Life is sweeter than jewish wine

olet lucernam

“So much for poetry, the Jezebel that kept me treacherous company all these years. Olet lucernam. Now it would be nice to tell a joke or two, but I can only think of one on the spot like this, just one. What’s more, it’s a Galician joke. Maybe you’ve heard it before. A man goes walking in the forest. Like me, for example, walking in a forest like the Parco di Traiano or the Terme di Traiano, but a hundred times bigger and more unspoiled. And the man goes walking, I go walking, through the forest and I run into five hundred thousand Galicians who’re walking and crying. And then I stop (a kindly giant, an interested giant for the last time) and I ask them why they’re crying. And one of the Galicians stops and says: because we’re all alone and we’re lost.”

-Roberto bolaño, The Savage Detectives, 421.

The Invention of the Jewish People

Just finished reading Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People as part of my research for the “Making Aliyah” project.
The book was an exciting intellectual provocation as to the roots of the myth of there being a singular, unique Jewish People. Some of the more insightful and inciteful claims that he makes are that: the descendants of the Judeans from Roman rule were not exiled but eventually converted to Islam under Muslim rule and became todays Palestinians; That Eastern European Jews are not descendants of the seed of Abraham, but rather come from the Turkic kingdom of Khazaria that converted to Judaism in the 10th Century; And that the Israeli state’s funding and search for a unique Jewish gene is akin to and a remnant of (with tragically similar consequences) eugenic research of the first half of the 20th century.
Excitingly thrilling, and sadly depressing with a rather pessimistic conclusion to the future.
(some quotations coming soon…)

Giovanni’s bookstore

This weekend V and I head down to Pesaro for the week to work on Giovanni’s bookstore. I wrote something about Giovi to post here a couple of months ago and never got around to it. So I include it here to explain the project, though our contribution to the bookstore has since changed a bit. You’ll read about Giovi’s vision in my earlier post as driving his new bookstore, in fact, he succumbed to the pressure of survival and hired a store designer to put together most of the place. Our role remains focused on the visual signage, for which we have developed a symbol language to refer to categories and machine embroidered about 40 colorful flags to hang around the store like prayer flags. pictures of these will follow this week. For now, here is that earlier explanatory post…

