Good news this morning as we heard our new sound piece ‘Where Are They Now?’ is going to be featured on The Listening Booth on the 27th of May. The Listening Booth is basically an online listening gallery of contemporary sound based art and experimental music. It’s an interesting project so check it out if you have a minute.
A book we’ve been invested in for about a month now has finally come to a close. ‘Why Grow Up’ by Susain Neiman proposes the question of how are we supposed to become free, happy and decent people? Rousseau’s “Emile” supplies Neiman with some plausible answers, and also with some cautionary lessons. A wonderfully problematic book – among other things a work of Utopian political thought, a manual for child-rearing, a foundational text of Romanticism and a sentimental novel – it serves here as a repository of ideas about the moral progress from infancy to adulthood. Rousseau and Kant are Neiman’s main characters, and she conveys a vivid sense of their contrasting personalities in addition to providing an accessible survey of their relevant ideas. Between them, they mapped out what she takes to be the essential predicament of maturity, namely the endless navigation of the gulf between the world as we encounter it and the way we believe it should be. In infancy, we have no choice but to accept the world as it is. In adolescence, we rebel against the discrepancy between the “is” and the “ought.” Adulthood, for Kant and for Neiman, requires facing squarely the fact that you will never get the world you want, while refusing to talk yourself out of wanting it. It is a state of neither easy cynicism nor naïve idealism, but of engaged reasonableness. She seems to believe in the virtues of travel, in limiting time on the Internet, in good government and progressive education. She doesn’t like mass tourism, advertising or authoritarian politics. Essentially she wants you to think for yourself. And who could argue? Thinking for oneself is a true skill. But if there’s one ‘message’ of this book it’s born out of its insistence that thinking for oneself is a difficult and lifelong undertaking.
An idea we, very literally, stumbled across a while back was art that had been thrown away or discarded somehow. We were walking along the street and came across a whole load of paintings that had just been thrown away. The act of throwing something away instantly decreases its value, regardless of the previous value it may have held. This all revolves around ownership and who owns what things. A rejected object might no longer portray the current ideas of the owner or represent them in a way they find flattering. Art comes into this because there’s a lot of ‘taste’ associated with art; everyone has art they like and everyone has art they dislike. This can be hijacked in a number of ways; art made by ones child will be loved regardless of how it appears because of the connection between the two parties (parent and child). This relates to art being thrown away because the question arises of whom has thrown it away? Is it the artist? Is it a collector of art? Is it someone who owns a gallery? Is it someone who is clearing out an old house and finds some paintings? This question means that different levels of value have been removed from the work. An art dealer is supposed to know what’s good and what’s bad so if they’ve thrown it away then it must be bad, right? The value of something can be reduced far more significantly if you’re high up within the field with which the object is associated. So this piece is essentially about value and the value of art and who has the power to value (or devalue) art. All the works were found by us and were clearly unwanted (either in a bin, a skip or by the side of the road for removal). It references when Michael Landy transformed the South London Gallery into ‘Art Bin’, a container for the disposal of works of art. Other artists would discard their works into the ‘bin’ and in doing so create this monument to creative failure.
