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Resultaat van eerste keer filmen voor de Carlijne over film.

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Een video van onze kerstviering bij mijn grootouders. Een groot deel is de combinatie van onderwerpen in het gesprek. Het gaat over leuke, speelse dingen maar, vooral ook over Carlijne en recente ervaringen met kinderen die dezelfde ziekte als Carlijne hebben/hadden.

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over verlies, rouw en verwerking door kunstenaars

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over verlies, rouw en verwerking door kunstenaars

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Missen als een ronde vorm - Stedelijk Museum Schiedam

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This is a summary of Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter, along with some of my own arguments about the p olitical implications of her work .

Ok, disclaimer: this isn't really a summary. A friend read this post and noted that Jane Bennett doesn't even really cover some of the stuff I'm talking about below. So this is more of a riff on Bennett's book, rather than a close reading or a summary of ideas. BUT, I'd say that's consistent with Bennett's own project, since she is prone to ask "what can a body do?" (or "what can a book do?") rather than asking what it is. This means experimenting with what's possible, rather than trying to focus on stable qualities or properties. Because when we focus on what something is, we separate it from what it could be.So this is about what Bennett's work could be; or what it makes possible. There. That's what I'm doing.

What are the political implications of recognizing that everything-i n cluding rocks, garbage dumps, and spools of thread-is alive? Bennett puts a radical conception of mate rialism and matter, with implications for politics, ecology, and the everyday ways we think of ourselves, others, and our world. She draws on a longstanding tradition of philosophy stretching from Baruch Spinoza through to Gilles Deleuze and their contemporary progeny like Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi, and Bennett herself. The basic argument is that everything is alive, interconnected, and in process: not only plants and humans, but rocks and air.

Here's a lecture by Bennett, where she explains some of the central arguments in her book, and looks at what 'hoarders' say about the things they collect, as a way to emphasize the way that things 'draw us near to them' or 'call' us:

All matter is pulsing with life. What does she mean by 'life'? Things aren't simply alive in a mechanistic way (i.e. composed of electrons and atoms in motion), or imbued with a non-material or transcendent spirit: they are alive in their complex interrelationships, entanglements, and propensities for open-ended change. Most of the time, we think of objects as passive and stable things, and we humans are the active subjects in the world. Bennett wants to dissolve this binary between subject and object, showing how worms, a dead rat, or a gunshot residue sample can all be 'actants:' they have the capacity to "animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle" (6). So objects are alive because of their capacities to make difference in the world, to have effects, to shape the web of interrelationships of which they are a part. From the other direction, humans aren't sovereign or autonomous subjects; we are ourselves composed by a complex web of active bodies and materials:

My 'own' body is material, and yet this vital materiality is not fully or exclusively human. My flesh is populated and constituted by different swarms of foreigners... the bacteria in the human microbiome collectively possess at least 100 times as many genes as the mere 20,000 or so in the human genome... we are, rather, an array of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes. (112-13)

In fact, there's no such thing as 'objects' or 'subjects' from a certain perspective: they (and we) are never entirely passive or stable; they're crystallizations of processes, and everything is in process, constantly undergoing transformation, constantly undergoing modification. So all matter is alive and in process: a complex, interwoven web of materials, all affecting each other, competing, forming alliances, initiating new processes and dissipating others. Humans are inextricably enmeshed in these webs that Bennett calls assemblages. So what? What difference does it make to think about the world this way? From my perspective, the great thing about this book, in comparison to other books on new materialism (which offer many of the same insights about reality-as-process) is that Bennett is actually trying to figure out why all this matters, and what they implications might be for politics, ecology, and everyday life.

There are three, interconnected implications of this process-oriented materialism:

1. Agency and causality gets complicated

2. Politics gets reconceived as open-ended problems and experimentation

3. There is no such thing as 'environment' or 'context'

We tend to think about the world in terms of agents and actors: they are usually people, and often the most important actors are thought to be the important people (presidents, leaders, etc). It's often assumed that humans are in charge, and objects and materials are simply used, transformed, or set in motion by us. By emphasizing our dense interconnections and interdependencies, Bennett troubles this idea of a human-centered action in the world. Of course humans act in the world and make a difference, but we never act alone, and it's impossible to say exactly who or what 'causes' an event to take place.

Bennett introduces the concept of distributive agency, which "does not posit a subject as the root cause of an effect" (31). This is distinguished from traditions that define agency as a moral capacity linked to "an advance plan or an intention" (31). "there are instead always a swarm of vitalities at play. The task becomes to identify the contours of the swarm, and the kind of relations that obtain between its bits... this understanding of agency does not deny the existence of that thrust called intentionality, but it does see it as less definitive of outcomes. It loosens the connections between efficacy and the moral subject, bringing efficacy closer to the idea of the power to make a difference that calls for a response" (32).

If we take seriously the idea that we're part of massive, complex, interconnected webs of processes, then we can never isolate any subject or actor as the ultimate cause of an event. What 'caused' the Arab Spring, for example? The man who set himself on fire in Tunisia? Increasing dissatisfaction with economic exploitation and repression? Twitter and the social interconnectedness made possible by social media? Longstanding traditions of resistance and social movements? Tahrir Square and the bodies that gathered there? Though the political pundits certainly tried to find or name the source, any attempt to locate a single cause immediately fails, and all of these elements are better conceived not as solitary 'actors' or 'causes' but actants:

while the smallest or simplest body or bit may indeed express a vital impetus, conatus, or clinamen, an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces (21).

Human and nonhuman elements are always capable of affecting the swarm of processes of which they're a part, and they are also immersed in that swarm and affected by it. Nothing acts alone: "any action is always a trans-action, and any act is really but an initiative that gives birth to a cascade of legitimate and bastard progeny" (101).

This has important implications for politics, and the way we think about changing the world, or ourselves, or our communities. First, because 'communities' for Bennett are always more-than-human 'problems':

if human culture is inextricably enmeshed with vibrant, nonhuman agencies, and if human intentionality can be agentic only if accompanied by a vast entourage of nonhumans, then it seems that the appropriate unit of analysis for democratic theory is neither the individual human nor an exclusively human collective but the (ontologically heterogeneous) 'public' coalescing around a problem" (108).

Problems, for Bennett, are impersonal events. The Arab Spring was a massive, open-ended problem, experienced and responded to differently by a swarm of actants, both human and non-human. No one was in charge, no single actor could decide what happened, and no one could predict the outcome in advance. Of course, some actants are more important than others, and the task of analysis is to tease out these problems, the actants involved, and gesture at some of the responses that are already underway.

Thinking about politics as an ecology of 'problems' helps displace or unsettle some of the common ways we think about politics: as a set of activities pursued by certain 'political' people and passively experienced by the rest of us, or a contest between rational actors with predetermined goals and motives in mind, or the struggle over a certain decision. All of these are going on as political problems emerge, but they're all going on at once, with no one in charge:

The field of politics is an ecology: No one body owns its supposedly own contemporaneous endeavors, each with its own duration and intensity, with endeavors that are losing or gaining momentum, rippling into and recombining with others... conjoint actions generate multitudinous consequences, and each of these consequences crosses the others to generate its own problems, and thus its own publics or group of persons especially affected" (101)

Problems are constantly being generated, being intensified or dissipated, and interacting in complex ways. Recent events like the Arab Spring, Idle No More, and Occupy are often seen as simplistic 'things' that you could be 'for' or 'against,' but in reality, these events invite us to explore the ways that we are already implicated in the problems they raise. They also invite us to think about the ways we act to affirm, intensify, dissipate, or ignore the problems raised by these movements. None of us gets to determine the course of these complex events, but we can certainly participate in the collective. Our agency isn't as sovereign, separate bodies though, but as actants immersed in a complex assemblage.

This immersive, complex, open-ended conception of reality suggests, I think, that politics is always experimental, whether we like it or not. As participants, we can never be sure of the consequences of our actions; they often provoke unintended effects. This can be understood as an invitation to embrace experimentation, at least some of the time: try out new tactics, practices, and ways of relating without roping them to a goal or outcome. Embrace uncertainty, vulnerability, and openness to the unexpected. Don't worry (or worry less, or differently) about failure, because even failures will provoke unintended effects. Know that you're a participant in a complex swarm of jostling, entangled bodies, and not a lone political actor.

Of course, this doesn't mean we can (or should) give up on goals entirely. But experimentation is often neglected in radical politics. When we're too focused on goals or outcomes, we miss the here-and-now. When we try to create systematic knowledge of politics or social change, we miss unexpected surprises, detours, and opportunities.

Another strategic implication of Bennett's ontological reworking is the way we begin to think about the 'environment' or 'context' in which politics is thought to occur. These terms suggest that humans are still the active ones, and the non-human elements form a passive background or structure that may constrain or subtly influence our actions. On the contrary, Bennett wants to do away with this dichotomy, which I think can help reveal how spaces, atmospheres, moods, and non-human materials have an agency and vitality themselves, with some important implications.

Bennett insists that objects have 'thing-power:' "the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle" (6). We can only glimpse thing-power; we can never know it systematically, because it's those unsettling experiences that show us how our 'environment' is active and 'we' aren't sovereign subjects. Bennett tells a story of one of her glimpses, where a glove, some pollen, dead rat, a bottle cap and a stick provoked affects in her, and strike her with the awareness of their singularity "I caught a glimpse of an energetic vitality inside each of these things, things that I generally conceived as inert. In this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects et them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics" (5).

So what? Bennett stared at some garbage and then tripped out a little? Who cares? What's the point of recognizing this 'thing-power' and does it do anything other than make us a feel a little weird for a while? Bennett suggests that taking seriously the idea that everything is alive would mean recognizing that a vital materiality can never really be thrown 'away,' for it continues its activities even as a discarded or unwanted commodity" (5). Alive doesn't mean 'good:' garbage dumps are alive, and their toxins are always seeping into the earth and bubbling into the air. Bennett thinks that if we paid attention to the aliveness of matter, we wouldn't be so careless with our stuff. In this sense, capitalist materialism is actually an anti-matieralism: "the sheer volume of commodities, and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter" (5).

We're always caught up in, and entangled with, complex assemblages, but we often parse these into (human, active) subjects and (passive, inert) objects in the background. But it's well-known that the 'background' has important effects on us, often more important than the other humans: casinos keep the air a little cold to keep people awake, temples provoke awe and serenity in their architecture, music can provoke all kinds of feelings and happenings. Bennett would say that these non-human forces have their own agency, and not just because of their 'cultural significance.' Their agency is really material, and it folds into our bodies and affects us. Bennett discusses the Chinese concept of shi as the "mood or style of an open whole in which both the membership changes over time and the members themselves undergo internal alteration... The shi of a milieu can be obvious or subtle, it can operate at the very threshold of human perception or more violently a coffee house or a school house is a mobile configuration of people, insects, odors, ink, electrical flows, air currents, caffeine, tables, chairs, fluids, and sounds. Their shi might at one time consist in the mild and ephemeral effluence of good vibes, and at another in a more dramatic force capable of engendering a philosophical or political movement" (35). Shi can be joyful or sad, revolutionary or banal, and it's a question of being open to it, and finding ways to shift the elements so that things change-even subtle shifts might make a difference, like being silly or vulnerable, or rearranging objects in a room, or moving outside.

I've already slipped up here, from Bennett's point of view, because I'm suggesting that we can attune ourselves to shi and make interventions to modify it, and the 'we' is privileging a human agency. To be consistent, it would be necessary to insist that the non-human aspects of shi have an agency all their own, whether or not humans are aware of it. But Bennett admits that it's probably impossible to horizontalize the world completely; we will probably end up refocusing on human action because it helps us think strategically about our own efforts, even if we recognize we're caught up in more-than-human assemblages (104). She suggests that this is a pragmatic approach to politics: "all kinds of bodies may be able to join forces, but a pragmatist would be quick to note that only some bodies can make this association into a task force" (102). The human capacity for reflection, strategy, and conscious action shouldn't be used to set us apart from the world, but this capacity (whether or not it is shared by humans) seems necessary for thinking through how we are in the world.

That doesn't mean we should be strategic all the time. Part of Bennett's aim is to increase our receptivity to the uncanny, the unexpected, and the wonder/horror/intensity of unfolding events and processes. This receptivity is often kept in check by our habits of thought that tell us we're separate, sovereign, autonomous actors intervening in a world of passive matter or mechanical nature. By busting the binaries of subject/object, and complicating the ways we think through politics, causality, and action, Bennett's Vibrant Matter can help us attune ourselves to the messy, complex world that we're enmeshed in. I'm suggesting that it can also be used to think through politics and social movements in more complex ways, too, so that we're more open to their possibilities, more humble, more present, and more able to navigate and modulate stuff while remembering that we're not in charge and we don't know what will happen next.

Notes from Vibrant Matter

Below are a bunch of excerpts from Bennett, organized along some themes for future writing/thinking/rereading.

Vitality: "the capacity of things-edibles, commodities, storms, metals-not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans, but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. My aspiration is to articulae a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due" (viii)

- vitality is the beyond-objects of objects themselves, when they become 'things' with 'thing-power:' "the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle" (6).

Three tasks of the book:

1) to paint a positive ontology of vibrant matter, which stretches concepts of agency, action, and freedom sometimes to the breaking point

2) to dissipate the onto-theological binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determination, and organic/inorganic, husing arguments and other rhetorical means to induce in human bodies an aesthetic-affective openness to material vitality

3) to sketch a style of political analysis that can better account for the contributions of nonhuman actants (x)

Political implications: "to encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things. A guiding question: How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies?" "how, for example, would patterns of consumption change if we faced not litter, rubbish, trash, or "the recycling," but an accumulating pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter?" (viii).

- micropolitics, sensibility, and habits are important: "the bodily disciplines through which ethical sensibilities and social relations are formed and reformed are themselves political and constitute a whole (underexplored) field of micropolitics... there will be no greening of the economy, no redistribution of wealth, no enforcement or extension of rights without human dispositions, moods, and cultural ensembles hospitable to these effects" (xii).

Politics defined: "politics as a political ecology and a notion of publics as human-nonhuman collectives that are provoked into existence by a shared experience of harm" (xix)

Publics and problems: Bennett draws on Dewey to suggest that "a public does not preexist its particular problem but emerges in response to it:" "when diverse bodies suddenly draw near and form a public, they have been provoked to do so by a problem, that is, by the 'indirect, serious, and enduring' consequences of 'conjoint aciton'" (100). These publics and their provocations aren't under the control over any rational plan, deliberate intention, or efficient cause: "any action is always a trans-action, and any act is really but an initiative that gives birth to a cascade of legitimate and bastard progeny" (101).

- The field of politics is an ecology: No one body owns its supposedly own contemporaneous endeavors, each with its own duration and intensity, with endeavors that are losing or gaining momentum, rippling into and recombining with others... conjoint actions generate 'multitudinous consequences, ' and each of these consequences 'crosses the others' to generate its own problems, and thus its own publics or 'group of persons especially affected" (101)

This means that a public is conceptualized "as a set of bodies affected by a common problem generated by a pulsing swarm of activities" (101). Members of publics don't voluntarily join; they are inducted into it: "each body finds itself thrown together with other harmed and squirming bodies" (101).

The members of a public are defined by their affective capacity: "problems give rise to publics, publics are groups of bodies with the capacity to affect and be affected; problems are signals that would-be or protomembers of a public had already encountered the indirect effects of other endeavoring bodies, effects that have decreased the capacity for action of the protomembers. A public is a cluster of bodies harmed by the actions of others or even by actions born from their own actions as these trans-act; harmed bodies draw near each other and seek to engage in new acts that will restore their power, protect against future harm, or comptensate for damage done-in that consists their political action, which, fortunately or unfortunately, will also become conjoint action with a chain of indirect, unpredictable consequences" (101)

The public as the appropriate unit of analysis: "if human culture is inextricably enmeshed with vibrant, nonhuman agencies, and if human intentionality can be agentic only if accompanied by a vast entourage of nonhumans, then it seems that the appropriate unit of analysis for democratic theory is neither the individual human nor an exclusively human collective but the (ontologically heterogeneous) 'public' coalescing around a problem" (108).

- Political pragmatism, then, is less about intentions and more about effects, making 'responsibility' "more a matter of responding to harms than of identifying objects of blame" (102).

In naming a problem, rather than an act of will, as the driving force behind the formation of a public, Dewey (almost) acknowledges that a political action need not originate in human bodies at all. For is it not the case that some of the intiatives that conjoin and cause harm started (or later became conjoined with) the vibrant bodies of animals, plants, metals, or machines?" (102)

So where is human action and perception in all this? "A pragmatic approach to politics, which emphasizes problem solving, may call forth... action-oriented perception. For are not human bodies the ones best equipped to analyze a problem and devise strategies for its solution? All kinds of bodies may be able to join forces, but a pragmatist would be quick to note that only some bodies can make this association into a task force" (102).

- Bennett's notion of 'problems' is promising but too limited; she sees problems as something to be 'solved' because all that they produce (or what's most significant) is the 'harm' they cause to members of a public. But why is harm and its solution the only way that problems come into existence and elicit responses? What about when people formulate different kinds of problems, especially ones with no clear solution? Then it would be a question of producing publics and responding to problems, without any hope, horizon, or telos of a solution. In fact, responses to problems might intensify them, rather than getting rid of them, and this intensification of problems is crucial for thinking through politics.

This kind of disruptive politics is thinkable through her treatment of Ranciere, where she notes "a potentially disruptive human force that exists within (though is not recognized by) the public" (105). The ultimate democratic act is the exposure of "the arbitrariness of the dominant partition of the sensible," the partition which "had been rendering some people visible as political actors while pushing others below the threshold of note" (105). Politics "is the name of a singular disruption of this order of distribution of bodies" (105).
Politics gets defined by the effects generated: "a political act not only disrupts, it disrupts in such a way as to change radically what people can 'see': it repartitions the sensible; it overthrows the regime of the perceptible" (107). These disruptive elements can be nonhuman things as well: "we see how an animal, plant, mineral, or artifact can sometimes catalyze a public, and we might then see how to devise more effective (experimental) tactics for enhancing or weakening that public" (107).