(from a couple of months ago)
This past weekend we went to Pesaro, Valentina’s home town. A big reason for our trip was to visit with Valentina’s friend Giovanni, whose story I want to recount to you. Pesaro is a small town, and although pre-dominantely a seaside resort, it is also known as the Rose of the Sea, for its leftist leanings. Its proximity to Urbino (the walled renaissance hilltop city), and the university that now-a-days occupies a major part of the city has provided for a vibrant student movement in the area. Some relatively famous Italian authors and designers came out of the Pesaro of the sixties and seventies. More recently, a successful movement of illustrators emerged from the area. One of the legacies of this past is a surprising amount of small bookstores in the old town. A locus of the book culture for the past fifteen years has been Giovanni. He owns a book shop in the old Jewish quarter of Pesaro, and his store for years acted as the place where book lovers congregated. A large collection of new titles and an excellent selection of rare and out of print books. It is the kind of place that you browse for the pleasure of browsing and discovering. But the main reason that people make their way to Giovanni’s bookstore is to visit and speak with the man. He is a bookseller of old, in that you may or may not know what you are looking for, but when engaging in conversation with him, topics open up, ideas are pursued and books are brought out. Efficiency and the final sale are not as important as building relationships and engaging in stimulating conversation. When Valentina was just a teenager she discovered the store and after a while started working for Giovanni. She stayed working there for many years and still returns occasionally during the busy seasons to help out. Whenever we are visiting Pesaro we will often stop by there directly from the train station, before going Valentina’s parents house to drop off the bags. At any moment there is some interesting congregation of regulars at the bookstore, or just outside smoking cigarettes and discussing with Giovi and Alessandra, his employee, a book or the latest events. The regulars include the Communist (a hard line communist activist), the Philosopher (a J.L. Nancy expert completing his Ph. D at the university in Urbino), the Neurosurgeon (a neurosurgeon… ), the Anarchist (though he is now studying in Paris), and I suppose now also the American… We will often stay well after closing time, the doors shut, the lights dimmed, and the space filling with cigarette smoke. Then conversations will continue without worry of offending or ignoring customers. Often listening to leftist Italian music from the sixties, or to Giovi recounting in his well honed storytelling style some misadventure. The bookstore, without presumption, or intention is a space of encounter, a space of performance, a space of community, and a space of the romantic actualized.
A couple of months ago it was announced that Librerie Coop, an Italian equivalent of Barnes & Noble, will be opening in Pesaro, just around the corner from Giovanni. Immediately a couple of the smaller bookshops announced that they will be closing down. Librerie Coop, understanding the importance of Giovanni in the book culture of the city, approached him with the proposal for him to become the manager of the new store. They then proceeded to offer him an insulting salary proposal and terms for the immediate closing of his store. When he refused, they began threatening him with his inevitable demise in the face of the all powerful chain store. While this is nothing new for us in the United States, it is a trend that is just emerging in Italian cities, especially in the historic centers, where small independent shops are still valued as essential elements of a community. For example, While Germany and France have been invaded with Starbucks there are none in Italy, where a culture of consuming coffee is directly related to the small coffee bar where for less than a Euro you grab an espresso at the bar. (I actually also just read in my history of contemporary italian that for many years the government encouraged small shop ownership over large chain through government subsidies).
In the aftermath of the announcement came much soul searching and figuring out how to continue, and whether it will be possible to perservere the invasion of the chain store. When we arrived this weekend Giovi surprised us by taking us each individually on a walk, just a little further down the street and into a home furnishings shop that occupies a vast and beautiful space with two levels, small nooks, exposed brick walls, arched doorways, and abundant windows. He told us that the store will be vacant in two months and that the landlord, aware of Giovi’s situation, offered this space to him for the equivalent of what he now pays for his very small store. And with that, Giovi asked Valentina and I if we would make ourselves available for a week in April and conceive of and design a vision for his new bookshop along with some other local creatives. While it must remain above all a place to sell books, with all of his new found space he is fantasizing about opening up the space in a way that will somehow formalize and accommodate the types of activities that are already happening within his existing location. Instead of trying to survive in the face of the chain store, and with the knowledge that trying to compete with them will be impossible, he has decided he wants to re-envision the role of his store in the community. He has asked us to utilize the creative strategies that we employ in artistic practice toward the conceptualization of this new space.

hmmm… reading this again, i feel sad that some of the early inspiration was lost, but v and i are looking forward to some other space transforming collaborations with Giovi, one of which we hope, will be the launch of our new publishing house.

the inoperative nancy

i’ve been trying to get my head around jean-luc nancy’s the inoperative community for the past few days. and while i very slowly try to block out the television and digest some french deconstruction, i did find some very enjoyable passages in the first few pages…

“A community presupposed as having to be one of human beings presupposes that it effect, or that it must effect, as such and integrally, its own essence, which is itself the accomplishment of the essence of humanness.” 3.

“But the individual is merely the residue of the experience of the dissolution of community. By its nature–as its name indicates, it is the atom, the indivisible–the individual reveals that it is the abstract result of a decomposition… the individual can be the origin and the certainty of nothing but its own death.” 3.

“To be absolutely alone, it is not enough that I be so; I must also be alone being alone–and this of course is contradictory. The logic of the absolute violates the absolute.” 4.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Translated by Lisa Garbus Peter Connor, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Vol. 76. Theory and History of Literature, ed. Peter Connor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

more on black mountain

I’m excitedly reading the section on John Wallen’s stay at the college.  Duberman is using Wallen the “collective visionary”,  idealist, the true champion of community living at BMC as a vehicle for exploring the urge to community.

Is there a conflict between “individualism” and community? Can an “artist” survive–would he want to survive–the innumerable pretty issues and responsibilities that come with communal living? Can one live fully and well with others and at the same time “produce”?  What do people need? Do their needs differ? is the desire for closeness itself a cultural phenomenon? Would most people seek solitude…? 238

Duberman, Martin. Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993.

