I want to write a little about a couple of books that are changing my life. But before I do that, here is some recommended reading:
Gilles Deleuze/Claire Colebrook
Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity/John Marks
Dialogues/Deleuze and Parnet
What is Philosophy?/Deleuze and Guattari
Bergsonism/Deleuze
Music and the Ineffable/Jankelevich
The Sonic Self/Cumming
The Nick of Time/Grosz
Introduction to Metaphysics/Bergson
Matter and Memory/Bergson
If you want to think about sound, music, temporality, and corporeality, I would recommend almost any combination of the above.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
d&g on art
From What Is Philosophy:
"Art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved. It preserves and is preserved in itself, although actually it lasts no longer than its support and materials--stone, canvas, chemical color, and so on. [...] If art preserves it does not do so like industry, by adding a substance to make the thing last. The thing became independent of its "model" from the start, but also independent of other possible personae who are themselves artist-things, personae of painting breathing this air of painting." (164)
"Art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved. It preserves and is preserved in itself, although actually it lasts no longer than its support and materials--stone, canvas, chemical color, and so on. [...] If art preserves it does not do so like industry, by adding a substance to make the thing last. The thing became independent of its "model" from the start, but also independent of other possible personae who are themselves artist-things, personae of painting breathing this air of painting." (164)
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
thinking about design
I've been occupied for the last few days with my website. I recently decided that perhaps, just maybe, if I embrace social media, I will grow to love it. To that end, I purchased clarelouiseharmon.com, my very own domain name. In preparing to post my design portfolio, I began to cobble together some thoughts on design. It often troubles me, to participate in a media that, essentially, produces waste. Posters are disposable. The streets are filled with cheap fliers, disintegrating in the gutter. Soon enough the following (or some form of it) will be posted on my website. For now, here it is. I began with three questions: What is it to design? What does design do? Why is design important to me?
What is it to design, to make objects?
As a musician, I worked primarily with temporal forms that lack specific objects. Intangible and transient, the quintessence of the ineffable constituted my study and continues to inform my thought. Indeed, the musical media draw us near Deleuzian immanence: they offer an image of time, a sense of the conceivable yet inarticulable, the truth that is grasped only as it slips through our fingers.
What does design do? Design produces a negative dialectic between the material and the imaginary; the actual and virtual. In this way, design produces endless Becomings. The tension between material and virtual--incapable of converging in perfect Hegelian unity--spurs the creation of perceptions, contexts, interpretations. Design creates an open system through its process of Rhizomatic proliferation.
Why is design important to me? Existing as we do in this an-aesthetic epoch--plagued by hierarchicalization of every stripe--that which is beautiful is either dehumanized, commodified, or restricted. Presently, poignancy is inextricable from art objects past and present. Art was once connected to individual bodies, the hands that made it and the eyes that saw it. Art was once an experience, singular and special. Art was once a human behavior, available to all and fully embodied. Now, we must do the best we can. The mass-produced object is a reality. A century of mechanical reproduction has obliterated Benjamin’s aura. Class stratification has undergone an ostensibly irreversible process of calcification. As a designer, I am compelled to create objects that reference and honor the hands that made them. I am compelled to explore an expressive form that resists commodification by embracing its own reproducibility. I am compelled to provide an aesthetic experience to the passer-by, not just to the museum-goer.
What does design do? Design produces a negative dialectic between the material and the imaginary; the actual and virtual. In this way, design produces endless Becomings. The tension between material and virtual--incapable of converging in perfect Hegelian unity--spurs the creation of perceptions, contexts, interpretations. Design creates an open system through its process of Rhizomatic proliferation.
Why is design important to me? Existing as we do in this an-aesthetic epoch--plagued by hierarchicalization of every stripe--that which is beautiful is either dehumanized, commodified, or restricted. Presently, poignancy is inextricable from art objects past and present. Art was once connected to individual bodies, the hands that made it and the eyes that saw it. Art was once an experience, singular and special. Art was once a human behavior, available to all and fully embodied. Now, we must do the best we can. The mass-produced object is a reality. A century of mechanical reproduction has obliterated Benjamin’s aura. Class stratification has undergone an ostensibly irreversible process of calcification. As a designer, I am compelled to create objects that reference and honor the hands that made them. I am compelled to explore an expressive form that resists commodification by embracing its own reproducibility. I am compelled to provide an aesthetic experience to the passer-by, not just to the museum-goer.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
hiatus
Oh, hello. It is with great regret that I announce that CMM5 will take place in 2013. We're on hiatus. But why?! Last year was the stuff of legend, truly. Never in my life have I had such a time. The thrill of a premiere, of an orchestra with more percussion than you might believe, of an brilliant composer and kind soul, honestly it just about did me in. So we're on hiatus. We're taking a year, to revise, rework, renew and rejuvenate. I'll continue to write and plan. CMM5 is tentatively planned for June of 2013; look out for a call for papers, proposals, and lecture recitals.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
more reading
I've been doing a lot of reading lately and no so much writing, so for the moment please enjoy the words of persons-far-more-eloquent-than-I.
