When I read Donald Kuspit’s The End of Art I wrote a lot of notes about the text on little scraps of paper and bookmarked the pages.* I am giving the book to a friend and just pulled out all of the pieces of paper and was reading them. They struck me as interestingly art-poetic. Thought I would repost them here:

aesthetic contemplation with no time to contemplate

post-aesthetic art as bully pulpit in-your-face right place for artist?

art as sanctuary

duchamp and the role of spectator as intrepretor

sensuality of form developed through manipulation of material

aesthetic reconciliation of reason and sense (form and subject matter)

postart – lacking in “translation” of information

aesthetic –> exploration of unconscious – unreality     postart –> banal reality

passing time rather than reaching beyond time – postart

I previously posted some notes on “postart.”

*I love the idea of writing in books, and find that the traces of readers before can be beautiful and affect the way one reads the book. However, I have never been able to bring myself to do it…

Things I want to read:

Art & Social Change, A Critical Reader by Charles Esche & Will Bradley

Participation, Documents of Contemporary Art by Claire Bishop

Reenchantment of Art by Suzi Gablik

Dream: Re-Imaging Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy by Stephen Duncombe

Conversation Pieces by Grant Kester

Mapping the Terrain: New Genres in Public Art by Suzanne Lacy

RenGen by Patricia Martin

Anyone want to do a bookswap?

Sorry I missed Thursday daily blip – I can’t figure out how to work it into the day – I leave early in the morning and am out of touch all day. Also – does anyone have opinions on the daily posting?

I have to thank my friend, Steve Lambert for introducing me to this interesting person (and I mean interesting in the good way!)

Steve is working on a book with Stephen Duncombe about artists measuring the impact of their work when they are taking on an activist role. (Is that proprietary info Steve? Let me know). Anyway, he and Stephen interviewed me and then I had a chance to wlk and talk with Stephen on the way back to the subway.

He is an activist, teacher, thinker and author. His most recent book is Dream: Re-Imaging Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (its on the upcoming, books I want to read list). He’s been recognized (well, his group the Lower East Side Collective) for creative activism by the Abbie Hoffman Foundation and was a key organizer with Reclaim the Streets.

And yet, when seen in another light, there is plenty wrong with the American backyard Bar-B-Que. Public resources were channeled from healthcare, education and urban development to–quite literally–pave the way to individual home purchases in the suburbs. Burger smoke wafting into the air from a million backyards, each separated from theother by a picket fence, symbolized the atomization of the public, as around each grill a nuclear family–perhaps joined by a few close friends–acted out the bourgeois fantasy of self-sufficiency. And the Bar-B-Que does not stand alone, it is but one component in a an array of leisure activities that gobble up resources and pollute the planet; each hamburger flipped and chicken thigh basted makes an implicit argument in favor of an ecologically unsustainable lifestyle. Then there is sartorial travesty of leisure wear: grown men and women wearing clothes best suited for children at the playground: t-shirts, sneakers, and shorts or worse: track suits whose elastic waistbandexpands effortlessly to accommodate the ever-growing American girth.

…Yet the Bar-B-Que can also be recognized as an organic vision of Utopia lovingly created, or perhaps dreamed, from below. The dreams of the ideal Bar-B-Que – seemingly alone among modern Utopias – has never lead to the gulag or a death camp. There has not been, nor do we believe there ever will be, a totalitarian state of Bar-B-Que. Abstract Man may want to collectivize farms or subject their will to the Fuhrer, but everyday people want to grill.

And excerpt from Stephen Duncombe’s blog on Reality Sandwich.

Books on my desk to read:

MoMA catalog for Design & the Elastic Mind (yeh, I do sometimes read the catalogs)

Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat & Crowded

Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local

Lester Brown, Plan B 3.0

Henry Hobhouse, Seeds of Change

daily post #3 (coming soon to lists, books I have read recently & books on my list to get in order that I may read them)