-17T22:31:00.006-05:00

Suddenly in love with Eugene O'Neill. Or The Wooster Group/New York City Players' version of him. Clunky words, cockney accents, spat out mechanically, like acting robots on a metal pipe scaffolding stage. Couplers and tubes. Sea shanties and dreams of solid land.

I always thought O'Neill's plays were a little thin compared to Chechov's or Ibsen's, slightly odd with his characters, these unlikeable people out of pulp novels or something. And the language always seemed contrived and a little embarrassing to me with the Emperor Jones's "sho' has!" and all that. But here they just put that up front, read it out like words on a page, and let the feelings underneath those words just sit there, jabbing you.

A bit in the first play (Moon of the Caribbees?) where a sailor breaks a bottle and the glass gets shattered all over the ship deck and they just walk on it. And it never gets cleaned up and then in the second one (The Long Voyage Home), another lug of a sailor has an accident and dies in agony in his bunk and then they just drag him shirtless over the glass. Those sharp edges seem to be what's underneath there. Forget complex psychology or metaphors. The dull ache of being on a ship or trying to sell alcohol to a bunch of drunken sailors or being the woman tossed around the bar is enough as it is.

United in Anger

2012-02-17T13:12:00.010-05:00

Watched the premier of this documentary on the history of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, last night. Highly recommended, especially if like me, you are looking for a historical overview of the movement and links to their use of visual & performative tactics.

United in Anger Trailer from United in Anger on Vimeo.

Did you know that by 1991, ACT UP was staging political funerals and chucking the ashes of the dead onto the White House lawn? This was one of the most powerful parts of the movie for me from a representational (can I say art historical?) perspective. Not only were these political actions, where symbols (political posters, signs, photographs, people marching, caskets, flowers, eulogies) were used to make statements about the government's and the country's blindness and disregard for a terrible public health crisis (these were truly funerals for democracy), but they were actual funeral processions, too, with actual bodies having succumbed to the virus and actual mourners with deep feelings of sorrow and rage. What happens when these two forms of representation - political symbology and public/private ritual come together? A very powerful political statement, for sure, one that is literally underpinned by the personal, by actual experience, by real and visible (and not just represented) grievance and pain.*

The film briefly touches on the fact that many participants in ACT UP were people who were not "political." They were not activists, and had they not found themselves infected and suddenly stripped of their habitual privileges within America's healthcare system, they would never have put their bodies on the line in direct action. A few people interviewed mentioned that there seemed to be a split within the movement between people who were there because they wanted to heal themselves and those who were there because they were just angry with the system itself and/or wanted to heal other people. This is an interesting point, though I'm not sure what to say about it. Except that in the case of the political funerals, clearly being touched personally, knowing that your body could be the next one in the casket, made for a stronger statement and a more powerful demonstration. Yes, it is largely a matter of demands: do you fight for drugs for yourself now or do you set your sights on a larger transformation of the healthcare system for everybody, not just yourself, not just for those society finds "deserving." Tough questions, though not, I think, mutually exclusive ones.

*Not saying that demonstrators do not bring their actual experiences with them when they march, just that they are not as visible then and there, they do not constitute the very form of the protest.

It's clearly become an orgy of cute.

2012-01-13T21:15:00.002-05:00

Also even more self-referential than usual.

Chickens from Medellín

2012-01-13T21:00:00.002-05:00

Left to my own devices...

2012-01-10T23:59:00.000-05:00

Apparently, I will learn to sew. Sweatshirt with oil stain + liberty fabric present finally find each other!

It's a little free-form crooked, so I kind of have to stand sideways to make it look good, but I'm fine with that.

FOUND!

2012-01-09T19:53:00.011-05:00

Add a new item to the list of apartment awesomeness:

There are some good things lying around in boxes on the sidewalks within 4 blocks the house around 8 or 9 pm most nights of the week. We picked up all of this at just 3 places last night. Already made compote with the apples and strawberries, scarfed down the grapes with shredded ginger (magic!), I've roasted some of the eggplants for eggplant caviar, and stuffed my face with more fresh strawberries. I should add that the best find we didn't even take, which was so many hardy greens - think collards. But I picked up the winter CSA this weekend, and the fridge is seeping greenage. But point being: this neighborhood is prime free food spot!

In other news, for those keeping track at home...

We were all forced to buy new calendars.

Some hot sailors kissed.

New Brunswick celebrated global warming.

First polar bear swim of the year.

We got a new pet.EP danced with a dog. I thought this was a camera. (It's not.)

What have you done in 2012?