I write this as i am sitting alone in my residency apartment at Lugar a Dudas.  I have intermittentanly felt a great urge toward community, community living, process, intimacy and have pursued a highly individualistic path that while engages with intimacy, collaboration and group processes, remains in fluxus, never settling for long enough to establish, build and deeply engage with the realities of community.  In truth, not since we left the kibbutz when i was 13 had i lived in a true community.  My draw to Putney in the summers is partly for the desire to community, and yet, the relief at the end of the summer is that the committment is on a temporary basis, that the next summer it will be built a new, differently.

Throughout my travels, experiences I often met so many people with whom, for a short while, an experiment in intimate communal (not implying romantic relationships) was an incredibly exciting and wonderful experience, and i lament that this group of people are scattered on the map that is my life experience.  If only they were all in one place, would there be a potential? I never see myself at center, and so i want to believe that the people i am drawn to and are drawn to me are somehow connected by something greater, bigger then the fact that at some point i have come to associate with them.  And then i ask myself whether it is enough to say that this is a different kind of community, a dissipated, 21 century community, one that so many will imply exists ideally on social networking sites.  but if this is the case, then we are each centers in our defined communities, and i don’t believe this, i want to believe that communities are not centered on the individual (though what i’ve read thus far in duberman’s book might lead me to think otherwise), but rather exist both because of and in spite of individualism.

So now back to Duberman, and i just read that Wallen offered a class on the psychology of the student-teacher relationship! using the class itself as a staging ground.  have i found a soulmate in Wallen?…

black mountain community

reading the history of black mountain by martin duberman, found this paragraph quite interesting on the development and role of rules.  this is in regards to an episode in which four students, two boys and two girls took a road trip together to florida during school vacation in the 1930′s:

What were the implications? Had a conclusion been reached decisive enough to establish a “rule” as regarded future trips? If so, does the episode demonstrate the way in which the Black Mountain community–the way any community–does slowly establish (even while denying it’s doing so) definitions of aceptable behavior, certifying one particular life style over others, controlling its members through the pressure of “group influence” even while rehtorically protesting the tyranny of conformity? Still further, what then happens in a community to the individual’s right to please himself so long as he isn’t hurting anyone else–the base on which Black Mountain was ostesibly founded? “Oh, but they were huring others,” is one obvious retort, “they were tearing down Black Mountain’s reputation.” But what reputation? Most of the world had never heard of the college; most of those who had, already disapporved of it; and anyway, who in Florida would have known or cared that those four kids–probably attractive in every way–were students at a place called Black Mountain (monogrammed sweat shirts not being part of BMC’s standard equipment)? 84.

Duberman, Martin. Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993.

Beuys : artist and audience

“This psychic drama of warmth and intimacy between artist and audience bespeaks the healing intention of Beuys’ art – its therapeutic mission. He wanted to give his German audience the care that would cure it of its post-war feelings of deprivation, isolation, and hurt, inflicted on it by the desperate failings of the parent state… Beuys’ ‘totalised concept of art’ involved the sense that what had become ‘hardened’ by life originated ‘out of the fluid process’ and could be returned to it to be re-formed. What had ‘solidified’, like congealed fat or wax, had only to be softened by artistic warmth to be given a more human form.  Beuys intended this principle to be applied ‘not only to artistic forms, but also to social forms or legal forms or economic forms, or also agricultural problems.”

Kuspit, Donald. “Joseph Beuys: The Body of the Artist.” In Joseph Beuys Diverging Critiques, ed. David Thistlewood, 95-105. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995.

reading

currently reading:

Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud

reading

currently reading a survey of
Erwin Wurm’s work
as well as Frederic Jameson’s chapter 6: Utopianism After the End of Utopia from Postmodernism, or, The cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
and for pleasure Michel’s Houellebecq’s new novel The Possibility of an Island

reading

at the moment i’m finishing up
Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. The MIT Press, 2004.
an excellent survey and theoretical analysis of site specific art.
i’m also reading
Verwoert, Jan. Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous (One Work). Afterall Books, 2006.
an in depth study of the conceptual framework of bas jan ader’s in search of the miraculous. verwoert does a good job in trying to pull ader out of the tragic artist role that his death bestowed on him and placing the project within the conceptual role that it meant to enact.