Coherence is not overrated

Since returning to civilian life two weeks ago I've been gleefully working on my thesis like a madman. It took almost a week and a half of steady work just to review all the notes I had accumulated from my last six months at McGill and during subsequent year and a half of articling and lawyering. Its pretty amazing to see it all come together, whatever it is. Tables of Contents can be such thrilling and reassuring beacons, but also somewhat melancholy. I unfortunately did have to ditch the rhizomaic double-helixical structure I imagined the thesis taking in the interests of actually finishing the god damn thing.

I make a lot of hay out of Chris Jordan's 2006-2007Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait series. Based on statistical data, he uses incredibly oversized canvases to show the "simultaneity" of otherwise discrete every day acts, such as flying in a plane or disposing of a plastic bottle. In our ego-centric world, these acts are often only experienced (and thus known and reacted upon) in the microscopic abstract as individual acts or in the macroscopic abstract as statistical figures in a government report somewhere. An encounter with Jordan's 20-foot photographs is a true confrontation and a chance to look at consumption otherwise than tiny individual acts or inconceivable wholes. Knowing that each individual object in the photograph was arranged by the artists hand further impresses the sense that each object has a life beyond the moment the consumer makes use of it.


"Jet Trails" depicts 11,000 jet trails -- equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours


"Plastic Bottles" Depicts two million plastic bottle beverages, the number used in the US every five minutes

March 28th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: simultaneity, Chris Jordan, thesis

Last Day in the Library

I celebrated my last day in the library with the newly minted english translation of Vattimo's Art's Claim to Truth and this lovely view from the 12th floor of the Robart's Library. You can sit directly before this huge window with your feet up on the heat register below. Tourists love the view too. Over the last two months I've taken four shots of couples in front of the even bigger window in the "red apex" of the 13th floor.

Vattimo's book is an interesting way to conclude my research into law and aesthetics. He adopts the work of a 1950's philosopher named Pareyson who argues that 20th art achieved autonomy through the revelation that each great work resonates with a "law of the work" that simultaneously synthesizes the coherency in form and content of the work, and which necessarily exceeds itself and opens onto an interpretative multiplicity and iterability heralding the death of metaphysic foundationalism. So on the one hand you have this act of recognition of this conspicuously undefined and pneumenal "law of art" but also notions that this law is constituted to be endlessly interpreted. It strikes me as a bit of an odd mix of the ancient greek aesthetic of rhythm and Georges Bataille, and would seem to have something to say about HLA Hart's classic "rule of recognition" or Dworkin's "chain novel" as the basis for inscribing law's absent authority. None of that would be terribly convincing though, which is perhaps why Vattimo runs with this a bit more to ultimately create a mash-up between Heidegger's ontology and Gadamer's hermeneutics. Which, of course, I think Levinas exceeds with an ethics of imagination (after all, there's no ambiguity of authority in a state of perfect unknowability). But it might also be a convenient way of exploring the internecine step between being, language and sensing, which is the crux of Levinasian aesthetics as I understand it.

Anyway, thesis completion, here I come.



August 7th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: Vattimo, Pareyson, art, thesis, roabrts library, sky-effing-line-of-Toronto