Manning Marable/The Great Wells of Democracy; Cornel West/Race Matters; Susanne Langer/Feeling and Form; Ellen Dissanayake/Art & Intimacy; Ta-Nehisi Coates/The Beautiful Struggle; Elizabeth Grosz (ed)/Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures
Cornel West on nihilism:
"...For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle."1
Elizabeth Grosz on Time:
"Time, or more precisely duration, is an extraordinarily complex term which functions simultaneously as singular, unified, and whole, as well as in specific fragments and multiplicitous proliferation. There is one and only one time, there there are also numerous times: a duration for each thing or movement, which melds with a global or collective time."2
"This is what time is if it is anything at all: not simply mechanical repetition, the causal ripple of objects on others, but the indeterminate, the unfolding, and the continual eruption of the new"3
Bergson as quoted by Grosz
"Thus the living being essentially has duration; it has duration precisely because it is continuously elaborating what is new and because there is no elaboration without searching, no searching without groping. Time is this very hesitation"4
Langer on music as the "Image of Time"
"The semblance of this vital, experiential time is the primary illusion of music. All music creates an order of virtual time, in which its sonorous forms move in relation to each other--always and only to each other, for nothing else exists there. Virtual time is as separate from the sequence of actual happenings as virtual space from actual space...Inward tensions and outward changes, heartbeats and clocks, daylight and routines and weariness furnish various incoherent temporal data, which we coordinate for practical purposes by letting the clock predominate. But music spreads out time for our direct and complete apprehension, by letting our hearing monopolize it--organize, fill, and shape it, all along. It creates an image of time measured by the motion of forms that seem to give it substance, yet a substance that consist entirely of sound, so it is transitoriness itself. Music makes time audible, and its form and continuity sensible.5
1. West, Cornel. 1993. Race matters. Boston: Beacon Press. 15
2. Grosz, E. A. 1999. Becomings: explorations in time, memory, and futures. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 18
3. Ibid 28
4. Ibid 25
5. Langer, Susanne Katherina Knauth. 1953. Feeling and form; a theory of art. New York: Scribner. 109-110
Manning Marable/The Great Wells of Democracy; Cornel West/Race Matters; Susanne Langer/Feeling and Form; Ellen Dissanayake/Art & Intimacy; Ta-Nehisi Coates/The Beautiful Struggle; Elizabeth Grosz (ed)/Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures
Cornel West on nihilism:
"...For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle."1
Elizabeth Grosz on Time:
"Time, or more precisely duration, is an extraordinarily complex term which functions simultaneously as singular, unified, and whole, as well as in specific fragments and multiplicitous proliferation. There is one and only one time, there there are also numerous times: a duration for each thing or movement, which melds with a global or collective time."2
"This is what time is if it is anything at all: not simply mechanical repetition, the causal ripple of objects on others, but the indeterminate, the unfolding, and the continual eruption of the new"3
Bergson as quoted by Grosz
"Thus the living being essentially has duration; it has duration precisely because it is continuously elaborating what is new and because there is no elaboration without searching, no searching without groping. Time is this very hesitation"4
Langer on music as the "Image of Time"
"The semblance of this vital, experiential time is the primary illusion of music. All music creates an order of virtual time, in which its sonorous forms move in relation to each other--always and only to each other, for nothing else exists there. Virtual time is as separate from the sequence of actual happenings as virtual space from actual space...Inward tensions and outward changes, heartbeats and clocks, daylight and routines and weariness furnish various incoherent temporal data, which we coordinate for practical purposes by letting the clock predominate. But music spreads out time for our direct and complete apprehension, by letting our hearing monopolize it--organize, fill, and shape it, all along. It creates an image of time measured by the motion of forms that seem to give it substance, yet a substance that consist entirely of sound, so it is transitoriness itself. Music makes time audible, and its form and continuity sensible.5
1. West, Cornel. 1993. Race matters. Boston: Beacon Press. 15
2. Grosz, E. A. 1999. Becomings: explorations in time, memory, and futures. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 18
3. Ibid 28
4. Ibid 25
5. Langer, Susanne Katherina Knauth. 1953. Feeling and form; a theory of art. New York: Scribner. 109-110
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
modernist, beautiful genius, or both?
Having just finished D.H. Lawrence's Twilight in Italy, I am completely enraptured. Sometimes I allow myself to forget the importance of art and spirit for the late-nineteenth century cognoscenti: in a world experiencing the death of God, the idea of Art and of the Mind (with a capital A and M, respectively), really meant something. Especially now, looking back at some of the texts I studied in the throes of my fin-de-siecle research, I can't help but compare Lawrence to people like Bahr, Klimt, even the ostensibly disparate Schoenberg and Stravinsky. To all these men, a nostalgia for the past prevailed--although expressed in a wide spectrum of references form the Greeks, to Byzantium, to baroque dance forms, and to ancient rituals--and was indeed, a major force of motion in their intellectual and artistic outputs. They were seeking an answer (or more aptly, the answer) and an antidote for nineteenth century material excess. In any event, if you want a break from theory, spend some time with D.H. Lawrence in Italy...just another piece of the 1890-1914 puzzle. Below are a couple of my favorite passages.
"The twilight deepened, though there was still the strange, glassy translucency of the snow-lit air. A fragment of moon was in the sky. A carriage-load of French tourists passed me. There was the loud noise of water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity, this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that mocks and destroys our warm being." (155)
Another favorite:
"It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The roads, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated, but the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and caving in, in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. So that it seems as though we should be left at last with a great system of roads and railways and industries, and a world of utter chaos seething upon these fabrications: as if we had created a steep framework, and the whole body of society were crumbling and rotting in between." (165)
"The twilight deepened, though there was still the strange, glassy translucency of the snow-lit air. A fragment of moon was in the sky. A carriage-load of French tourists passed me. There was the loud noise of water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity, this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that mocks and destroys our warm being." (155)
Another favorite:
"It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The roads, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated, but the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and caving in, in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. So that it seems as though we should be left at last with a great system of roads and railways and industries, and a world of utter chaos seething upon these fabrications: as if we had created a steep framework, and the whole body of society were crumbling and rotting in between." (165)
Saturday, January 21, 2012
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
"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
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