Subject/object and beyond: a concept used to short-circuit the subject/object binary is the actant: "a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events." It's "competence is deduced from its performance rather than posited in advance of the action" (viii)

- this project entails bracketing the question of the subject (or at least the centering of the subject) and "elide the rich and diverse literature on subjectivity and its genesis, its conditions of possibility, and its boundaries (ix).

- Instead Bennett focuses on what's normally "cast in the shadow: the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things

- Why? "My hunch is that the image of deador thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption" (ix).

- We are prevented "from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies" and these "material powers, which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us, in any case call for our attentiveness, or even 'respect'" (ix).

- Reading difference 'horizontally' doesn't mean erasing all difference: the point is to dissipate the naturalized hierarchies of difference, and see their complex entanglements in making things happen and making each other possible

"To put it bluntly, my conatus will not let me 'horizontalize' the world completely. I also identify with members of my species, insofar as they are bodies most similar to mine. I so identify even as I seek to extend awareness of our interinvolvements and interdependencies. The political goal of a vital matieralism is not the perfect equality of actants, but a polity with more channels of communication between members... How can humans learn to hear or enhance our receptivity for 'propositions' not expressed in words?" (104).

- Even human power is a kind of thing-power: "the case for matter as active needs also to readjust the status of human actants: not by denying humanity's awesome, awful powers, but by representing these powers as evidence of our own constitution as vital materiality... at one level this claim is uncontroversial: it is easy to acknowledge that humans are composed of various material parts (the minerality of our bones, or the metal of our blood, or the electricity of our neurons). But it is more challenging to conceive of these materials as lively and self-organizing, rather than as passive or mechanical means under the direction of something non-material, that is, an active soul or mind (10)

My 'own' body is material, and yet this vital materiality is not fully or exclusively human. My fliesh is populated and constituted by different swarms of foreigners... the bacteria in the human microbiome collectively possess at least 100 times as many genese as the mere 20,000 or so in the human genome... we are, rather, an array of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes. If more people marked this fact more of the time, if we were more attentive to the indispensable foreignness that we are, would we continue to produce and consume in the same violently reckless ways?" (112-13)

- Anthropomorphism might be dangerous, but it's also helpful in moving beyond the subject/object binary: "a touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations. In revealing similarities across categorical divides and lighting up structural parallels between material forms in "nature" and those in "culture," anthropomorphism can reveal isomorphisms " (99).

- It's not that humans are no different from the rest of the world, but rather "there is no necessity to describe these differences in a way that places humans at the ontological center or hierarchical apex" (11)

- Vs. moral panic: Bennett acknowledges the worry that the erasure of these hierarchies worries people, because it seems to "authorize the treatment of people as mere things; in other words, that a strong distinction between subjects and objects is needed to prevent the instrumentalization of humans" (12). These critics worry about losing the human-centric ontology because they want to preserve a moral ground for privileging human over germ, or for condemning human-to-human instrumentalization (12).

Bennett's responses: [1] acknowledge subject/object distinction has sometimes worked to prevent human suffering; [2] note that this implies human instrumentalization of non-human life is alright; [3] note that "the Kantian imperative to treat humanity always as an end-in-itself and never merely as a means does not have a stellar record of success in preventing human suffering or promoting human well-being (12)

Instead: "open up space for forms of ethical practice that do not rely upon the image of an intrinsically hierarchical order of things. Here the materialist speaks of promoting healthy and enabling instrumentalizations, rather than of treating people as ends in themselves, because to face up to the compound nature of the human self is to find it difficult even to make sense of the notion of a single end-in-itself. What instead appears is a swarm of competing ends being pursued simultaneously in each individual, some of which are healthy to the whole, some of which are not" (12).
"All bodies become more than mere objects, as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper relief. Vital materialism would thus set up a kind of safety net for those humans who are now, in a world where Kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to suffer because they do not conform to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other) model of personhood. The ethical aim becomes to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such. Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations." (13)

- The ethical task: "For the vital materialist, the starting point of ethics is... the recognition of human participation in a shared, vital materialist. We are vital materialist and we are surrounded by it, though we don't always see it that way. The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it (14)

"The self-criticism of conceptualization, a sensory attentiveness to the qualitative singularities of the object, the exercise of an unrealistic imagination, and the courage of a clown: by means of such practices one might replace the "rage" against nonidentity with a respect for it, a respect that chastens our will to mastery" (15)

Vitality: "the capacity of things-edibles, commodities, storms, metals-not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans, but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. My aspiration is to articulae a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due" (viii)

- vitality is the beyond-objects of objects themselves, when they become 'things' with 'thing-power:' "the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle" (6).

- We can only glimpse this, and Bennett tells a story of one of her glimpses, where a glove, some pollen, dead rat, a bottle cap and a stick provoked affects in her, and strike her with the awareness of their singularity "I caught a glimpse of an energetic vitality inside each of these things, things that I generally conceived as inert. In this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is as vidvid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects et them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics" (5)

- This helps reveal that capitalist materialism is actually an anti-matieralism: "the sheer vlolume of commodiites, and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter" (5). In contrast, "a vital materiality can never really be thrown 'away,' for it continues its activities even as a discarded or unwanted commodity

- Vibrant matter is alive, but not in the way we typically conceive of aliveness: The worms that Darwin studied are "neither an expression of divine purpose" (they don't have a teleological purpose) but nor are they "reducible to an unvarying mechanical instinct" (their actions vary as they affect and are affected-embedded in different assemblages) (98)

- "are there more everyday tactics for cultivating an ability to discern the vitality of matter? One might be to allow oneself, as did Charles Darwin, to anthropomorophize, to relax into resemblances discerned across ontological divides: you (mis)take the wind outside at night for your father's wheezy breathing in the next room; you get up too fast and see starts; a planstic topographical map reminds you of the veins on the back of your hand... Maybe it is worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphizing (superstition, the divinization of nature, romanticism) because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism: a chord is struck between person and thing, and I am no longer above or outside a nonhuman 'environment' (120).

Non-organic life is alive: "even the humblest forms of matter and energy have the potential for self-organization... there are, for instance, those coherent waves called solitons which form in many different types of materials, ranging from ocean waters (where they are called tsunamis) to lasers. Then there are... stable states (or attractors), which can sustain coherent cyclic activity... finally, and unlike the previous examples of nonlinear self-organization where true innovation cannot occur, therare are the different combination into which entities derived from the previous processes (crystals, coherent pulses, cyclic patterns) may enter. When put together, these forms of spontaneous structural generation suggest that inorganic matter is much more variable and creative than we ever imagined (7)

- Delanda: "soft tissue (gels and aerosols, muscle and nerve) reigned supreme until 5000 million years ago. At that point, some of the conglomerations of fleshy matter-energy that made up life underwent a sudden mineralization, and a new material for constructing living creatures emerged: bone. It is almost as if the mineral world that had served as a substratum for the emergence of biological creatures was reasserting itself. Mineralization names the creative agency by which bone was produced, and bones then made new forms of movement control possible for animals, freeing them from amany constraints and literally setting them into motion to conquer every available niche in the air, in water, and on land... in the long and slow time of evolution, then, mineral appears as the mover and shaker, the active power, and human beings, with their much-lauded capacity for self-directed action, appear as its product" (11).

- Bennett argues that the "life-matter binary" is "the dominant organizational principle of adult experience" (20).

Rethinking agency and causality: Bennett tells the story of a court proceeding where gunshot residue analysis is used to prove that the defendant's hand had either fired a gun or been within three feet of a gun firing. The Gunpowder Residue Sampler is conceived as an 'object/witness:' this composite of glass, skin cells, glue, words, laws, metals, and human emotions had become an actant. Actant, recall, is Bruno Latour's term of a source of action; an actant can be human or not, or mostly likely, a combination of both. Latour defines it as "something that acts or to which activity is granted by others" (9). In Deleuze's terms, it's "quasi-causal operator" - "An operator is that which, by virtue of its being in the right place at the right time, becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event (9). Actant and operator are substitute words for what in a more subject centered vocabulary are called agents. Agentic capacity is now seen as differentially distributed across a wider range of ontological types" (9).

- "while the smallest or simplest body or bit may indeed express a vital impetus, conatus, or clinamen, an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces" (21)

- in social sciences, these problems arise in the 'structure/agency debate,' - structures are often attributed a powerful entities that constrain or work against human purposes, but, she argues, " The category of 'structur'e is ultimately unable to give force of things its due: a structure can only act negatively, as a constraint on human agency, or passively, as enabling background context for it. Active action or agency belongs to humans alone... There is no agency proper to assemblages, only the effervescence of the agency of individuals acting alone or in concert with each other. Structures, surroundings, and contexts make a difference to outcomes, but they are not quite vibrant matter" (29).

- Bennett is in favour of a concept of distributive agency, which "does not posit a subject as the root cause of an effect" (31). This is distinguished from traditions that define agency as a moral capacity linked to "an advance plan or an intention" (31). "there are instead always a swarm of vitalities at play. The task becomes to identify the contours of the swarm, and the kind of relations that obtain between its bits... this understanding of agency does not deny the existence of that trhust called itnetionality, but it does see it as less definitive of outcomes. It loosens the connections between efficacy and the moral subject, bringing efficacy closer to the idea of the power to make a difference that calls for a response" (32).

- Agency is also bound up with idea of directionality, Bennett says: "a trajectory, a directionality or movement away from somewhere even if the toward-which it moves is obscure or even absent" (32). Bennett points to Derrida's formulation of messianicity: "the open-ended promissory quality of a claim, image, or entity... things in the world appear to us at all only because they tantalize and hold us in suspense, aluding to a fullness that is elsewhere, to a future that, apparently, is on its way (32).

- Towards an impersonal account of events and distributed agencies: "There are events. I never act; I am always slightly surprised by what I do. That which acts through me is also surprised by what I do, by the chance to mutate, to change, and to bifurcate" (103).

- It's also impossible to posit efficient causality: "if agency sis distributive or confederate, then instances of efficient causality, with its chain of simple bodies acting as the sole impetus fro the next effect, will be impossibly rare... here causality is more emergent then efficient, more fractal than linear. Instead of an effect obedient to a determinant, one finds circuits in which effect and cause alternate position and redound on each other" (33). There's no such thing as efficient causality: "elements by themselves probably never cause anything. They become origins of events if and when they crystallize into fixed and definite forms. Then, and only then, can we trace their history backwards. The event illuminates its own past, but it an never be deduced from it" (34). For this reasons, sources can only be revealed retroactively; causes are back-projections, and "what makes the event happen is precisely the contingent coming together of a set of elements" (34).

"In a world of lively matter, we see that biochemical and biochemical-social systems can sometimes unexpectedly bifurcate or choose developmental paths that could not have been foreseen, for they are governed by an emergent rather than a linear or deterministic causality. And once we see this, we will need an alternative both to the idea of nature as a purposive, harmonious process and to the idea of nature as a blind mechanism. A vital materialism interrupts both the teleological organicism of some ecologists and the machine image of nature governing many of their opponents" (112)

- This kind of distributed agency calls for a new model of political responsibility, because responsibility is always-already attributable to a human-nonhuman assemblage (not an autonomous subject): "On lose-enough inspection, the productive power that has engendered an effect will turn out to be a confederacy, and the human actants within it will themselves turn out to be confederations of tools, microbes, minerals, sounds, and other 'foreign' materialities. Human intentionality can emerge only by way of such a distribution. The agency of assemblages is not the strong, autonomous kind of agency to which Augustine or Kant (or an omnipotent God) aspired; this is because the relationship between tendencies and outcomes or between trajectories and effects is imagined as more porous, tenuous, and thus indirect (36).

Autonomy and strong responsibility seem to me to be empirically false, and thus their invocation seems tinged with injustice.

So what then? "The notion of a confederate agency does attenuate the blame game, but it does not thereby abandon the sources of harmful effects. To the contrary, such a notion broadens the range of places to look for sources

Perhaps the ethical responsibility of an indivudal human now resides in one's response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating: Do I attempt to extricate myself from my assemblages whose trajectory is likely to do harm? Do I enter into proximity of assemblages whose conglomerate effecitvity tends toward the enactment of nobler ends?" (37-8)

This doesn't preclude outrage, either: "outrage will not and should not disappear, but a politics devoted too exclusively to moral condenation and not enough to a cultivated discernment of the web of agentic capacities can do little good... an understanding of agncy as distributve and confederate thus reinvokes the need to detach ethics from moralism and to produce guides to action appropriate to a world of vital, cross-cutting forces" (38)

Assemblages: help understand agency "as a confederation of human and nonhuman elements" - they are "ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts (23).

- Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within (24)

- "The effects generated by an assemblage are, rather, emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to make something happen (a newly inflected materialism, a blackout, a hurricane, a war on terror) is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality considered alone" (24)

- An assemblage "not only has a distinctive history of formation but a finite life span" (24)

- Bennett's example of an assemblage is the power grid, and the blackout that occurred through a complex conflagration of circumstances and events. This helps show how there's no single agent or cause in the blackout; the grid has a life (composed of many lives) of its own: "I have been suggesting that there is not so uch a doer (an agent) behind the deed (the blackout) as a doing and an effecting by a human-nonhuman assemblage. This federation of actants is a creature that the concept of moral responsibility fit only loosely and to which the charge of blame will not quite stick" (28)

- How assemblages change: "When a member-actant, in the midst of a process of self-alteration, becomes out of sync with its (previous) self, when, if you like, it is in a reactive-power state, it can form new sets of relations in the assemblage and be drawn toward a different set of allies" (35)

- It's not a structure: It is because of the creative activity within actants that the agency of assemblages is not best described in terms of social structures, a locution that designates a stolid whole whose fficacy resides only in its conditioning recalcitrance or capacity to obstruct" (35).

- Ecological assemblages: The worms studied by Darwin were part of an assemblage, and "this assemblage is an interconnected series of parts, but it is not a fixed order of parts, for the order is always being reworked in accordance with a certain "freedom of choice" exercised by its actants (97).

Bennett discusses Bruno Latour's investigation of a forest-savanna ecotone, in which scientists are trying to figure out whether the forest is receding or advancing, and what's making this happen: these questions presume "a kind of vegetal agency in a natural system understood not as a mechanical order of fixed laws but as the scene of not-fuly-predictable encounters between multiple kinds of actants. Savanna vegetation, forest trees, soil, soil microorganisms, and humans native and exotic to the rainforest are all responding, in real time and without predetermined outcome, to each other and to the colletive force of the shifting configurations that form (97).
"It is difficult to pinpoint just who or what was the key operator or "assemblage converter" here: The worms? Their diet? The aluminum excrement? Had the human inhabtants of the rainfest done something to make the worms migrate? These various materialities do not exercise exactly the same kind of agency, but neither is it easy to arrangem them into a hierarchy, for in some times and places, the "small agency" of the lowly worm makes more of a difference than the grand agency of humans" (98)

'Environment' or 'context' assumes a passive or structuring/constraining background: "it is difficult, for example, for a public convened by environmentalism to include animals, vegetables, or minerals as bona fide members, for nonhumans are already named as a passive environment or perhaps a recalcitrant context for human action. A more materialist public would need to include more earthlings in the swarm of actants" (111)

If environmentalism lea to the call for the protection and wise management of an ecosystem that surrounds us, a vital matieralism suggests that the task is to engage more strategically with a trenchant materialist that is us as it vies with us in agentic assemblages" (111)

"Admit that humans have crawled or secreted themselves into every corner of the environment; admit that the environment is actually inside human bodies and minds, and then proceed politically, technologically, scientifically, in everyday life, with careful forbearance, as you might with unruly relatives to whom you are inextricably bound and with whom you will engage over a l8ifetime, like it or not. Give up the futile attempt to disentangle the human from the nonhuman. Seek instead to engage more civilly, strategically, and subtly with the nonhumans in the assemblages in which you, too, participate" (116)

Bennett also uses these insights about ecological assemblages to trouble ideas about 'treading lightly:' "According to this maxim, I should try to minimize the impact of my actions so as to minimize the damage or destruction of other things with which I share existence" but "If I live not as a human subject who confronts natural and cultural objects but as one of many conative actants swarming and competing with each other, then frugality is too simple a maxim. Sometimes ecohealth will require individuals and collectives to back off or ramp down their activeness, and sometimes it will call for grander, more dramatic and violent expenditures of human energy" (122).

Guattari on ecological assemblages: "The modern period of intense techno-scientific transofmrations has degraded both the impersonal environment and our own sociopsychic netowrks: air, water, and soil are contaminated as kinship networks tend to be reduced to a bare minimum; domestic life is being poisoned by the gangrene of mass-media consumption; family and married life are frequently 'ossified' by a sort of standardization of behavior; and neighbourhood relations are generally reduced to their meanest expression" (113).
Guattari calls this assemblage "integrated world capitalism" and it "works to manufacture the particular psychosocial self in the interest of which environmentalism is initially pursued. It doe sso by means of various modules of subjectification,' which include ideological as well as (Foucauldian) disciplinary components, all designed to organize bodily energies (including the 'intensive' forces of the unconscious) into the form of the consumer self" (114). The political task is to create and deploy "new modules of subjectification." In addition to reforms, the creation of different worlds will require "new micropolitical and microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetic and analytic practices regarding the formation of the unconscious" (114)

Spinoza and affect: "I invoke his idea of conative bodies that strive to enhance their power of activity by forming alliances with other bodies, and I share his faith that everything is made of the same substance" (x).

- I now emphasize even more how the figure of enchantment points in two directions: the first towards the humans who feel enchanted and whose agentic capacities may thereby be strengthened, and the second toward the agency of the things that produce (helpful, harmful) effects in human and other bodies. Organic and inorganic bodies, natural and cultural objects (these distinctions are not particularly salient here) all are affective. I am here drawing on a Spinozist notion of affect, which refers broadly to the capacity of any body for activity and responsiveness. Deleuze and Guattari put it this way: "We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body..." (xii)

- "Affects create a field of forces that do not tend to congeal into subjectivity

- "Spinoza's conative bodies are also associative or (one could even say) social bodies, in the sense that each is, by its very nature as a body, continuously affecting and being affected by other bodies... the power of a body to affect other bodies includes a corresponding and inseparable capacity to be affected; there are two equally actual powers, that of acting, and that of suffering action, which vary inversely with one to the other, but whose sum is both constant and constantly effective. Spinoza's conative, encounter-proone body arises in the context of an ontogloigcal vision according to which all things are 'modes' of a common 'substance' (21).

