making, meaning, knowing

After reading text after text about institutional racism and sexism, I turned to my brilliant sister for some reading suggestions. Something uplifting. Her answer? Ellen Dissanayake. With only a chapter remaining of Art & Intimacy, I am positively giddy. Like so many other authors/books that have changed my life, I cannot wait to talk about, write about, and assimilate Dissanayake's ideas. For now, the following:

"The challenge...was, in all acts of life, to transform the contaminated and impure into the culturally infused and human. This--no more and no less--was the meaning of life."¹

In an era permeated (perhaps even defined) by toxicity, Dissanayake's observation of the Yekuana culture becomes all the more pertinent and (for me at least) poignant. Sullied by capitalism, industrialism, and a kind of mutated Enlightenment individualism, we are bereft. We scramble for truth and hold fast to illusion. Could it be that the paucity of transformational making is to blame? In a society where the simple acquisition of material goods is valorized and the complexity and nuance of empirical knowing virtually absent, fulfillment and meaning are indeed diaphanous and distant.

As I read Dissanayake, I couldn't help but think of the unique and damning problems that come with the performing arts. What happens when "making" does not result in an object? For example, in the life of a musician--where that which is made is temporal, transient, and without artifact--the issue of "hands-on" knowing produces an unpredictable (and yes, often toxic) series of  psychological ripples. We make yet produce no object, we strive for the Truth/Notion/Idea through a means that requires isolation and elitism (in contrast to Dissanayake's assertion that art and relationships go hand in hand). We toil so that we might contribute to that dangerous dialectic of the intentional and the ineffable. 

1.Dissanayake, Ellen. 2000. Art and intimacy: how the arts began. Seattle, Wa: University of Washington Press. 78

generation - reproduction - proliferation

Recently, I revisited Thomas Laqueur's comprehensive text, Making Sex, to refresh my knowledge of eighteenth century gender constructions. In discussing the dramatic epistemological changes occuring during the "age of enlightenment" Laqueur points out an ostensibly trivial change in nomenclature noting the change from "generation" to "reproduction" in the eighteenth century. [1] Laqueur further elucidates this change, and its accompanying relationship to the body-as-machine ideology, quoting Fontanelle: "...put the Machine called a Dog, and the Machine called a Bitch to one another for some time, and there may result another little Machine." [2]

I've written before about this concept of bio-power--that, in the eighteenth century, we start to see the institutionalization of the body. Effectively, reproduction becomes a concern of the state due to--among and in conjuction with other things--a burgeoning global economy. Creepy, no? When we consider the word "reproduction" in this context, it takes on the added connotation of mechanized reproduction. Furthermore, if one examines the prevalance and popularity of the body explained as a great machine (a microcosm of the universe as a watch, with God the divine engineer), such imagery can only be linked to industrialization.

Today, we find ourselves approaching a kind of "zero hour." Pessimistic though it may be, I would argue (and yes, Baudrillard would likely back me up) that we cannot remain in the purgatory of fractal expansion we have created. Words like "advance" "develop" "create" no longer accurately express the twenty-first centruy condition of production. Rather, we find ourselves in a paradoxically static dimension of proliferation: reproduction without conciousness, expansion lacking telos. Inundated by imagery, information and material we are entrapped by the unreal. Dissociated from experience we find ourselves espoused to that which is external and fundamentally alien. Adrift in an ocean of excess, the terrific and the grotesque commune with one another in post-modern bacchanalian revelry.

Where "generation" implies something sacred and singular, "reproduction" participates in rhetoric of multiplicity, duplication, and interchangeability. Upping the proverbial ante, "proliferation" culls images of crass overpopulation, a planet teeming with perverse, meaningless life.

[1] Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990.

[2] Ibid.

nel futuro, saremo...

...non-profit! Clearly, I am bouncing off the walls with excitement regarding such a development. We have hashed and rehashed this possibility in the past, but it never seemed feasible; I can't really say why. Honestly, with the help of my dear father, close family friends adept in navigating the murky waters of charitable organizations, and a manageable measure of clerical elbow grease, I don't think it will be that bad. Famous last words.

My future as a grant-writing violist begins now. As I've said to many over the past couple of days, "I am going to spend my whole life asking institutions for money, I might as well start immediately." So true. However, I am looking forward to giving CMM a little more legitimacy. As a non-profit, we could receive any number of grants--translating in funds to not only cover the cost of hosting the concerts but also to bring in my new colleagues from MI, or old colleagues now relocated. Many options.

Furthermore, In writing the new mission statement (soon to be seen here!) I have had to look closely at that which I want CMM to truly address. We all know that it is not just an ordinary music festival, but specifically, how and why does it differ? For one thing, there is no admission and no one gets paid. Anything. I hope that by exchanging no funds in payment of services rendered, the festival participants feel more like friends and family than the employed. Additionally, the concerts themselves, logistically speaking, are extremely informal. We perform here, there is no stage, and the performers sit in the pews with the audience until their "time." We are all hanging out in the space before the concert and after, and I like to think that the audience members feel comfortable talking to us. Certainly, I don't believe I am going to deconstruct decades upon decades of concert culture and audience/performer power structures, but. Just the idea that the space itself does not support power relationships (that is to say, there is no stage), is an important step.

I think often of new places, new venues to help promote such a deconstruction. Next season is the first step!