"Every mode is itself a mosaic or assemblage of many simple bodies;" all existing modes are actually composed of a great number of parts (22)

All bodies are conative: "conatus is expressed as a stubbornness or inertial tendency to persist; in the case of a complex body or mode, conatus refers to the effort required to maintain the specific relation of 'movement and rest' that obtains between its parts, a relation that defines the mode as what it is (22).

This maintenance "is not a process of mere repetition of the same, for it entails continual invention: because each mode suffers the actions on it by other modes, actions that disrupt the relation fo movement and rest characterizing each mode, every mode, if it is to persist, must seek new encounters to creatively compensate for the alteration or affections it suffers. What it means to be a 'mode', then, is to form alliances and enter assemblages: it is to mod(e)ify and be modified by others... each mode vies with and against the (changing) affections of (a changing set of) other odes, all the while being subject o the elemnt of chance or contingency intrinsic in the encounter (22)

Bodies enhance their power in or as a heterogeneous assemblage. What this suggests for the concept of agency is that the efficacy or effectivity to which that term has traditionally referred becomes distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field, rather than being a capacity localized in a human body or in a collective produced (only) by human efforts

Example: this book - "The sentences of this book also emerged from the confederate agency of many striving macro- and microactants: from 'my' memories, intentions, contentions, intestinal bacteria, eyeglasses, and blood sugar, as well as from the plastic computer keyboard, the bird song from the open window, or the air or particulates in the room, to name only a few of the participants. What is at work here on the page is an animal-vegetable-mineral-sonority cluster with a particular degree and duration of power (23)

Limits of critique and demystification (vs paranoid theory, towards affirmation and creation of alternatives): "For this task, demystification, that most popular of practices in critical theory, should be used with caution and sparingly, because demystification presumes that at the heart of any event or process lies a human agency that illicitly has been projected into things. This hermeneutics of suspicion calls for theorists to be on high alert for signs of the secret truth (a human will to power) below the false appearance of nonhuman agency" (xiv)

- "there are limits to its political efficacy, among them that exposes of illegality, greed, mendacity, oligarchy, or hypocrisy do not reliably produce moral outrage and that, if they do, this outrage may or may not spark ameliorative action" (xv)

- "ethical political action on the part of humans eems to require not only a vigilant critique of existing institutions but also positive, even utopian alternatives " (xv)

- Ultimately she says we need both: "we need both critique and positive formulations of alternatives, alternatives that will themselves become the objects of later critique and reform" (xv).

- The capacity to detect the presence of impersonal affect requires that one is caught up in it. One needs, at least for a while, to suspend suspicion and adopt a more open-ended comportment. If we think we already know what is out there, we will surely miss much of it " (xv).

- vs. constructivism: "There is a strong tendency among modern, secular, well-educated humans to refer such sighs back to a human agency conceived as its ultimate source. This impulse toward cultural, linguistic, or historical constructivism, which interprets any expression of thing-power as an effect of culture and the play of human powers, politicizes moralistic and oppressive oappeals to nature. And that is a good thing. But the constructivist response to the world also tends to obscure from view whatever thing-power there may be. There is thus something to be said for moments of methodological naivete, for the postponement of a genealogical critique of objects. This delay might render manifest a subsistent world of nonhuman vitality. To "render manifest" is both to receive and to participate in the shape given to that which is received. What is manifest arrives through humans but not entirely because of them" (17)

- "Vital materialists will thus try to linger in those moments during which they find themselves fascinated by objects, taking them as clues to the material vitality that they share with them. This sense of a strange and incomplete commonality with the out-side may induce vital materialists to treat nonhumans-animals, plants, earth, even artifacts and commodities-more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically. But how to develop this capacity for naivete?

- Relation to joyful militancy: Bennett discusses the Chinese concept of shi as the "mood or style of an open whole in which both the membership changes over time and the members themselves undergo internal alteration... The shi of a milieu can be obvious or subtle, it can operate at the very threshold of human perception or more violently a coffee house or a school house is a mobile configuration of people, insects, odors, ink, electrical flows, air currents, caffeine, tables, chairs, fluids, and sounds. Their shi might at one time consist in the mild and ephemeral effluence of good vibes, and at another in a more dramatic force capable of engendering a philosophical or political movement" (35). Shi can be joyful or sad, and it's a question of being open to it, and finding ways to shift the elements so that things change-even subtle shifts might make a difference, like being silly, or vulnerable, or moving outside.

Metatheory

- Thoreau's notion of the Wild + Deleuze's virtual + Foucault's unthought: "All three thinkers are trying to acknowledge a force that, though quite real and powerful, is intrinsically resistant to representation (xvi)

- Everything is connected and irreducible to a simple substrate, and Bennett recognizes that this "resonates with an ecological sensibility," but "in contrast to some versions of deep ecology, my monism posits neither a smooth harmony of parts nor a diversity unified by a common spirit. The formula here, writes Deleuze, is "ontologically one, formally diverse... a turbulent, immanent field in which various and variable materialities collide, congeal, morph, evolve, and disintegrate" (xi).

- This is not historical materialism (Deleuze > Marx/Adorno)

Historical materialism follows "the trail of human power to expose social hegemonies" but Bennett argues that "there is also public value in following the scent of a nonhuman, thingly power, athe material agency of natural bodies and technological artifacts" (xiii)

- Engagement w/ Foucault: F's genealogical project revealed the way is in which "the human body was disciplined, normalized, sped up and slowed down, gendered, sexed, nationalized, globalized, rendered disposable, or otherwise composed" This was materialist because these cultural practices fold into the body, and there's a "material recalcitrance of such cultural productions" and "the point was that cultural forms are themselves powerful, material assemblages with resistant force" (1). Bennett distinguishes her project from this Foucauldian one because she seeks "to highlight a positive, productive power" of things themselves; "instead of focusing on collectives conceived primarily as conglomerates of human designs and practices ("discourse"), I will highlight the active role of nonhuman materials in public life. In short, I will try to give a voice to thing-power" (2)

In other words, she is trying to point to the 'out-side' and the unrepresentable: "a not-quite-human force that addled and altered human and other bodies"-this thing is at the limit of knowledge, the not-knowable, but Bennett emphasizes that this epistemological viewpoint is less important than the ontological one: not knowing objects and forces, but focusing on what they can do (3)

This required "a certain anticipatory readiness" to perceive this thing-power; "a perceptual style open to the appearance of thing-power" (5)

- Vs phenomenology; it's human-centric: Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception was designed to avoid placing too much weight on human will, intentionality, or reason. It focused instead on the embodied character of human action, through its concept of motor intentionality, and on the agentic contributions made by an intersubjective field" (30). Bennett takes on Coole's reworking of Merleau-Ponty, which attempts to push beyond any single intentionality or subject, but Bennett says "though Coole's spectrum gives no special privilege to the human individual, it recognizes only human powers: human biological and neurological processes, human personalities, human social practices and institutions. Coole limits the spectrum in this way because she is interested in a specifically political kind of agency, and for her politics is an exclusively human affair (30)

Criticisms: there's almost no mention of resistance or contention: the "us" and the "we" of Bennett is implicitly a homogenous humanity, and the ways that people and communities (and the assemblages they're a part of) is stripped of notions of contention, conflict, and social movements that have shaped us and brought us to the unsustainable status quo (and the conflictual assemblages that threaten it and already point and move in other directions).

- The "we" is often figured as a homogenous "human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption" (ix).

- what about relations of power? Does this get shunted into 'historical materialism' in the preface (xiii)

- Liberal bourgeois horizon of social change: greening of the economy, redistribution of wealth, enforcement or extension of rights (xii).

Others to look at: Romand Coles, Val Plumwood, Wade Sikorski, Freya Mathews, Wendell Berry, Angus Fletcher, Barry Lopez, and Barbara Kingslover

Materialist ecology ppl: Freya Mathews, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Gay Hawkins, Tim Ingold, N. Katherine Hayles, Karen Barad, Sarah Whatmore, Nick Bingham, Felix Guattari, Don Ihde, and WJT Mitchell have been making the call for more sustainable, less noxious modes of production and consumption in the name of a vigorous materiality rather than in the name of the environment

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This is a summary of Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter, along with some of my own arguments about the political implications of her work. Ok, disclaimer: this isn't really a summary. A friend read this post and noted that Jane Bennett doesn't even really cover some of the stuff I'm talking about below.

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Dag Casper,

Je had het erover dat je graag dingen in de ruimte zet. Ook gebruikte je mooie woorden als troostvol in relatie tot de objecten van je werk en hoe ze zijn geplaatst tot elkaar. Waarschijnlijk kwam je daarop door het gepraat uit het maken. We hadden het erover om dat je schrijfsels gaat maken van je proces. Getypt op mooi papier, spelend met de rust van de wit ruimtes. Misschien is het nog interessant om te kijken naar haiku’s. Lees bijvoorbeeld deze van Matsuo Basho, hij is een van de grootste haiku-meesters uit de Japanse poëziewereld:

Ach oude vijver                            Furu ike ya

Een kikker springt erin               Kawazu tobikomu

Geluid van water                        mizu no oto

Ik had deze al een keer eerder bij jou in de Silex gedaan.

De haiku doet denken aan de boom die wordt geschud.  Mogelijk kun je eerst schrijfsels maken op papier in relatie tot je proces. Kijken wat voor gepraat uit het maken komt. Deze aantekeningen verzamelen. Je kunt ook gebruik maken van schetsjes en die in je tekst doen. Omcirkel ook citaten uit de boeken die je leest die mogelijk op een bepaald moment bruikbaar zijn in je tekst. Kijk ook wanneer je in het schrijven terug denkt aan je ervaringen in Japan wanneer het zich aandient. Misschien dat Mono-ha nog interessant voor je kan zijn, stond al je in je Silex. Mogelijk zie in de loop van het proces ook relatie met de kunstenaars die je al had verzamelt in je Silex, hoe zij ruimte en objecten gebruiken en hoe dat zich verhoudt tot jouw werk/onderzoek. Het kan zich in het schrijfproces aandienen. Ik heb ook nog een paar denkers als Heiddegger en Material Vitalism toevoegd. Net als. Shinto staan ze stil bij de kracht die het materiaal al in zich heeft. Bij jouw hebben objecten hun eigen emoties. Je wordt in de sfeer gebracht door de objecten die tegen je lijken te praten. Objecten hebben hun eigen karakter. Mogelijk vetellen ze wie ze zijn als je behandelt in het maken. Maar er is ook natuurlijk humor. Kunnen masculiene hoekige en zware objecten zichzelf voor de gek houden en een zachtheid toelaten? Hebben ze zelfspot? Ook is er een kunsttraditie met Zen, zie toevoegingen in Silex

Groet,

Hille

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The veins of water that pour from the earth flow in trickles that merge, like the branches in the trunk, like the fingers in the palm of a hand, like the bronze in the matrix of a tree.
-Giuseppe Penone

Throughout his fifty-year career, Giuseppe Penone has employed a wide range of materials and forms in an exploration of the fundamental language of sculpture. A protagonist of Arte Povera, Penone explores respiration, growth, and aging-among other involuntary processes-to create an expansive body of work including sculpture, performance, works on paper, and photography.

Penone's early performance-based works evolved in direct response to the forests near his native village of Garessio, Italy, where he interacted with trees, water, and marble. In the Alpi Marittime ( Maritime Alps) works(1968), his gestures and interventions left physical traces over extended periods of time: tree trunks were distorted by copper wire, stones, and bronze casts of the artist's hand; mechanisms made of ropes and deer hides reacted to the weather; and casts of Penone's face, hands, and feet were immersed in a stream bed.

In 1969 Penone created the first of his Alberi ( Trees): "stripped" trees made by carving into mature timbers and removing the wood along the outer growth rings to reveal the memory of a sapling at the core of the trunk. This ongoing series has taken on various permutations as Penone refines his techniques and experiments with different sizes and installations. In 1970 he even carved an Albero in the presence of an audience, merging sculpture and performance. This same year he made the Rovesciare i propri occhi ( Reversing One's Eyes) works, in which he wore custom-made mirrored contact lenses and had himself photographed. The lenses, though they deprived the artist of his own gaze, allowed him to objectively record images, literally reflecting his surroundings.

During this period Penone also began to explore different ways of documenting his work, as well as his body's interactions with sculpture. In the Svolgere la propria pelle ( To Unroll One's Skin) series (1970-71), he captured the intricate patterns of rock and bark, skin and hair, through frottage (taking rubbings on sheets of paper), imprints (pressing his body into surfaces), and photography. Then, with the Soffi ( Breath) works (1977-), Penone attempted to translate into sculpture the ephemeral phenomenon of breath. He took photographs of light powder that he had blown into the air and translated the cloud-like forms into bronze sculptures, drawings, and vase-like constructions.

Essere fiume ( To be a River, 1981) marked an important turning point in Penone's practice. Extracting chunks of stone or marble from the source of a river, he carved them so that they resembled the smaller, smoother stones at the bottom of the riverbed, mimicking the effects of water on the rocks' shape and size. Then, returning to an investigation of the figure, Penone began the Gesti vegetali ( Vegetal Gestures)works (1982-), hollow anthropomorphic sculptures whose forms were based on single gestures or movements.

In the 1990s Penone worked on the Anatomie ( Anatomies, 1992-), which included Carrara marble and other stones carved in high relief to echo vascular and muscular systems, as well as the Propagazioni ( Propagations, 1995), a series of drawings based on the concentric linear patterns of a fingerprint. Since then he has continued to expand upon many of his earlier series and to work on the Idee di pietra ( Ideas of Stone) sculptures (2003-), in which he juxtaposes rocks and trees to highlight the balance between verticality and horizontality and the interplay of gravity and growth. Penone has also designed two gardens, one in Turin and one in the Reggia di Venaria in Piedmont.

In Penone's work, sculptural transformations draw the viewer's attention to details that have long existed but are easily overlooked. By bringing the grandeur-as well as the modesty and intimacy-of raw but also cultural material into various settings, Penone raises questions about sculpture and its essence.

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Learn about the work and career of artist Giuseppe Penone. Artworks, biography, exhibitions, editorial content, news, museum exhibitions, press, and more.

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Aphorisms for Thirsty Fish: The Lost Writings of Wu Hsin

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The Lost Writings of Wu Hsin are a timeless trove of wisdom for navigating the world and living a more meaningful life.

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Post 1

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Japanese Aesthetics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Although the Japanese have been producing great art and writing about
it for many centuries, including a rich tradition of poetics going
back a millennium, the philosophical discipline in Japan corresponding
to Western “aesthetics” did not get underway until the
nineteenth century. A good way to sur…

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De manier waarop hij zijn naam schrijft - herman de vries (Alkmaar, 1931) - vertelt veel over zijn manier van werken en denken. De vries vermijdt het gebruik van hoofdletters: hij vindt dat er geen hiërarchie bestaat tussen de dingen.

De vries raakt in de jaren 60 betrokken bij de Nederlandse Nul-beweging, verwant aan de internationale avant-gardistengroep ZERO, waarin serialiteit, neutraliteit en herhaling belangrijke kernidealen zijn. In 1975 begint hij zich meer en meer te richten op de processen en fenomenen van de natuur. In Steigerwald, het bos rondom zijn woonplaats Eschenau in Duitsland, kan een rottende boomstronk dagenlang door de vries bestudeerd worden, tot het moment dat deze de perfecte vorm heeft. Deze 'sculptuur' voegt de vries vervolgens, als een ready made, toe aan zijn verzameling. Aan teruggeven doet de vries ook: in het bos plaatst hij blokken zandsteen, die hij grafeert met teksten als 'veritas existentiae' - de waarheid van wat is.

Volgorde en ordening zijn belangrijke principes binnen de vries' oeuvre. Titels als infinity in finity, no thing en to be all ways to be spelen met klank, eenheid en diversiteit. Met name to be all ways to be, de noemer waarmee de vries in 2015 Nederland vertegenwoordigt op de 56ste Biënnale van Venetië, zinspeelt op het idee dat deze zes woorden ook in een andere volgorde kunnen komen te staan.

Hier openbaart zich de filosofie van de praktijk van de vries: het ordenen van wat is en daarmee de aandacht willen vestigen op zowel de eenheid als de diversiteit van wat er zich om ons heen bevindt. Vandaar ook de directe manier waarop de vries zijn werk toont - ingelijste gevonden voorwerpen, variërend van stukjes glas tot konijnenkeutels en van gesteente tot verschillende soorten aarde. Zijn doel is de poëzie van de dingen in de dingen centraal te stellen en te tonen.

De vries is opgeleid als bioloog en natuuronderzoeker aan de Rijkstuinbouwschool in Hoorn (1949-1951) en was als plantkundige werkzaam voor de Plantenziektekundige Dienst in Wageningen (1952-1956). Exposities van zijn werk waren te zien in het Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Borzo (Amsterdam) en het Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo). Werk van de vries bevindt zich in museumcollecties over de hele wereld.

REGISSEUR VAN DIT PORTRET:

Barbara Makkinga

Camera: Richard van Oosterhout

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De manier waarop hij zijn naam schrijft - herman de vries (Alkmaar, 1931) - vertelt veel over zijn manier van werken en denken. De vries vermijdt het gebruik van hoofdletters: hij vindt dat er geen hiërarchie bestaat tussen de dingen.

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Dag Casper,

We hadden het erover om je schrijfsels te verzamelen en dat je daar een aantal uitpakt. Mogelijk kun je kijken of je daar een essay uit kunt maken (gebruik ook je poezie dat voor zichzelf kan spreken, mogelijk kunnen de poetische aforismen van Kenko en Min Sih (heeft nooit bestaan, is door iemand bedacht) een inspiratie zijn. Zijn een beetje in Mogelijk ga je verbanden zien en komen er ook nieuwe gedachten op. Je kunt in je schrijven ook gebruik maken van bronnen uit de Samoerai, je kennis over Ikigai, enzovoort. Mogelijk passen er elementen in. Je hoeft ze niet zozeer uitgebreid te lezen, maar wat gedachten komen mogelijk in je op die je van die bron herinnert en hoe verhouden die zich tot je schrijfsels. Ook dat beeldend verhaal wat je vertelde over de tuin, dat die boeddha aan die boom schudde. Dit deed me denken aan het esthetisch concept uit Japanse esthetica:

A distinctive notion in Japanese aesthetic discourse is that of the “cut” (kire) or, “cut-continuity” (kire-tsuzuki).

Zen Buddhism

Zen master Hakuin (1686–1769). For Hakuin the aim of “seeing into one’s own nature” can only be realized if one has “cut off the root of life”: “You must be prepared to let go your hold when hanging from a sheer precipice, to die and return again to life”

Cutting also appears in the “cut-syllable” (kireji) in the art of haiku poetry, which cuts off one image from—at the same time as it links it to—the next. There is a famous cut-syllable, ya, at the end of the first line of the best known haiku by Bashō, the most famous haiku poet:

Furuike ya
Kawazu tobikomu
Mizu no oto.

Ah, an ancient pond—
Suddenly a frog jumps in!
The sound of water.

The most distinctively Japanese style of garden, the “dry landscape” (karesansui) garden, owes its existence to the landscape’s being “cut off” from the natural world beyond its borders. The epitome of this style is the rock garden at Ryōanji in Kyoto, where fifteen “mountain”-shaped rocks are set in beds of moss in a rectangular “sea” of white gravel.

Zie post 1

Herman de Vries is ook door het schoonheidsconcept van het oosten geïnspireerd. Zie post 2.

Mogelijk kun je ook je eigen woorden vinden voor dingen, wat bijvoorbeeld schoonheid voor je betekent.

Porbeer vanuit je schrijfsels een verband te leggen met je werk

Groet,

Hille

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#YoshidaKenko#Kenko#JapaneseAesthetics

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Around the year 1330, a poet and Buddhist monk named Kenko wrote Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa) -an eccentric, sedate and gemlike assemblage of his thoughts on life, death, weather, manners, aesthetics, nature, drinking, conversational bores, sex, house design, the beauties of understatement and imperfection.

For a monk, Kenko was remarkably worldly; for a former imperial courtier, he was unusually spiritual. He was a fatalist and a crank. He articulated the Japanese aesthetic of beauty as something inherently impermanent-an aesthetic that acquires almost unbearable pertinence at moments when an earthquake and tsunami may shatter existing arrangements.

Kenko yearned for a golden age, a Japanese Camelot, when all was becoming and graceful. He worried that "nobody is left who knows the proper manner for hanging a quiver before the house of a man in disgrace with his majesty." He even regretted that no one remembered the correct shape of a torture rack or the appropriate way to attach a prisoner to it. He said deliberate cruelty is the worst of human offenses. He believed that "the art of governing a country is founded on thrift."

One or two of his essays are purely informational (not to say weird). One of my favorites is essay 49, which reads in its entirety: "You should never put the new antlers of a deer to your nose and smell them. They have little insects that crawl into the nose and devour the brain."

A sailor in rough seas may grip the rail and fix his eye on a distant object in order to steady himself and avoid seasickness. I read Kenko's essays for a similar reason.

Kenko lived on a different planet-planet Earth in the 14th century. But if you proceed on the vertical from the 14th century to the 21st, you become aware of a time-flex in which his intimations of degeneracy and decline resonate with our own. A kind of sonar: from Kenko our own thoughts bounce back across time with an alienated charm and a laugh of recognition.

Kenko had been a poet and courtier in Kyoto in the court of the emperor Go-Daigo. It was a time of turbulent change. Go-Daigo would be ousted and driven into exile by the regime of the Ashikaga shoguns. Kenko withdrew to a cottage, where he lived and composed the 243 essays of the Tsurezuregusa. It was believed that he brushed his thoughts on scraps of paper and pasted them to the cottage walls, and that after his death his friend the poet and general Imagawa Ryoshun removed the scraps and arranged them into the order in which they have passed into Japanese literature. (The wallpaper story was later questioned, but in any case, the essays survived.)

Kenko was a contemporary of Dante, another sometime public man and courtier who lived in exile in unstable times. Their minds, in ways, were worlds apart. The Divine Comedy contemplated the eternal; the Essays in Idleness meditated upon the evanescent. Dante wrote with beauty and limpidity and terrifying magnificence, Kenko with offhand charm. They talked about the end of the world in opposite terms: the Italian poet set himself up, part of the time, anyway, as the bureaucrat of suffering, codifying sins and devising terrible punishments. Kenko, despite his lament for the old-fashioned rack, wrote mostly about solecisms and gaucheries, and it was the Buddhist law of uncertainty that presided over his universe. The Divine Comedy is one of the monuments of world literature. The Essays in Idleness are lapidary, brief and not much known outside Japan.

Kenko wrote: "They speak of the degenerate, final phase of the world, yet how splendid is the ancient atmosphere, uncontaminated by the world, that still prevails within the palace walls." As Kenko's translator Donald Keene observed, there flows through the essays "the conviction that the world is steadily growing worse." It is perversely comforting to reflect that people have been anticipating the end of the world for so many centuries. Such persistent pessimism almost gives one hope.

There is consolation in knowing, too, that Kenko was a sailor at the rail, fixing his eye across the water: "The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known." Kenko is like a friend who reappears, after a long separation, and resumes your talk as if he had left the room for just a moment.

Kenko is charming, off-kilter, never gloomy. He is almost too intelligent to be gloomy, or in any case, too much a Buddhist. He writes in one of the essays: "A certain man once said, 'Surely nothing is so delightful as the moon,' but another man rejoined, 'The dew moves me even more.' How amusing that they should have argued the point."

He cherished the precarious: "The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty." He proposed a civilized aesthetic: "Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth." Perfection is banal. Better asymmetry and irregularity.

He stressed the importance of beginnings and endings, rather than mere vulgar fullness or success: "Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring-these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration."

At a time when flowers have been wilting, when assets dwindle and mere vulgar fullness may suggest something as unpromising as a portfolio managed by Bernard Madoff, the eye might appreciate a moon obscured by clouds.

Of houses, Kenko says: "A man's character, as a rule, may be known from the place where he lives." For example: "A house which multitudes of workmen have polished with every care, where strange and rare Chinese and Japanese furnishings are displayed, and even grasses and trees of the garden have been trained unnaturally, is ugly to look at and most depressing. A house should look lived in, unassuming." So much for the McMansion.

In a time of traumatic change, some writers or artists or composers may withdraw from the world in order to compose their own universe-Prospero's island.

That is how Montaigne, in the midst of France's 16th-century Catholic-Protestant wars, came to write his Essaies, which changed literature. After an estimable career as courtier under Charles IX, as member of the Bordeaux parliament, as a moderating friend of both Henry III and Henry of Navarre during the bloody wars of religion, Montaigne withdrew to the round tower on his family estate in Bordeaux. He announced: "In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out.... he has consecrated [this sweet ancestral retreat] to his freedom, tranquility and leisure."

The wood over his doorway was inscribed to read, "Que sais-je?" -"What do I know?"-the pre-eminent question of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. So, surrounded by his library of 1,500 books, he began to write.

Montaigne followed a method of composition much like Kenko's. In Japanese it is called zuihitsu, or "follow the brush"-that is, jot down the thoughts as they come to you. This may produce admirable results, if you are Kenko or Montaigne.

I find both to be stabilizing presences. A person's sense of balance depends upon the inner ear; it is to the inner ear that such writers speak. Sometimes I get the effect by taking a dip in the Bertie Wooster stories of P. G. Wodehouse, who wrote such wonderful sentences as this description of a solemn young clergyman: "He had the face of a sheep with a secret sorrow." Wodehouse, too, would eventually live in exile (both geographical and psychological), in a cottage on Long Island, remote from his native England. He composed a Bertie Wooster Neverland-the Oz of the twit. The Wizard, more or less, was the butler Jeeves.

Wodehouse, Kenko, Dante and Montaigne make an improbable quartet, hilariously diverse. They come as friendly aliens to comfort the inner ear, and to relieve one's sense, which is strong these days, of being isolated on an earth that itself seems increasingly alien, confusing and unfriendly.

It is a form of vanity to imagine you are living in the worst of times-there have always been worse. In bad times and heavy seas, the natural fear is that things will get worse, and never better. It's a jolt to a Western, instinctively progressive mind, trained to think of history as ascendant-like the stock market, like housing prices-to find trends running in the other direction.

Still, I remember once going to Kyoto, the scene of Kenko's exile, and after that I took the bullet train to Hiroshima. The memorial park was there, and the memorial museum with its terrible record of what happened in August 1945-hell itself-and there was the charred skeleton of the dome of the city's prefecture, preserved as a reminder. But otherwise...a bustling, prospering city, with a thousand neon signs flashing familiar corporate logos. And when you crossed a busy intersection, the "Walk" signal played a tinkling little Japanese version of "Comin' Through the Rye."

Those who say the world has gone to hell may be right. It is also true that hell, contra Dante, may be temporary.

Dante, Kenko and Montaigne all wrote as men exiled from power-from the presence of power. But power, too, is only temporary.

Every moment readjusts the coordinates of hope and despair-some of the readjustments are more violent than others. We live now in a validation of Bertrand Russell's model of "spots and jumps." In 1931, the philosopher wrote: "I think the universe is all spots and jumps, without unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of the other properties that governesses love...it consists of events, short, small and haphazard. Order, unity and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as are catalogues and encyclopedias."

Kenko in one essay wrote: "Nothing leads a man astray so easily as sexual desire. The holy man of Kume lost his magic powers after noticing the whiteness of the legs of a girl who was washing clothes. This is quite understandable, considering that the glowing plumpness of her arms, legs and flesh owed nothing to artifice."

That, too, sends a strange little echo back to our time. The magic power the holy man lost was his ability to fly. Our world regained the magic, and it gave us Charles Lindbergh, Hiroshima, global travel, 9/11 and the Nigerian terrorist who, coming into Detroit one Christmas Day, set his underpants on fire.

We are surrounded by magic, some good, some evil and some both at once-an excess of magic, a confusion of it. Solitary Kenko brushed his cranky, acerbic thoughts onto scraps of paper that survived through the centuries only by luck; they might just as well have rotted on the walls or gone out with the trash. But look at our magic now: you can Google Kenko, and if you have a Kindle or Nook or iPad or some other e-reader, you can reassemble all of Kenko or Dante or Montaigne electronically upon a thin, flat screen-from which it may also vanish at a touch, in a nanosecond.

A trompe l'oeil universe: creation and un-creation-poof! Precious writers are miraculously diffused through the Web, you fetch them out of the air itself. And they may disappear more quickly than Kenko's vanishing blossoms or shrouded moons. The universe is not a solid thing.

Writing is-we have always thought-a solitary and even covert labor. Of course a great writer need not be a hermit. (Shakespeare was not.) I have wondered whether Montaigne or Kenko or (God help us) Dante would have been on Facebook or Twitter, gabbing and texting away in the gregarious solidarities of new social forms. Are there such things as exile or retreat or solitude in the universe of Skype, the global hive? Does the new networking improve the quality of thinking and writing? It undoubtedly changes the process-but how, and how much? We don't know yet.

Sometimes, oddly enough, it's easier to write in a noisy room than in silence and solitude; for a time I liked to write while riding up and down Manhattan on the Lexington Avenue IRT-the rattling of the cars and screeching of the rails improved my concentration, and I liked having company as I scribbled away. I was fascinated and strangely soothed by the protocol of the subway, which requires that the faces of all those diverse riders-Asians, Africans, Latinos, Europeans-should, for the duration of the ride, be impassive and unreadable: no eye contact, perfect masks.

Lance Morrow's books include the essay collection Second Drafts of History.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Around the year 1330, a poet and Buddhist monk named Kenko wrote Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa) -an eccentric, sedate and gemlike assemblage of his thoughts on life, death, weather, manners, aesthetics, nature, drinking, conversational bores, sex, house design, the beauties of understatement and imperfection.

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change, impermeance, being in the moment of change

# data[].attributes.subject
change, impermeance, being in the moment of change

# data[].attributes.body
#YoshidaKenko#Kenko#JapaneseAesthetics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Around the year 1330, a poet and Buddhist monk named Kenko wrote Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa) -an eccentric, sedate and gemlike assemblage of his thoughts on life, death, weather, manners, aesthetics, nature, drinking, conversational bores, sex, house design, the beauties of understatement and imperfection.

For a monk, Kenko was remarkably worldly; for a former imperial courtier, he was unusually spiritual. He was a fatalist and a crank. He articulated the Japanese aesthetic of beauty as something inherently impermanent-an aesthetic that acquires almost unbearable pertinence at moments when an earthquake and tsunami may shatter existing arrangements.

Kenko yearned for a golden age, a Japanese Camelot, when all was becoming and graceful. He worried that "nobody is left who knows the proper manner for hanging a quiver before the house of a man in disgrace with his majesty." He even regretted that no one remembered the correct shape of a torture rack or the appropriate way to attach a prisoner to it. He said deliberate cruelty is the worst of human offenses. He believed that "the art of governing a country is founded on thrift."

One or two of his essays are purely informational (not to say weird). One of my favorites is essay 49, which reads in its entirety: "You should never put the new antlers of a deer to your nose and smell them. They have little insects that crawl into the nose and devour the brain."

A sailor in rough seas may grip the rail and fix his eye on a distant object in order to steady himself and avoid seasickness. I read Kenko's essays for a similar reason.

Kenko lived on a different planet-planet Earth in the 14th century. But if you proceed on the vertical from the 14th century to the 21st, you become aware of a time-flex in which his intimations of degeneracy and decline resonate with our own. A kind of sonar: from Kenko our own thoughts bounce back across time with an alienated charm and a laugh of recognition.

Kenko had been a poet and courtier in Kyoto in the court of the emperor Go-Daigo. It was a time of turbulent change. Go-Daigo would be ousted and driven into exile by the regime of the Ashikaga shoguns. Kenko withdrew to a cottage, where he lived and composed the 243 essays of the Tsurezuregusa. It was believed that he brushed his thoughts on scraps of paper and pasted them to the cottage walls, and that after his death his friend the poet and general Imagawa Ryoshun removed the scraps and arranged them into the order in which they have passed into Japanese literature. (The wallpaper story was later questioned, but in any case, the essays survived.)

Kenko was a contemporary of Dante, another sometime public man and courtier who lived in exile in unstable times. Their minds, in ways, were worlds apart. The Divine Comedy contemplated the eternal; the Essays in Idleness meditated upon the evanescent. Dante wrote with beauty and limpidity and terrifying magnificence, Kenko with offhand charm. They talked about the end of the world in opposite terms: the Italian poet set himself up, part of the time, anyway, as the bureaucrat of suffering, codifying sins and devising terrible punishments. Kenko, despite his lament for the old-fashioned rack, wrote mostly about solecisms and gaucheries, and it was the Buddhist law of uncertainty that presided over his universe. The Divine Comedy is one of the monuments of world literature. The Essays in Idleness are lapidary, brief and not much known outside Japan.

Kenko wrote: "They speak of the degenerate, final phase of the world, yet how splendid is the ancient atmosphere, uncontaminated by the world, that still prevails within the palace walls." As Kenko's translator Donald Keene observed, there flows through the essays "the conviction that the world is steadily growing worse." It is perversely comforting to reflect that people have been anticipating the end of the world for so many centuries. Such persistent pessimism almost gives one hope.

There is consolation in knowing, too, that Kenko was a sailor at the rail, fixing his eye across the water: "The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known." Kenko is like a friend who reappears, after a long separation, and resumes your talk as if he had left the room for just a moment.

Kenko is charming, off-kilter, never gloomy. He is almost too intelligent to be gloomy, or in any case, too much a Buddhist. He writes in one of the essays: "A certain man once said, 'Surely nothing is so delightful as the moon,' but another man rejoined, 'The dew moves me even more.' How amusing that they should have argued the point."

He cherished the precarious: "The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty." He proposed a civilized aesthetic: "Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth." Perfection is banal. Better asymmetry and irregularity.

He stressed the importance of beginnings and endings, rather than mere vulgar fullness or success: "Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring-these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration."

At a time when flowers have been wilting, when assets dwindle and mere vulgar fullness may suggest something as unpromising as a portfolio managed by Bernard Madoff, the eye might appreciate a moon obscured by clouds.

Of houses, Kenko says: "A man's character, as a rule, may be known from the place where he lives." For example: "A house which multitudes of workmen have polished with every care, where strange and rare Chinese and Japanese furnishings are displayed, and even grasses and trees of the garden have been trained unnaturally, is ugly to look at and most depressing. A house should look lived in, unassuming." So much for the McMansion.

In a time of traumatic change, some writers or artists or composers may withdraw from the world in order to compose their own universe-Prospero's island.

That is how Montaigne, in the midst of France's 16th-century Catholic-Protestant wars, came to write his Essaies, which changed literature. After an estimable career as courtier under Charles IX, as member of the Bordeaux parliament, as a moderating friend of both Henry III and Henry of Navarre during the bloody wars of religion, Montaigne withdrew to the round tower on his family estate in Bordeaux. He announced: "In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out.... he has consecrated [this sweet ancestral retreat] to his freedom, tranquility and leisure."

The wood over his doorway was inscribed to read, "Que sais-je?" -"What do I know?"-the pre-eminent question of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. So, surrounded by his library of 1,500 books, he began to write.

Montaigne followed a method of composition much like Kenko's. In Japanese it is called zuihitsu, or "follow the brush"-that is, jot down the thoughts as they come to you. This may produce admirable results, if you are Kenko or Montaigne.

I find both to be stabilizing presences. A person's sense of balance depends upon the inner ear; it is to the inner ear that such writers speak. Sometimes I get the effect by taking a dip in the Bertie Wooster stories of P. G. Wodehouse, who wrote such wonderful sentences as this description of a solemn young clergyman: "He had the face of a sheep with a secret sorrow." Wodehouse, too, would eventually live in exile (both geographical and psychological), in a cottage on Long Island, remote from his native England. He composed a Bertie Wooster Neverland-the Oz of the twit. The Wizard, more or less, was the butler Jeeves.

Wodehouse, Kenko, Dante and Montaigne make an improbable quartet, hilariously diverse. They come as friendly aliens to comfort the inner ear, and to relieve one's sense, which is strong these days, of being isolated on an earth that itself seems increasingly alien, confusing and unfriendly.

It is a form of vanity to imagine you are living in the worst of times-there have always been worse. In bad times and heavy seas, the natural fear is that things will get worse, and never better. It's a jolt to a Western, instinctively progressive mind, trained to think of history as ascendant-like the stock market, like housing prices-to find trends running in the other direction.

Still, I remember once going to Kyoto, the scene of Kenko's exile, and after that I took the bullet train to Hiroshima. The memorial park was there, and the memorial museum with its terrible record of what happened in August 1945-hell itself-and there was the charred skeleton of the dome of the city's prefecture, preserved as a reminder. But otherwise...a bustling, prospering city, with a thousand neon signs flashing familiar corporate logos. And when you crossed a busy intersection, the "Walk" signal played a tinkling little Japanese version of "Comin' Through the Rye."

Those who say the world has gone to hell may be right. It is also true that hell, contra Dante, may be temporary.

Dante, Kenko and Montaigne all wrote as men exiled from power-from the presence of power. But power, too, is only temporary.

Every moment readjusts the coordinates of hope and despair-some of the readjustments are more violent than others. We live now in a validation of Bertrand Russell's model of "spots and jumps." In 1931, the philosopher wrote: "I think the universe is all spots and jumps, without unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of the other properties that governesses love...it consists of events, short, small and haphazard. Order, unity and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as are catalogues and encyclopedias."

Kenko in one essay wrote: "Nothing leads a man astray so easily as sexual desire. The holy man of Kume lost his magic powers after noticing the whiteness of the legs of a girl who was washing clothes. This is quite understandable, considering that the glowing plumpness of her arms, legs and flesh owed nothing to artifice."

That, too, sends a strange little echo back to our time. The magic power the holy man lost was his ability to fly. Our world regained the magic, and it gave us Charles Lindbergh, Hiroshima, global travel, 9/11 and the Nigerian terrorist who, coming into Detroit one Christmas Day, set his underpants on fire.

We are surrounded by magic, some good, some evil and some both at once-an excess of magic, a confusion of it. Solitary Kenko brushed his cranky, acerbic thoughts onto scraps of paper that survived through the centuries only by luck; they might just as well have rotted on the walls or gone out with the trash. But look at our magic now: you can Google Kenko, and if you have a Kindle or Nook or iPad or some other e-reader, you can reassemble all of Kenko or Dante or Montaigne electronically upon a thin, flat screen-from which it may also vanish at a touch, in a nanosecond.

A trompe l'oeil universe: creation and un-creation-poof! Precious writers are miraculously diffused through the Web, you fetch them out of the air itself. And they may disappear more quickly than Kenko's vanishing blossoms or shrouded moons. The universe is not a solid thing.

Writing is-we have always thought-a solitary and even covert labor. Of course a great writer need not be a hermit. (Shakespeare was not.) I have wondered whether Montaigne or Kenko or (God help us) Dante would have been on Facebook or Twitter, gabbing and texting away in the gregarious solidarities of new social forms. Are there such things as exile or retreat or solitude in the universe of Skype, the global hive? Does the new networking improve the quality of thinking and writing? It undoubtedly changes the process-but how, and how much? We don't know yet.

Sometimes, oddly enough, it's easier to write in a noisy room than in silence and solitude; for a time I liked to write while riding up and down Manhattan on the Lexington Avenue IRT-the rattling of the cars and screeching of the rails improved my concentration, and I liked having company as I scribbled away. I was fascinated and strangely soothed by the protocol of the subway, which requires that the faces of all those diverse riders-Asians, Africans, Latinos, Europeans-should, for the duration of the ride, be impassive and unreadable: no eye contact, perfect masks.

Lance Morrow's books include the essay collection Second Drafts of History.

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Around the year 1330, a poet and Buddhist monk named Kenko wrote Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa) -an eccentric, sedate and gemlike assemblage of his thoughts on life, death, weather, manners, aesthetics, nature, drinking, conversational bores, sex, house design, the beauties of understatement and imperfection.

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#MinjaeKim#Matter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Minjae Kim is a Korean artist working in New York witha background in architecture and furniture designHis practice in furniture and objects acts as an antithesis to the restrictions in architectural practice in time, scale, and accessibility.‍The results are simple, quirky, imperfect, incoherent,…

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As I have learned about the social life of trees and the intimate bonds that indigenous peoples have with various lifeforms and rivers - as I pore through recent ecophilosophy that explains aliveness to the western mind - I've concluded: We really ought to be talking more about animism and commoning.

Scientific rationalism and economistic thinking may be the dominant forces of our time, but they aren't so good at creating social purpose and meaning. Which may help explain why evidence of a new animism keeps popping up as a way to re-enchant the world, often finding its voice through commoning. This should not be too surprising, suggests ecophilosopher Andreas Weber, because the biology of life points to reality itself as a commons.

Commons are realms of life defined by organic wholeness and relationality. They stand in stark contrast to a modern world whose hallmark is separation - the separation of humans from "nature"; of individuals from each other; and a separation between our minds and our bodies.

To be sure, animism has a problematic history. Early anthropologists generally projected their own worldviews onto tribal peoples, denigrating them as backward. As staunch Cartesians and moderns, they saw body and mind as utterly separate. So anyone who ascribed a living presence to animals, mountains and natural forces could only be seen as "primitive" and "superstitious."

But today's animism (as seen through western eyes) is different. It sees the experience of life as a dynamic conversation among the creatures and natural systems of the Earth. It is about surrendering an anthrocentric vision and seeing the world as "full of persons, only some of whom are human," in which "life is always lived in relationship with others," as religious studies scholar Graham Harvey has put it. Animism is "concerned with learning how to be a good person in respectful relationships with other persons." It resembles the "I-thou" relationship of respectful presence proposed by theologian Martin Buber.

For me, two recent readings have brought animism into sharper focus for me.

The first is a piece in The Guardian by British nature writer Robert Macfarlane (November 2, 2019) that points to "new animism" on the rise. He starts by mentioning a number of "rights of nature" laws that have been enacted around the world. Ecuador and Bolivia are the the most famous cases, but did you realize that the City of Toledo, Ohio - on the banks of Lake Erie - approved a referendum in 2019 that gives "legal personhood" to that troubled lake? Lake Erie now joins the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India and the Whanganui River in New Zealand in enjoying legal standing in their respective nation-states.

Macfarlane explains the significance of the Lake Erie Ecosystem Bill of Rights:

Embedded in the bill is a bold ontological claim - that Lake Erie is a living being, not a bundle of ecosystem services. The bill is, really, a work of what might be called "new animism" (the word comes from the Latin anima, meaning spirit, breath, life). By reassigning both liveliness and vulnerability to the lake, it displaces Erie from its instrumentalised roles as sump and source. As such, the bill forms part of a broader set of comparable recent legal moves in jurisdictions around the world - all seeking to recognise interdependence and animacy in the living world, and often advanced by indigenous groups - which have together come to be known as the "natural rights" or "rights of nature" movement.

Macfarlane goes on to say that a "'radical re-storying' is presently under way across culture, theory, politics and literature, as well as law" that can be seen in "the creative protests of Extinction Rebellion; in the "new animist" scholarship of Isabelle Stengers, David Abram and Eduardo Kohn" and the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer. I would add the ecophilosophy of Andreas Weber ("Biology of Wonder" "Matter and Desire") and Stephan Harding ("Animate Earth").

All these efforts, says Macfarlane, "seek to recognise something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors," in the words of Amitav Ghosh.

I have also been quite taken by Eduardo Kohn's 2013 book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Kohn boldly asks the modern mind to show humility in how it thinks about and represents "nature." It asks that we try to see the more-than-human world as a vast living system of "biosemiotics" - embodied, living organisms that are constantly creating meaning as they interact with each other.

Kohn warns that we moderns are "colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality.... Without realizing it we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own, and then, to compound this, we narcissistically ask them [nonhumans] to provide us with corrective reflections of ourselves."

So in our modern world of separation, we assume that "nature" is all about individuals striving to survive a dog-eat-dog market competition, ignoring the deep symbiosis and cooperation that is a major part of all biological life. We also assume that the natural world is inert, unfeeling, and without meaning - a mute backdrop for the drama of humankind.

Kohn spent four years doing ethnographic fieldwork among the Runa of the Upper Amazon in Ecuador, an experience that forced him to rethink the meaning of "real." He brilliantly argues that our planet is alive, literally, and therefore we humans, as biological beings, are deeply implicated in "a complex web of relations that [he calls] an 'ecology of selves.'"

Whether an organism presents as a threat to others, a sometime-cooperator, or a distant support through the landscape, living creatures must always invent a "self." The whole process of generating and sustaining living selves creates "meaning" embodied in the shape, behavior, and expression of an organism. Or as Kohn puts it, "All life is semiotic and all semiosis is alive." Life and meaning cannot exist without each other.

Hence the explanation for the book's title. Kohn argues that forests think as its constituent living organisms interpenetrate each other in highly complicated ways, giving rise to an ecosystem of selves, whether plants or animals or microorganisms.

That's what is so difficult for we moderns to understand - the aliveness and relationality that pervades our planet! It's not just humans who are alive and having thoughts. All sorts of living organisms are creating selves and meaning, independent of human observation and activity. "The rain forest, writes Kohn, is "an emergent and expanding multilayered, cacophonous web of mutually constitutive, living, and growing thoughts."

The question is, Can we tune into that frequency, the "vast ecology of selves" that are inscrutable to modern epistemologies and ways of knowing? Can we moderns allow ourselves to enter into the logic of how forests think? Can we learn to see the relations between plants and soil, for example, or between human and jaguar, as forms of living representation and meaning, even if they lie beyond linguistics?

We are so accustomed to seeing ourselves as separate and apart from "nature" - as the apex predator that can reshape "nature" however we wish - that we have trouble situating ourselves within the flows and constraints of a living planet. We presume to be masters of "nature" - a presumption ratified by language itself. Western cultures have a strong preference for using generic, abstract nouns whereas indigenous cultures tend to use precise verbs that name relationships and interactions with living systems. Indigenous languages reflect the idea that "there exist other kinds of thinking selves beyond the human."

I resonate to the new animism because, like the commons, it is about honoring relationality as a core reality of life. That's an idea that Silke and I tried to feature in our new book Free, Fair and Alive. We wanted to reconceptualize the commons as a living social system of relationships, not merely as an economic vehicle for "managing resources."

Commoning is all about the peer construction of relationships, including with the large ecosystems in which we live. Fortunately, the new rights of nature laws, scholarly literature on animism, and the proliferation of countless commons are fueling the great OntoShift that is needed. Aliveness and the relationality it requires are getting their due recognition.
Teaser photo credit: Rajesh Pamnani via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license

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As I have learned about the social life of trees and the intimate bonds that indigenous peoples have with various lifeforms and rivers - as I pore through recent ecophilosophy that explains aliveness to the western mind - I've concluded: We really ought to be talking more about animism and commoning.

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#Animism

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Some people love to divide and classify, while others are bridge-makers-weaving relations that turn a divide into a living contrast, one whose power is to affect, to produce thinking and feeling.

But bridge-making is a situated practice. As a philosopher, I am situated: a daughter to a practice responsible for many divisions, but which may also be understood as a rather particular means of bridge-making. The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that all Western philosophy can be understood as footnotes to Plato's texts. Perhaps I became a philosopher because writing such footnotes implies feeling the text as an animating power-inviting participation, beckoning to me and suggesting the writing of another footnote that will make a bridge to the past, that will give ideas from the past the power to affect the present.

In spite of this, I will not take advantage of the possibility that philosophy is a form of textual animism, using this to delocalize myself, to feel authorized to speak about animism. Indeed, where what we call animism is concerned, the past to be considered is primordially the one in which philosophical concepts served to justify colonization and the divide across which some felt free to study and categorize others-a divide that still exists today.

Thus, in contrast to David Abram, whose experience enables him to turn the animist modes of experience, awareness, and knowledge into an intensely powerful bridge-making tool, as a generative constraint I must accept to not feel free to speak and speculate in a way that would situate others. Rather, I must acknowledge the fact that my own practice and tradition situate me on one side of the divide, the side that characterized "others" as animists. "We," on our side, presume to be the ones who have accepted the hard truth that we are alone in a mute, blind, yet knowable world-one that is our task to appropriate.

In particular, I shall not forget that my side of the divide is still marked today not only by this epic story, but also, and perhaps more crucially, by its moral correlate: "thou shalt not regress." Such a moral imperative confers another meaning on my decision to stand on the side I belong to. Indeed, there is some work to be done on this side. We can by addressing the moral imperative that mobilizes us, as it produces an obscure fear of being accused of regression as soon as we give any sign of betraying hard truth by indulging soft, illusory beliefs.

As for this hard truth itself, philosophers are anyhow no longer on the frontlines where it is expounded. When scientists' contradictory arguments resound, we are only bystanders. Neuroscientists may freely characterize what we were proud of-freedom and rationality-as mere beliefs. Anthropologists like Philippe Descola may freely affirm that our "naturalism" is just one of four human schemes organizing the human and nonhuman world (with animism being another of these schemes). As philosophers, we may certainly wonder whether the neuronal explanation is a case of "naturalism," or whether our organizing schemes can themselves be explained in terms of some neuronal attractors. But what we know is that those who are not authorized scientists cannot intervene in these questions, any more than a mere mortal could intervene in the Olympian gods' quarrels. Neither philosophers nor theologians have a voice in such matters, although the former are descendants of Greek reason and the latter are the inheritors of the monotheistic creed. Let us not even speak of the old lady with a cat who claims that her cat understands her.

Scientists may disagree on how we are wrong, but they agree that we are wrong. The epic is no longer about the "ascent of Man," but rather about the ascent of the Scientist. How, then, to keep the question of animism, if it is taken seriously at all, from being framed in terms that verify Science's right to define it as an object of knowledge?

The work that I feel needs to be done on my side of the divide may be characterized in terms of what the ethnologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has called a "decolonization of thought"-the attempt to resist a colonizing power that begins already with the old lady with the cat, defining her in terms of a belief that may be tolerated but never taken seriously. However, I would not identify this colonizing power with the living work of scientists. The feeling that it is possible and necessary to resist also stems from my interest in what I would call scientific achievements, and my correlative disgust at the way such achievements have been translated into the great epic story about "Science disenchanting the world."

Science, when taken in the singular and with a big S, may indeed be described as a general conquest bent on translating everything that exists into objective, rational knowledge. In the name of Science, a judgment has been passed on the heads of other peoples, and this judgment has also devastated our relations to ourselves-whether we are philosophers, theologians, or old ladies with cats.

Scientific achievements, on the other hand, require thinking in terms of an "adventure of sciences" (in the plural and with a small s). The distinction between such an adventure and Science as a general conquest is certainly hard to make if you consider what is done in the name of science today. However, it is important to do so because it allows for a new perspective: what is called Science, or the idea of a hegemonic scientific rationality, can be understood as itself the product of a colonization process.

On this side of the divide, it would then be possible to remain true to a very particular adventure, while also betraying the hard demands of an epic. In order to think sciences as an adventure, it is crucial to emphasize the radical difference between a scientific conquering "view of the world" and the very special and demanding character of what I would call scientific "achievements." In experimental sciences, such achievements are the very condition of what is then, after they have been verified, celebrated as an objective definition. An experimental achievement may be characterized as the creation of a situation enabling what the scientists question to put their questions at risk, to make the difference between relevant questions and unilaterally imposed ones.

What experimental scientists call objectivity thus depends on a very particular creative art, and a very selective one, because it means that what is addressed must be successfully enrolled as a "partner" in a very unusual and entangled relation. Indeed, the role of this partner is not only to answer questions but also, and primordially so, to answer them in a way that tests the relevance of the question itself. Correlatively, the answers that follow from such achievements should never separate us from anything, because they always coincide with the creation of new questions, not with new authoritative answers to questions that already mattered for us.

We can only imagine the adventure of sciences that would have accepted such claims as obvious, which would have accepted the very specific challenge of addressing whatever they address only if the situation ensures that the addressee is enabled to "take a position" about the way it is addressed. What we should not imagine, however, is that science would then have verified animism.

We may well think instead that the term itself would not exist. Only a "belief" can receive such a global name. If the adventurous specificity of scientific practices has been acknowledged, no one would dream of addressing others in terms of the "beliefs" they would entertain about a "reality" to which scientists enjoy privileged access. Instead of the hierarchical figure of a tree, with Science as its trunk, what we call progress would perhaps have had the allure of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called a rhizome, connecting heterogeneous practices, concerns, and ways of giving meaning to the inhabitants of this earth, with none being privileged and any being liable to connect with any other.

One might object by calling this a figure of anarchy. Yes-but an ecological anarchy, because while connections may be produced between any parts of a rhizome, they also must be produced. They are events, linkages-like symbiosis. They are what is and will remain heterogeneous.

In order to resist the powerful image of a treelike progress, with Science as its trunk, I will now address another idea of Gilles Deleuze, that of our need to "think by the milieu," meaning both without reference to a ground or ideal aim, and never separating something from the milieu that it requires in order to exist. To think then in terms of scientific milieus and what they demand, it is clear that not everything will agree to some of these demands. In particular, not everything may accept the role associated with scientific creation, the role of putting to the test the way it is represented.

I once offered the example of the Virgin Mary-not the theological figure but the intercessor whom pilgrims address. It's wrong to think that the Virgin Mary could make her existence known independently of the faith and trust of pilgrims; for her to do so in a situation committed to the question of how to represent her would be in bad taste. Rather, tif we accept that that aim of a pilgrimage is the transformative experience of the pilgrim, we must not require the Virgin Mary to "demonstrate" her existence to prove she is not merely a "fiction." We must not, in other words, mobilize the categories of superstition, belief, or symbolic efficacy in an attempt to explain away what pilgrims claim to experience. Instead, we must conclude that the Virgin Mary requires a milieu that does not answer to scientific demands.

However, pilgrims and the Virgin are weak examples of rhizomatic phenomena because they have been captured by the dichotomy of "natural" and "supernatural" causations. Within such a dichotomy, one would ask: What is responsible for the healings that occur at Lourdes and other miracle sites-a miraculous intervention or some sort of "enhanced placebo effect"?

This question authorizes the ugly scene, where, before announcing a miracle, the church hierarchy awaits the verdict of physicians empowered to decide whether a healing can be explained away in terms of "natural causes," such as a placebo effect. This relies on a disastrous definition the "natural," namely: that which Science will eventually explain. "Supernatural" is then-just as disastrously-whatever challenges such explanations. In other words, the milieu here opposes any rhizomatic connections, pigeonholing the case in terms of belief-those who believe that "nature," as the domain where Science rules, explains effects that kindle superstition, and those who accept this belief but add another one: a belief in a power that transcends nature.

The half-forgotten case of magnetism offers an interesting contrast here. In the nineteenth century, magnetism provoked a passionate interest that blurred the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. Nature was made mysterious, and supernature was populated by messengers bringing news from elsewhere to mediums in a magnetic trance-a very disordered situation that understandably invited the hostility of both scientific and church institutions.

It has even been proposed that psychoanalysis was not the subversive "plague" that Freud boasted of, but rather a restoration of order, since it helped explain away mysterious cures, magnetic "lucidity," and other demonic manifestations pigeonholed as purely human. In the name of Science it deciphered a new universal cause. The Freudian unconscious was indeed "scientific" in the sense that it authorized the denigrating of those who marveled and fantisized, and it extolled the sad, hard truth behind specious appearances. It verified the great epic Freud himself popularized: he was following Copernicus and Darwin, inflicting a final wound on what he called our narcissistic "beliefs."

A distinct operation was attempted by the surrealist poet André Breton, who claimed that the magnetism should be taken out of the hands of scientists and physicians, who mutilate them through polemical verifications dominated by the suspicion of quackery, self-delusion, or deliberate cheating. For Breton, the point was not to verify what magnetized clairvoyants see, or to understand enigmatic healings, but to cultivate lucid trances (automatism) in the milieu of art, with the ultimate aim of escaping the shackles of normal, representational perception. The milieu of art would explore the means to "recuperate our psychical force."

Breton's proposition is interesting, as the milieu of art could indeed have supported and sustained the unsettling effects associated with magnetism. Such a milieu would perhaps have been able to produce its own practical knowledge of trances-a knowledge concerned only with effects of trances, indifferent to whether the causes were "natural" or "supernatural." Yet Breton's proposition was less a practical one than an appropriative one, marked by a typically modernist triumphalism. To him, art was supreme, not a craft among other crafts but instead the final manifestation of the "surreal," purified of superstitious beliefs-such as animism.

He would thus not envisage making rhizomatic connections to other practices that likewise explore a metamorphic (rather than a representational) relation to the world. He would not break with the perspective that still dominates so many "interdisciplinary" encounters, where the "subjectivity" of the artist's standpoint is contrasted with the "objectivity" of Science. It is as if a contrast could be produced between two banners in a devastated landscape, each bearing one of these subjugating, commanding words-and therefore each empty. The seemingly opposite banners agree on one crucial thing: we should not betray the moral imperative that commands us to trample on what appears as a cradle we are able to leave, and have the imperious duty to leave.

Here it becomes crucial to finally ask, as an active, transformative, and not a reflexive question: Who is this we? It is a question whose efficacy I will associate with yet another operation, that of "reclaiming." Again it will be a question of thinking by the milieu, but this time a milieu that is dangerous and insalubrious, one that entices us to feel that we bear the high responsibility to determine what is entitled to "really" exist and what is not. It is a milieu that is, as a consequence, ruled by the power of judgmental critique.

Scientists are infected, of course, as are all those who accept their authority to decide what objectively exists. But also infected might be those who would claim to be animists, if they affirm that rocks "really" have souls or intentions, like humans. It is the "really" that matters here, an emphasis that marks the polemical power associated with truth. Coming back for a moment to the anthropologist Philippe Descola's classification, I would guess that those who are categorized as animists have no word for "really," for insisting that they are right and others are victims of illusions.

Reclaiming begins with recognizing the infective power of this milieu, a power that is not defeated in the slightest when the sad relativity of all truth is affirmed. Quite the contrary, in fact, since the sad-because monotonous-refrain of the relativist is that our truths do not "really" have the authority they claim.

Reclaiming means recovering what we have been separated from, but not in the sense that we can just get it back. Recovering means recovering from the very separation itself, regenerating what this separation has poisoned. The need to struggle and the need to heal, in order to avoid resembling those we have to struggle against, are thus irreducibly allied. A poisoned milieu must be reclaimed, and so must many of our words, those that-like "animism" and "magic"-carry with them the power to take us hostage: do you "really" believe in...?

I received this word "reclaiming" as a gift from neo-pagan contemporary witches and other US activists. I also received the shocking cry of neo-pagan Starhawk: "The smoke of the burned witches still hangs in our nostrils." Certainly the witch hunters are no longer among us, and we no longer take seriously the accusation of devil worshipping that was once levelled at witches. Rather, our milieu is defined by the modern pride in being able to interpret both witchery and witch hunting in terms of social, linguistic, cultural, or political constructs and beliefs. What this pride ignores, however, is that we are the heirs of an operation of cultural and social eradication-the forerunner of what was committed elsewhere in the name of civilization and reason. Anything that classifies the memory of such operations as unimportant or irrelevant only furthers the success of those operations.

In this sense, our pride in our critical power to "know better" than both the witches and the witch hunters makes us the heirs of witch hunting. The point is obviously not to feel guilty. It is rather to open up what William James, in his "The Will to Believe," called a genuine, effective option, complicating the "us" question, demanding that we situate ourselves. And here the true efficacy of Starhawk's cry enters. Reclaiming the past is not a matter of resurrecting it as it was, of dreaming to make some "true," "authentic" tradition come alive. It is rather a matter of reactivating it, and first of all, of smelling the smoke in our nostrils-the smoke that I smelled, for instance, when I hurriedly emphasized that, no, I did not "believe" that one could resurrect the past.

Learning to smell the smoke is to acknowledge that we have learned the codes of our respective milieus: derisive remarks, knowing smiles, offhand judgments, often about somebody else, but gifted with the power to pervade and infect-to shape us as those who sneer and not among those who are sneered at.

However, we can try to understand everything about how the past has shape us, but understanding is not reclaiming because it is not recovering. Indeed, this is the anguished question of David Abram, a question that we cannot avoid just by invoking capitalism or human greed: How can a culture as educated as ours be so oblivious, so reckless, in its relations to the animate earth? Abram writes that an answer to this question hit him when he was in a bookshop where all the sacred traditions and resources of moral wisdom of the present and the past were gathered:

No wonder! No wonder that our sophisticated civilizations, brimming with the accumulated knowledge of so many traditions, continue to flatten and dismember every part of the breathing earth ... For we have written all of these wisdoms down on the page, effectively divorcing these many teachings from the living land that once held and embodied these teachings. Once inscribed on the page, all this wisdom seemed to have an exclusively human provenance. Illumination-once offered by the moon's dance in and out of the clouds, or by the dazzle of the sunlight on the wind-rippled surface of mountain tarn-was now set down in an unchanging form.

Yet David Abram still writes, and passionately so. As a first step towards recovery, I propose that the experience of writing (not writing down) is marked by the same kind of crucial indeterminacy as the dancing moon. Writing resists the "either/or" dismembering of experience. It resists the choice between either the moon that "really" offers us illumination, as an intentional subject would do, or the moon of the critique, just triggering what would "really" be of human provenance.

Writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation. It makes one feel that ideas are not the author's, that they demand some kind of cerebral-that is, bodily-contortion that defeats any preformed intention. (This contortion makes us larvae, as Deleuze wrote). It could even be said that writing is what gave transformative forces a particular mode of existence-that of "ideas." Alfred North Whitehead suggested that Plato's ideas are those things that first of all erotically lure the human soul-or, we could say, "animate" humans. For Whitehead, what defines the (Greek) human soul is "the enjoyment of its creative function, arising from its entertaining of ideas."

However, when the text is written, taking an "unchanging form," it may well impose itself as being of human provenance-even giving the impression that it can be the vehicle for accessing the intentions of the writer, for grasping what he "meant to communicate" and for what is ours to "understand." Correlatively, the Platonic soul may become a definition divorced from experience, something that we have and that "nature" does not have.

Whitehead wrote that, after The Symposium, where Plato discusses the erotic power of ideas, Plato should have written another dialogue called The Furies, which would have dealt with the horror lurking "within imperfect realization." The possibility of an imperfect realization is certainly present whenever transformative, metamorphic forces make themselves felt, but this is especially true where ideas are concerned, if, as I claim, the realization of ideas implies writing.

Indeed, once "written down," ideas tempt us to associate them with a definite meaning, generally available to understanding, severing the experience of reading from that of writing. This is all the more so in a world that is now saturated with texts and signs that are addressed to "anyone"-separating us from the "more than human" world to which ideas nevertheless belong. In order to reclaim animism, however, it is not sufficient to entertain an "idea" that would allow us to claim that we know about it-even if for people like myself it is crucial to realize that my experience of writing is an animist experience, attesting to a "more than human" world.

Reclaiming means recovering, and, in this case, recovering the capacity to honor experience, any experience we care for, as "not ours" but rather as "animating" us, making us witness to what is not us. While such a recovery cannot be reduced to the entertaining of an idea, certain ideas can further the process-and can protect it from being "demystified" as some fetishistic illusion. Such an idea is the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of "assemblage" (the often-discussed translation for the French " agencement ").

An assemblage, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the coming together of heterogeneous components, and such a coming together is the first and last word of existence. I do not first exist and then enter into assemblages. Rather, my existence is my very participation in assemblages, because I am not the same person when I write and as I am when I wonder about the efficacy of the text after it is written down. I am not gifted with agency or intention. Instead, agency-or what Deleuze and Guattari call "desire"-belongs to the assemblage as such, including those very particular assemblages, called "reflexive assemblages," which produce an experience of detachment, the enjoyment of critically testing previous experience in order to determine what is "really" responsible for what. Another word for this kind of agency that doesn't belong to us is animation.

Relating animism to the efficacy of "assemblages" is a dangerous move, however, because it may well reassure us a bit too easily. It is part of our fabrication as readers, to feel free to ponder without experiencing the existential consequences of our questions. For instance, we may be tempted to understand assemblages as an interesting concept among others, pondering its connections with other concepts-that is, without feeling our intentional stance threatened by its demand. And also without fearing the suspicious gaze of the inquisitors, without feeling the smoke in our nostrils. We are protected by the references we quote.

This is why it may be better to revive more compromised words, which have been restricted to metaphoric use only. "Magic" is such a word, as we freely speak of the magic of an event, of a landscape, of a musical moment. Protected by the metaphor, we may then express the experience of an agency that does not belong to us even if it includes us, but an "us" as it is lured into feeling.

I would propose that we need to forfeit this protection in order to relieve ourselves of the sad, monotonous little critical or reflexive voice whispering that we should not accept being mystified, a voice that relays that of the inquisitors. This voice may tell us about the frightening possibilities that would follow if we gave up critique, the only defense we have against fanaticism and the rule of illusions. But it is first of all the voice of the epic story that still inhabits us. "Thou shall not regress!"

We would admit many daring propositions as long as-like Breton's-they reflect a version of the epic, as long as they warrant that only selected types (artists, philosophers, and so forth) are authorized to explore what mystifies others.

Magic undercuts any such version of the epic. And this is precisely why neo-pagan witches call their own craft "magic": naming it so, they say, is itself an act of magic, since the discomfort it creates helps us notice the smoke in our nostrils. Worse, they have learned to cast circles and invoke the Goddess-She who, the witches say, "returns," She to whom thanks will be given for the event that makes them capable of doing what they call "the work of the Goddess."

In so doing, they put us to the test! How can we accept regression, or conversion to supernatural beliefs? The point, however, is not to wonder whether we have to "accept" the Goddess that contemporary witches invoke in their rituals. If we said to them, "But your Goddess is only a fiction," they would doubtless smile and ask us whether we are among those who believe that fiction is powerless.

What the witches challenge us to accept is the possibility of giving up criteria that claim to transcend assemblages, and that reinforce, again and again, the epic of critical reason. What they cultivate, as part of their craft (it is a part of any craft), is an art of immanent attention, an empirical art about what is good or toxic-an art which our addiction to the truth has too often despised as superstition. They are pragmatic, radically pragmatic, experimenting with effects and consequences of what, as they know, is never innocuous and involves care, protections, and experience.

The witches' ritual chant-"She changes everything She touches, and everything She touches changes"-could surely be commented on in terms of assemblages, since it resists the dismembering attribution of agency. Does change belong to the Goddess as "agent" or to the one who changes when touched?

But the first efficacy of the refrain is in the "She touches." The indeterminacy proper to assemblages is no longer conceptual. It is part of an experience that affirms the power of changing to be NOT attributed to our own selves nor reduced to something "natural." It is an experience that honors change as a creation.

Moreover, the point is not to comment. The refrain must be chanted; it is part and parcel of the practice of worship. Can the proposition that magic designates both a craft of assemblages and their particular transformative efficacy help us to reclaim it from both the safety of the metaphoric and the stigma of the supernatural? Can it help us to feel instead that nothing in nature is "natural"? Can it induce us to consider new transversal connections, resisting all reduction, unlike this sad term "natural," which in fact means "no trespassing: available for scientific explanation only," and also unlike "the symbolic," which covers about everything else?

Reclaiming always implies a compromising step. I would claim that we, who are not witches, do not have to mimic them but instead discover how to be compromised by magic.

We might, for instance, experiment with the (nonmetaphoric) use of the term "magic," which designates the craft of illusionists who make us perceive and accept what we know to be impossible. Magic, the witches say, is a craft. They would not be shocked by a transversal connection with the craft of performing magicians if this connection was a reclaiming one-that is, if the craft of performing magicians was addressed as what survived when magic became a matter of illusion and manipulative deception in the hands of quacks, or left to the mercenary hands of those who know the many ways we can be lured into desiring, trusting, buying.

And this is precisely what David Abram, himself a slight-of-hand magician, proposes when he relates his craft with what makes it possible, that is, "the way the senses themselves have, of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible." What "illusionists" artfully exploit would then be the very creativity of the senses as they respond to what Abram characterizes as "suggestions offered by the sensible itself." If there is an exploitation, the magician himself is exploited as the suggestions are offered not only by his explicit words and intentional gestures, but also by subtle bodily shifts that express that he himself participates in, and is lured by, the very magic he is performing.

Our senses, Abram concludes, are not for detached cognition but for participation, for sharing the metamorphic capacity of things that lure us or that recede into inert availability as our manner of participation shifts-but, he insists, never vanishes: we never step outside the "flux of participation." When magic is reclaimed as an art of participation, or of luring assemblages, assemblages inversely become a matter of empirical and pragmatic concern about effects and consequences, not of general consideration or textual dissertation.

Alluring, suggesting, specious, inducing, capturing, mesmerizing-all our words express the ambivalence of lure. Whatever lures us or animates us may also enslave, and all the more so if taken for granted. Scientific experimental crafts, which dramatically exemplify the metamorphic efficacy of assemblage conferring on things the power of "animating" the scientist into feeling, thinking, imagining, are also a dramatic example of this enslaving power. What I would call with Whitehead an "imperfect realization" of what they achieve has unleashed a furious conquest in the name of which scientists downgrade their achievements, presenting them as mere manifestation of objective rationality.

But the question of how to honor the metamorphic efficacy of assemblages-neither taking it for granted nor endowing it with supernatural grandiosity-is a matter of concern for all "magic" crafts, and more especially so in our insalubrious, infectious milieu. And it is because that concern may be common, but can receive no general answer, that reclaiming magic can only be a rhizomatic operation.

A rhizome rejects any generality. Connections do not manifest some truth about what is common beyond the rhizomatic heterogeneous multiplicity-beyond the multiplicity of distinct pragmatic significations associated with "magic" as related to what we call politics, healing, education, arts, philosophy, sciences, agriculture, or to any craft requiring or depending upon a capacity to lure us into relevant metamorphic attention.

The only generality here is about our milieu and its compulsion to categorize and judge-and spiritualism is here a probable judgment-or to negate whatever would point to the metamorphic dimension of what is to be achieved. Rhizomatic connections may be a non-general answer to this generality. Each "magic" craft needs connections with others in order to resist infection by the milieu, the divisive power of social judgment, to smell the smoke that demands we decide whether we are heirs to the witches or the witch hunters.

But connections may also be needed to heal and to learn. Where the dangerous art of animating in order to be animated is concerned, what connects may be practical learning about the needed immanent (critical) attention. Not about what is good or bad in itself, but about what Whitehead called realization. Again, no mode of realization may be taken as a model, only as calling for pragmatic reinvention. In order to honor the making of connections, to protect it against models and norms, a name may be required. Animism could be the name for this rhizomatic art.

Reclaiming animism does not mean, then, that we have ever been animist. Nobody has ever been animist because one is never animist "in general," only in terms of assemblages that generate metamorphic transformation in our capacity to affect and be affected-and also to feel, think, and imagine. Animism may, however, be a name for reclaiming these assemblages, since it lures us into feeling that their efficacy is not ours to claim. Against the insistent poisoned passion of dismembering and demystifying, it affirms that which they all require in order not to enslave us: that we are not alone in the world.

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#Butoh

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Video of Mushimaru Fujieda Butoh workshop

Butoh is a form of Japanese dance theatre that encompasses a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement. Following World War II, butoh arose in 1959 through collaborations between its two key founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. The art form is known to "resist fixity" and is difficult to define; notably, founder Hijikata Tatsumi viewed the formalisation of butoh with "distress". Common features of the art form include playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, and extreme or absurd environments. It is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion. However, with time butoh groups are increasingly being formed around the world, with their various aesthetic ideals and intentions.

Butoh performers

Butoh first appeared in post- World War II Japan in 1959, under the collaboration of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, "in the protective shadow of the 1950s and 1960s avant-garde". A key impetus of the art form was a reaction against the Japanese dance scene then, which Hijikata felt was overly based on imitating the West and following traditional styles like Noh. Thus, he sought to "turn away from the Western styles of dance, ballet and modern", and to create a new aesthetic that embraced the "squat, earthbound physique... and the natural movements of the common folk". This desire found form in the early movement of "ankoku butō". The term means "dance of darkness", and the form was built on a vocabulary of "crude physical gestures and uncouth habits... a direct assault on the refinement ( miyabi) and understatement ( shibui) so valued in Japanese aesthetics."

The first butoh piece, Forbidden Colors (禁色, Kinjiki) by Tatsumi Hijikata, premiered at a dance festival in 1959. It was based on the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima. It explored the taboo of homosexuality and ended with a live chicken being held between the legs of Kazuo Ohno's son Yoshito Ohno, after which Hijikata chased Yoshito off the stage in darkness. Mainly as a result of the audience outrage over this piece, Hijikata was banned from the festival, establishing him as an iconoclast.

The earliest butoh performances were called (in English) "Dance Experience". In the early 1960s, Hijikata used the term "Ankoku-Buyou" to describe his dance. He later changed the word "buyo", filled with associations of Japanese classical dance, to "butoh", a long-discarded word for dance that originally meant European ballroom dancing.

In later work, Hijikata continued to subvert conventional notions of dance. Inspired by writers such as Yukio Mishima (as noted above), Comte de Lautréamont, Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet and Marquis de Sade, he delved into grotesquerie, darkness, and decay. At the same time, Hijikata explored the transmutation of the human body into other forms, such as those of animals. He also developed a poetic and surreal choreographic language, butoh-fu, to help the dancer transform into other states of being.

The work developed beginning in 1960 by Kazuo Ohno with Tatsumi Hijikata was the beginning of what now is regarded as "butoh". In Nourit Masson-Sékiné and Jean Viala's book Shades of Darkness, Ohno is regarded as "the soul of butoh", while Hijikata is seen as "the architect of butoh". Hijikata and Ohno later developed their own styles of teaching. Students of each style went on to create different groups such as Sankai Juku, a Japanese dance troupe well known to fans in North America.

Students of these two artists have been known to highlight the differing orientations of their masters. While Hijikata was a fearsome technician of the nervous system influencing input strategies and artists working in groups, Ohno is thought of as a more natural, individual, and nurturing figure who influenced solo artists.

Starting in the early 1980s, butoh experienced a renaissance as butoh groups began performing outside Japan for the first time; at this time the style was marked by "full body paint (white or dark or gold), near or complete nudity, shaved heads, grotesque costumes, clawed hands, rolled-up eyes and mouths opened in silent screams." Sankai Juku was a touring butoh group; during one performance by Sankai Juku, in which the performers hung upside down from ropes from a tall building in Seattle, one of the ropes broke, resulting in the death of a performer. The footage was played on national news, and butoh became more widely known in America through the tragedy. A PBS documentary of a butoh performance in a cave without an audience further broadened awareness of butoh in America.

In the early 1990s, Koichi Tamano performed atop the giant drum of San Francisco Taiko Dojo inside Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, in an international religious celebration.[citation needed ]

There is a theatre in Kyoto, Japan, called the Kyoto Butoh-kan, which attempts to be dedicated to regular professional butoh performances.

There is much discussion about who should receive the credit for creating butoh. As artists worked to create new art in all disciplines after World War II, Japanese artists and thinkers emerged from economic and social challenges that produced an energy and renewal of artists, dancers, painters, musicians, writers, and all other artists.

A number of people with few formal connections to Hijikata began to call their own idiosyncratic dance "butoh". Among these are Iwana Masaki, and Teru Goi. Although all manner of systematic thinking about butoh dance can be found, perhaps Iwana Masaki most accurately sums up the variety of butoh styles:

While 'Ankoku Butoh' can be said to have possessed a very precise method and philosophy (perhaps it could be called 'inherited butoh'), I regard present-day butoh as a 'tendency' that depends not only on Hijikata's philosophical legacy but also on the development of new and diverse modes of expression. The 'tendency' that I speak of involved extricating the pure life which is dormant in our bodies.

Hijikata is often quoted saying what opposition he had to a codified dance: "Since I believe neither in a dance teaching method nor in controlling movement, I do not teach in this manner." However, in the pursuit and development of his own work, it is only natural that a "Hijikata" style of working and, therefore, a "method" emerged. Both Mikami Kayo and Maro Akaji have stated that Hijikata exhorted his disciples not to imitate his own dance when they left to create their own butoh dance groups. If this is the case, then his words make sense: There are as many types of butoh as there are butoh choreographers.

In 2000 Sayoko Onishi established in Palermo, Italy where she founded the International Butoh Academy at the presence of master and butoh founder Yoshito Ohno. Sayoko Onishi and Yoshito Ohno are credited as being the first butoh choreographers to speak about New Butoh style. The academy name was changed to New Butoh School in 2007. In 2018 the New Butoh School established in Ruvo di Puglia, Italy.[1]

Most butoh exercises use image work to varying degrees: from the razorblades and insects of Ankoku Butoh, to Dairakudakan's threads and water jets, to Seiryukai's rod in the body. There is a general trend toward the body as "being moved", from an internal or external source, rather than consciously moving a body part. A certain element of "control vs. uncontrol" is present through many of the exercises.

Conventional butoh exercises sometimes cause great duress or pain but, as Kurihara points out, pain, starvation, and sleep deprivation were all part of life under Hijikata's method, which may have helped the dancers access a movement space where the movement cues had terrific power. It is also worth noting that Hijikata's movement cues are, in general, much more visceral and complicated than anything else since.

Most exercises from Japan (with the exception of much of Ohno Kazuo's work) have specific body shapes or general postures assigned to them, while almost none of the exercises from Western butoh dancers have specific shapes. This seems to point to a general trend in the West that butoh is not seen as specific movement cues with shapes assigned to them such as Ankoku Butoh or Dairakudakan's technique work, but rather that butoh is a certain state of mind or feeling that influences the body directly or indirectly.

Hijikata did in fact stress feeling through form in his dance, saying, "Life catches up with form," which in no way suggests that his dance was mere form. Ohno, though, comes from the other direction: "Form comes of itself, only insofar as there is a spiritual content to begin with."

The trend toward form is apparent in several Japanese dance groups, who recycle Hijikata's shapes and present butoh that is only body-shapes and choreography which would lead butoh closer to contemporary dance or performance art than anything else. A good example of this is Torifune Butoh-sha's recent works.

Iwana Masaki, a butoh dancer whose work shies away from all elements of choreography, states:

I have never heard of a butoh dancer entering a competition. Every butoh performance itself is an ultimate expression; there are not and cannot be second or third places. If butoh dancers were content with less than the ultimate, they would not be actually dancing butoh, for real butoh, like real life itself, cannot be given rankings.

Critic Mark Holborn has written that butoh is defined by its very evasion of definition. The Kyoto Journal variably categorizes butoh as dance, theater, "kitchen," or "seditious act." The San Francisco Examiner describes butoh as "unclassifiable". The SF Weekly article "The Bizarre World of Butoh" was about former sushi restaurant Country Station, in which Koichi Tamano was "chef" and Hiroko Tamano "manager". The article begins, "There's a dirty corner of Mission Street, where a sushi restaurant called Country Station shares space with hoodlums and homeless drunks, a restaurant so camouflaged by dark and filth it easily escapes notice. But when the restaurant is full and bustling, there is a kind of theater that happens inside..." Butoh frequently occurs in areas of extremes of the human condition, such as skid rows, or extreme physical environments, such as a cave with no audience, remote Japanese cemetery, or hanging by ropes from a skyscraper in front of the Washington Monument.

Hiroko Tamano considers modeling for artists to be butoh, in which she poses in "impossible" positions held for hours, which she calls " really slow Butoh".[citation needed ] The Tamano's home seconds as a "dance" studio, with any room or portion of yard potentially used. When a completely new student arrived for a workshop in 1989 and found a chaotic simultaneous photo shoot, dress rehearsal for a performance at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, workshop, costume making session, lunch, chat, and newspaper interview, all "choreographed" into one event by Tamano, she ordered the student, in broken English, "Do interview." The new student was interviewed, without informing the reporter that the student had no knowledge what butoh was. The improvised information was published, "defining" butoh for the area public. Tamano then informed the student that the interview itself was butoh, and that was the lesson.[citation needed ] Such "seditious acts," or pranks in the context of chaos, are butoh.

While many approaches to defining butoh-as with any performative tradition-will focus on formalism or semantic layers, another approach is to focus on physical technique. While butoh does not have a codified classical technique rigidly adhered to within an authoritative controlled lineage, Hijikata Tatsumi did have a substantive methodical body of movement techniques called Butoh Fu. Butoh Fu can be described as a series of cues largely based on incorporating visualizations that directly affect the nervous system, producing qualities of movement that are then used to construct the form and expression of the dance. This mode of engaging the nervous system directly has much in common with other mimetic techniques to be found in the history of dance, such as Lecoq's range of nervous system qualities, Decroux's rhythm and density within movement, and Zeami Motokiyo's qualitative descriptions for character types.

Teachers influenced by more Hijikata style approaches tend to use highly elaborate visualizations that can be highly mimetic, theatrical, and expressive. Teachers of this style include Waguri, Yumiko Yoshioka, Minako Seki and Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, founders of Harupin-Ha Butoh Dance Company.

There have been many unique groups and performance companies influenced by the movements created by Hijikata and Ohno, ranging from the highly minimalist of Sankai Juku to very theatrically explosive and carnivalesque performance of groups like Dairakudakan.

Many Nikkei (or members of the Japanese diaspora), such as Japanese Canadians Jay Hirabayashi of Kokoro Dance, Denise Fujiwara, incorporate butoh in their dance or have launched butoh dance troupes.

More notable European practitioners, who have worked with butoh and avoided the stereotyped 'butoh' languages which some European practitioners tend to adopt, take their work out of the sometimes closed world of 'touring butoh' and into the international dance and theatre scenes include SU-EN Butoh Company (Sweden), Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, Kitt Johnson (Denmark), Vangeline (France), and Katharina Vogel (Switzerland). Such practitioners in Europe aim to go back to the original aims of Hijikata and Ohno and go beyond the tendency to imitate a ' master' and instead search within their own bodies and histories for 'the body that has not been robbed' (Hijikata).

LEIMAY (Brooklyn) emerged 1996-2005 from the creative work of Shige Moriya, Ximena Garnica, Juan Merchan, and Zachary Model at the space known as CAVE. LEIMAY has organized and run diverse programs including, the NY Butoh Kan Training Initiative which later became the NY Butoh Festival; Vietnamese Artist in Residency; NY Butoh Kan Training Initiative which turned into the NY Butoh Kan Teaching Residency and now is called LEIMAY Ludus Training). A key element of LEIMAY's work has become transformation of specific spaces. In this way, the space - at times a body, environment or object - and the body - at times dancer, actor, performer or object - are fundamental to LEIMAY's work.

Eseohe Arhebamen, a princess of the Kingdom of Ugu and royal descendant of the Benin Empire, is the first indigenous and native-born African butoh performer. She invented a style called "Butoh-vocal theatre" which incorporates singing, talking, mudras, sign language, spoken word, and experimental vocalizations with butoh after the traditional dance styles of the Edo people of West Africa. She is also known as Edoheart.

COLLAPSING silence Performance Troupe (San Francisco) was established and co-founded by Indra Lowenstein and Terrance Graven in 1992 and was active until 2001. They were a movement-based troupe that incorporated butoh, shibari, ecstatic trance states, and Odissi. They designed all of their costumes, props, puppets, and site-specific installations, while collaborating with live musicians such as Sharkbait, Hollow Earth, Haunted by Waters, and Mandible Chatter. In 1996, they were featured at The International Performance Art Festival and also performed at Asian American Dance Performances, San Francisco Butoh Festival, Theatre of Yugen, The Los Angeles County Exposition (L.A.C.E.), Stanford University, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the beginning years at Burning Man, and various other venues creating multi-media dance performances.

In 1992, Bob DeNatale founded the Flesh & Blood Mystery Theater to spread the art of butoh. Performing throughout the United States, Flesh & Blood Mystery Theater was a regular participant in the San Francisco Butoh Festival of which DeNatale was an Associate Producer. DeNatale's other butoh credits include performing in the film Oakland Underground (2006) and touring Germany and Poland with Ex...it! ' 99 International Dance Festival.

Jay Hirabayashi performs a butoh dance piece in memory of his parents, Gordon and Esther Hirabayashi, at a Day of Remembrance event in Seattle, Washington, February 22, 2014.

A Butoh performance choreographed by Yoshito Ohno appears at the beginning of the Tokyo section of Hal Hartley's 1995 film .

Ron Fricke's experimental documentary film (1992) features scenes of butoh performance.

In the late 1960s, exploitation film director Teruo Ishii hired Hijikata to play the role of a Doctor Moreau-like reclusive mad scientist in his film horror movie Horrors of Malformed Men. The role was mostly performed as dance. The film has remained largely unseen in Japan for forty years because it was viewed as insensitive to the handicapped.

The video clip for Madonna's " Nothing Really Matters" features butoh-style performance.

The video clip for Kent's " Musik non stop" also features butoh-style performance.

The video clip for Foals' " Inhaler" by director Dave Ma features portions of butoh-influenced performance and movement.

In Bust A Groove 2, a video game released for the PlayStation in 2000, the dance moves of the hidden boss character Pander are based on Butoh.

The influence of Butoh has also been felt heavily in the J-Horror movie genre, forming the basis for the appearance of the ghosts in seminal J-Horror Ju-on: The Grudge.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa used butoh movement for actors in his 2001 film , remade in Hollywood in 2006 as . The re-make did not feature butoh.

Butoh performance features heavily in Doris Dörrie's 2008 film Cherry Blossoms, in which a Bavarian widower embarks on a journey to Japan to grieve for his late wife and develop an understanding of this performance style for which she had held a lifelong fascination.

A portrait of Kazuo Ohno appears on the cover of the 2009 Antony & the Johnsons album The Crying Light.

Butoh has greatly influenced the Sopor Aeternus and the Ensemble of Shadows, the musical project of Anna-Varney Cantodea. Its visual motifs are used in for the project's publicity photos and videos.

The Finnish black metal band Black Crucifixion's 2013 music video "Millions of Twigs Guide Your Way Through the Forest" heavily features the Japanese butoh artist Ken Mai.

The video clip for The Weeknd's " Belong to the World" features butoh-style performance.

Richard Armitage cited the dance form as an inspiration for his animalistic portrayal of the villain Francis Dolarhyde (the "Red Dragon") in the third season of .

Butoh dance is featured in the music video for Machine Head's song "Catharsis".

The music video for German Neue Deutsche Härte band Rammstein's " Mein Teil" features one of the band members, Oliver Riedel performing a butoh-style dance performance.

The music video for Matt Elliott's song "Something About Ghosts" features Gyohei Zaitsu, who performs butoh after writing a note.

The music video for the Japanese heavy metal band Dir En Grey's 2003 single "Obscure" features women dressed in Geisha attire with blackened teeth, wearing butoh-style face paint and performing bodily movements/facial expressions similar to those found in butoh.

The Brisbane-based artist, KETTLE, attributes their performance art pieces, Otherwise (2001) and The Australian National Anthem (2001), to Butoh.

In the 2015 folk horror film , Butoh dancers played the coven of witches featured in the climax of the film.

In 2019, Japanese-American indie rock musician Mitski began incorporating Butoh-inspired choreography into her live performances, including "highly stylized, sometimes unsettling gestures," developed with performance artist and movement coach Monica Mirabile.

Butoh dance is a recurring theme in the 2020 Taiwanese movie, Wrath of Desire.

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Butoh is a form of Japanese dance theatre that encompasses a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement. Following World War II, butoh arose in 1959 through collaborations between its two key founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno.

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#Akiyama#Sōdeisha.

Yō Akiyama was a late leading figure of Sōdeisha.

"The postwar art world needed the expediency of creating associations in order to escape from personal confusion, but today, finally, that provisional role appears to have ended. The birds of dawn taking flight out of the forest of falsehood now discover their reflections only in the spring of truth. We are united not to provide a ‘warm bed of dreams’, but to come to terms with our existence in broad daylight".

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Sōdeisha (, founded July 1948 - disbanded 1998), the "Crawling through Mud Association," was founded by Kazuo Yagi and led by Yagi and two other founding members, Hikaru Yamada and Suzuki Osamu. Sodeisha was formed in opposition to the Mingei or folk-craft movement that was the dominant ceramic style and philosophy in mid-20th century Japan, and also in reaction to the aesthetic of rusticity associated with the tea ceremony inspired Shino and Bizen ceramics of the Momoyama Revival pottery of artists such as Kaneshige Toyo and Arakawa Toyozu. Sodeisha had nearly 40 members in 1964 and was disbanded in 1998.

Kyoto, where Sodeisha was founded, had a prominent ceramics industry since the late sixteenth century. Many workshops have emerged across the city, in particular on the hills east of the city, in neighborhoods such as Awata and Gojozaka. In the 1940s, ceramic production in Kyoto and beyond was still very much controlled by small-sized, family style workshops that often have an inherited artistic name. Generations of skilled craftsmen continue to pass on their skills to produce decorated vessels that manifest classical forms of Japan, China, and Korea.

Yagi, Yamada, and Osamu all grew up in this part of Kyoto and were sons of potters who were working in this milieu. When WWII ended, young potters like them began to question about their professional and creative careers. The sprouting of various artistic organizations around that time inspired Yagi to seek a collective force to power new developments in ceramic design and production.

In 1948, the Sodeisha artists mailed out postcards with their 'motto' or artistic credo:

"The postwar art world needed the expediency of creating associations in order to escape from personal confusion, but today, finally, that provisional role appears to have ended. The birds of dawn taking flight out of the forest of falsehood now discover their reflections only in the spring of truth. We are united not to provide a 'warm bed of dreams', but to come to terms with our existence in broad daylight".

Sodeisha artists sought to engage with difficult questions around the artistic and aesthetic issues around ceramic production and potters' professional identity. They attempted to examine the larger environment of arts and crafts in order to establish new forms, products, and procedures that could allow potters in the new era to refrain from the existing, systematic rules.

In an article written for The Japan Times, Robert Yellin wrote of the Sodeisha philosophy that:

"They had as their unwritten laws that they would not submit work to official exhibitions, to avoid being judged on others criteria, and not to copy antique wares of the past. That was the basic credo, quite bold and naive. A major hurdle in the beginning, believe it or not, was whether or not the mouth of a work should be closed or not-if left open it gives the feeling of a common vessel, and thus to close it was the only way to have it taken seriously as ceramic sculptural art".

Two years after the formation of Sodeisha, Yagi and his cohorts made two resolutions. The first is to cease working after models from pottery history and, second, to discontinue submitting their works to the salon system. With this severance from the canons and institutions of the pottery world, they freed themselves to explore that which lay beyond.

The following year the group inaugurated independent annual group exhibitions which did not need to take heed of the salon's hierarchical separation of sculpture and pottery. Though Yagi still lived and worked with his father in the Gojozaka in close contact with a whole community of traditional vessel potters, Yagi began bending and warping his wheel thrown forms and glazing them with designs that resembled paintings by Picasso, Klee and Miro. The work of these European modernists had been well known among Japanese artists before the war. After the war, new Japanese publications started to reacquaint artists with their work and the first post-war exhibitions of their works in Japan began to appear in the early 1950s.

An exhibition of Picasso's ceramics was mounted in 1951, but already in the late 1940s Yagi was deeply moved by what he saw in the photographs of ceramic work by Picasso, who appropriated the vessel surface as both ground and medium for representation. He created images on his ceramics which triggered punning and rhyming reverberations between what was painted and what was potted. Yagi puts, "All material and technical aspects [in Picasso's ceramics] are directly embodied by Picasso himself, resulting in a willful form corresponding to the movement of the artist's spirit." In a 1949 tribute to Picasso's use of pottery - Jar with Inlaid Figure - Yagi carved the image of a face using a Picasso style of draftsmanship on to the surface of one of his vessels and infected the pottery wall with a dent under the face.

Their work was characterized by biomorphic and slab-built geometric forms. An emphasis on the sculptural as opposed to the functional meant that typically their pieces didn't have holes, or 'mouths', that might allow the work in question to be seen as a vase or pot. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the works of Klee, Miro and Picasso were an influence on members of the group, as were the ceramics produced by Isamu Noguchi in the studio of Rosanjin in 1952.

Two notable artists in the Sodeisha mold are Akiyama Yo (1953- ) and Takiguchi Kazuo (1953- ), both prize-winning ceramists and former students of Yagi.

Bert Winther-Tamaki . Yagi Kazuo:The admission of the Nonfunctional Object into the Japanese Pottery World. Journal of Design History, Vol 12 No.2 (1999) pp. 123-141.

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Sōdeisha (, founded July 1948 - disbanded 1998), the "Crawling through Mud Association," was founded by Kazuo Yagi and led by Yagi and two other founding members, Hikaru Yamada and Suzuki Osamu.

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#Penone

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Giuseppe Penone (born 3 April 1947, Garessio) is an Italian artist and sculptor, known for his large-scale sculptures of trees that are interested in the link between man and the natural world. His early work is often associated with the Arte povera movement. In 2014, Penone was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award. He currently lives and works in Turin, Italy.

Giuseppe Penone was born on April 3, 1947 in Garessio, Italy. In 1970, he graduated from the Accademia Albertina in Turin, Italy, where he studied sculpture.

Penone's sculptures, installations, and drawings are distinguished by his emphasis on process and his use of natural materials, such as clay, stone, metal, and wood. His work strives to assimilate the natural word with his artistic practice, unifying art and nature. More specifically the tree, a living organism which closely resembles a human figure, is a recurring element in Penone's oeuvre. Penone created his first Albero ("Tree") sculpture in 1969, a series which continues to the present. Since this time, his practice has continued to explore and investigate the natural world and the poetic relationship between man and nature, artistic process and natural process.

In Penone's first exhibition at the age of 21, a one-man show at the Deposito d'Arte Presente in Turin in 1968, he presented works made out of lead, iron, wax, pitch, wood, plaster and burlap. Two of them involved the natural action of the elements: Scala d'acqua ("Water Ladder"), in which molten pitch was sculpted with a jet of water, and Corda, pioggia, zinco. Corda, pioggia, sole ("Rope, Rain, Sun"), a structure in movement with its form was altered by weathering.

In December 1968 Penone performed a series of acts in a wood near his home, the region of the Maritime Alps. In this work, titled Alpi Marittime, Penone intervened in the growth processes of a tree, whose form retained the memory of his gesture over time. One of his acts involved the flow of the waters in a stream, the vital sap which gives strength to the tree and on which the artist draws constantly in his work, a vehicle of growth and proliferation. He interlaced the stems of three saplings in Ho intrecciato tre alberi ("I Have Interwoven Three Trees") and uses nails to leave the imprint of his hand on the trunk of a tree and then affixed twenty-two pieces of lead to it, the number of his years, joining them up with zinc and copper wire: Albero/filo di zinco/rame ("Tree/Wire of Zinc/Copper). He enclosed the top of a tree in a net burdened by the weight of plants: Crescendo innalzerà la rete ("Growing It Will Raise The Net). He pressed his body to a tree and marked on the trunk the points of contact with barbed wire: L'albero ricorderà il contatto ("The Tree Will Remember the Contact").

In another of Penone's earliest experiments, Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto ("It Will Continue to Grow Except at that Point") (1968), he inserted a steel cast of his hand in a tree trunk, forcing the tree to grow around his hand. He immersed in a stream a tub of cement with the dimensions of his body on which he had left the imprints of his hands, feet and face: La mia altezza, la lunghezza delle mie braccia, il mio spessore in un ruscello ("My Height, the Length of My Arms, My Breadth in a Stream").

In 1969, Penone's works were published in the Germano Celant's seminal publication Arte Povera in a form of a sort of diary correlated with drawing, photographs and brief notes. Six black-and-white photos, each of which documents a different action, were exhibited at a group exhibition in the gallery of Gian Enzo Sperone in Turin in May of the same year.

Other Penone works include: Pane alfabeto ("Bread Alphabet"), a large loaf of bread pecked by birds and thereby revealing the metal letters it contains; Scrive/legge/ricorda (Writes/Reads/Remembers), a steel wedge with the alphabet scored on it embedded in the trunk of a tree; Gli anni dell'albero più uno ("The Years of the Tree Plus One"); a bough covered with wax with, imprinted on it, the bark of the tree on one side and on the other the gestures of the artist; Alberi e pietre, I rami dell'albero più uno, Zona d'ombra ("Trees and Stones, The Boughs of the Tree Plus One, Shadow Zone") were all created between 1969 and 1971 in the forest of Garessio, where the artist assimilated his work to the behavior of other living things, for the most part, trees.

In 1969, Penone also produced the work titled Il suo essere nel ventiduesimo anno di età in un'ora fantastica ("His Being in the Twenty-Second Year of his Age in a Fantastic Hour"), which he created by uncovering within a wooden beam the tree as it was when it was his own age. The trunk and branches are only partially uncovered and reveal their natural origin while remaining partly incorporated in the geometrical structure of the beam. "Rise trees of the wood, of the forest" wrote the artist in a text of 1979, "rise trees of the orchards, of the avenues, of the gardens, of the parks, rise from the wood that you have formed, take us back to the memory of your lives, tell us about the events, the seasons, the contacts of your existence. Take us back to the woodland, the darkness, the shadow, the scent of the undergrowth, the wonder of the cathedral that is born in the wood land".

In 1970, Penone created two sculptures, titled Albero di dodici metri ("Trees of Twelve Metres"), as performances during Aktionsraum 1 in Munich, Germany. For this work, Penone carved an existing tree down to a much smaller, more bare beam, and then created new branches so as to transport the tree back to an earlier period of its life. Another Albero di dodici metri, dating from 1980, was shaved out of a beam to its full height, with the exception of a part at the top of the plant that used to form the base of the sculpture. It was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York in 1982 and at the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Nantes in 1986. Other examples of trees, carved in different ways out of beams, make up the various installations titled Ripetere il bosco ("Repeating the Forest") at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1980 and at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in 1991. In his impressive sculpture Cedro di Versailles ("Cedar of Versailles") of 2004, the profile of the young tree is hewn in the trunk of an ancient cedar uprooted by the storm that wrought havoc in the Forest of Versailles in December 1999.

In Rovesciare i propri occhi ("Turning One's Eyes Inside Out"), an action of 1970, Penone wears mirror-finish contact lenses that interrupt the channel of visual information between the individual and his surroundings, entrusting to photography the possibility of seeing in the future the images that the eye should have collected. "The work of the poet," Penone wrote, "is to reflect like a mirror the visions that his sensibility has given him, to produce the sights, the images necessary to collective imaginings."

During this period, Penone carried out his work on traces and imprints obtained using various procedures, all based on contact. They range from the technique of the mold or cast to different actions based on exerting pressure. In Svolgere la propria pelle ("Developing One's Own Skin"), a 1970 artwork published the following year in the form of an artist's book, Penone recorded the boundary of his body with hundreds of photos taken by superimposing a sheet of glass on his skin. "The animal image, the imprint is involuntary culture. It has the intelligence of the material, a universal intelligence, an intelligence of the flesh of the material of man. The imprint of the whole epidermis of one's body, a leap into the air, a plunge into water, the body covered with earth. Developing one's skin against the air, water, earth, rock, walls, trees, dogs, handrails, windows, roads, hair, hats, handies, wings, doors, seats, stairs, clothes, books, eyes, sheep, mushrooms, grass, skin ... " wrote the artist, reflecting on the quantity of voluntary and involuntary signs that bodies disseminate and spread on different things: the neon lights in a gallery, the panes of glass in a window at the Kunsthalle in Kassel at " Documenta 5" in 1972, on a stone in Svolgere la propria pelle/pietra ("Developing One's Own Skin/Stone") of 1971, or on the fingers in Svolgere la propria pelle/dita ("Developing One's Own Skin/Finger") of the same year.

Penone's purpose is to produce the work starting from an image as automatic and unconscious as a fingerprint, and to make it conscious and voluntary through the irreplaceable action of drawing, which enlarges it and retraces it in all its art. Other examples are the cycles titled Pressione ("Pressure") begun in 1974 and Palpebre ("Eyelids") in 1975. The procedure adopted by the artist is articulated in different phases: making strips of adhesive tape adhere to his skin sprinkled with black, or pressure imprinting his own body or spreading a fine layer of resin on his eyelids and then photographing the image derived from the contact, projecting it enlarged onto paper or other surfaces, where it is transcribed in charcoal or pencil and with another act of contact, which the artist exerts by drawing. In some cases the work, which is the projection of the skin of an individual onto what is outside his body, takes on the dimension of an interior and the imprints traced on the walls of the space envelop the viewer, as in the installations he made for the exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum of Lucerne (1977), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1981), The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (1983), or the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris (1984).

The connection between the act of contact and the process of memory became more prominent in Vaso ("Vase") of 1975. This consisted of a terracotta vase from an archeological excavation and an expansion, in four bronze sculptures, of the fingerprints left on it by the potter. Here, for the first time, Penone worked in bronze. In 1978, Penone began a series of works in clay titled Soffio ("Breath"). With these works, he reproduced the volume of the breath against his body in the form of a large clay vase, making visible a performative gesture of the artist. In 1979, he also produced Soffio di foglie ("Breath of Leaves"), in which the volume of the breath and the imprint of the body of the artist are impressed in a pile of leaves.

With his Patate ("Potatoes") of 1977, Penone inserted himself into organic forms. In this work, Penone grew potatoes inside moulds of his face, so as to make them appear like parts of his face, such as his ears and his nose. This process was repeated again with his Zucche ("Pumpkins") of 1978, which saw Penone create bronzes sculptures from casts of pumpkins grown inside facial casts. This work was shown for the first time at his solo exhibition at the Halle für Internationale Neue Kunst of Zürich in 1980, and is always accompanied by the sculpture Nero d' Africa ("Black of Africa"), a block on marble partially sculpted in the negative and positive form of the artist's own figure.

In 1981 Penone began a series titled Essere Fiume ("Being the River"). For this series, Penone chose a rock from a river bed and then went to the source of the river to extract the same type of stone. The artist then painstakingly carved the stone to replicate the natural processes that have shaped the rock in the river, copying the ricochets and bumps as closely as possible. He then exhibits the two stones side by side. In mimicking the work done by natural agents on the rock, Penone highlights the similarities between the action of the river and the action of the sculptor, thus identifying himself with the river. He wrote: "Picking up a stone worn by the river, going back up the course of the river to discover the point in the hills from which the stone came and hewing a new block of stone from the mountain and then exactly replicating the stone picked up in the river in the new block of stone: this is to be a river. Producing a stone made of stone is perfect sculpture, a return to nature, it is a cosmic heritage, pure creation, the naturalness of a good sculpture acquires a cosmic value. Being a river is the true stone sculpture."

Some of Penone's works produced between 1979-1980 such as Albero d'acqua ("Tree of Water") and Colonna d'acqua ("Column of Water), all stem from the same logic of superimposing liquid on liquid vertically. "The condition of water is horizontality, the condition of verticality is sculpture, raising the water is a poetic gesture," he wrote in 1976. He sees all elements as fluid and what we would describe as hard or soft depends only on the state in which we find ourselves acting.

In Gesti vegetali ("Vegetation Gestures"), a series of sculptures which Penone began to work on in 1982, Penone "fossilized" the imprints of his hands on strips of clay stuck to a dummy that served as a frame. He then cast the clay in bronze using the lost-wax technique and completed the work by placing the casts next to each other so as to create the semblance of a human being. Gesti vegetali ("Vegetation Gestures") was first displayed in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1984. "Fossilized gestures that have been performed in a space," wrote the artist in 1977, "bring man closer to plants, which are compelled to live eternally under the burden of the gestures of their past." In his installation in Basel's Merian Park in 1984, he began to engraft vegetation onto his sculptures, as appears in his solo exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York in 1985.

Penone has made bronze trees which have been erected in various public spaces. One example is the Pozzo di Münster ("Well of Münster") created for the 1987 edition Skulpture Projects; on its trunk was the imprint of a hand which gushed water. Others were the Faggio di Otterloo ("Beech of Otterloo") conceived for the outdoor sculptures park, the Rijksmuseum Kroller-Müller in 1988, the Albero delle vocali ("Vowel Tree"), a sculpture thirty meters long placed horizontally in the Tuileries in Paris, where it has been installed since 2000, or Elevazione ("Elevation") 01 2000-2001, a large tree raised off the ground in Rotterdam.

Many of Penone's works produced in the second hall of the 1980s are closely bound up with the idea of contact as a generator of memory and change. The series of works titled Verde del bosco ("Green of the Woods"), created between 1983 and 1987, are frottages on canvas of the trunks of forest trees, made using the leaves of the trees themselves. Sometimes the canvases are united in a single work with the trunks that produced them, or with Gesti vegetali ("Vegetation Gestures"), as in his installations in 1986 at the Museum of Grenoble in France and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Charleroi.

Like hair, nails are an extension of the body, the part used to investigate or attack matter, but they also the part where the materials from contact tends to sediment. Starting in 1987, Penone created large glass sculpture in the lorm of nails and places them in contact with different materials, piles of leaves, forest trees, logs and blocks of marble. They were the theme of the 1998 exhibition at the Musée Rodin in Paris.

In the cycle of works titled Terre ("Lands") created starting from 1988, the earth sedimented in layers, as in its natural state, is enclosed in a transparent glass parallelepiped through which can be seen the imprint left by a gesture of the artist, the upheaval in the soil which preserves the image of the hand that caused it.

In the personal exhibition presented at the Église Courmelois at Val-De-Vesle in 1991, Penone displayed the large sculpture titled Suture ("Sutures"), which he worked on between 1987 and 1991. In it the enlarged negative of the image of a human brain is rendered by four jagged lines of steel that reproduce the points of contact between the four lobes, marking their boundaries and lines of contact with each other. A Y-shaped transparent glass tube containing soil constitutes the central element of the sculpture and raises the subject of the relationship between man and nature.

In the large drawings titled Foglie ("Leaves"), the traces that a soft matter like the brain leaves on the skull are transposed to the images of leaves. In the Anatomie ("Anatomies"), shown for the first time at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Nîmes in 1993, the artist hewed into the surface of Carrara marble (much favored for statuary) to bring out the veining, which so closely resembles the vessels through which blood flows in living creatures.

In the 1994 cycle of works titled Propagazione ("Propagation"), the concentric lines derived from the imprint of a finger expand into a system of waves. In Sorgente di cristallo ("Crystal Spring") of 1996, the glass cast in which the water seems to be crystallized, is taken from a casting of a trunk. Again in Albero delle vertebre ("Tree of Vertebrae"), presented for the first time in a traveling show at the museums of Nîmes, Tilburg and Trento between 1997 and 1998, the form of a tree trunk lives in the transparent material of crystal and it rises from forms in plaster created by enlarging the casts of a human skull.

Respirare l'ombra ("Breathing the Shadow") is a dimly lit room lined with laurel leaves, where visual and tactile impressions combine with olfactory sensations. In another installation, shown for the first time at the Galego Contemporary Art Center at Santiago de Compostela and then at the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 2000, in the centre of one of the walls there appears a gilt bronze lung, whose lobes are also modeled using laurel leaves.

In the bronze sculptures titled Pelle di foglie ("Skin of Leaves"), 2000, the leaves seem the endings of a system of nerves or veins evoked by the densely interlacing stems. In spoglia d'oro su spine d'acacia ("Golden Skin on Acacia Thorns") 01 2002, the imprint 01 lips is picked out in myriads of acacia thorns, so transforming the human trace into a natural landscape. At the same time it evokes the nerve endings of a mouth while, by contrast, stressing its sensitivity. The work forms part of a series made from acacia thorns applied to silk and sometimes associated with slabs of marble, whose veiningin relief is shown to match traces marked by the vegetation. An example is the work titled Pelle di marmo su spine d'acacia ("Marble Skin on Acacia Thorns"), exhibited in 2001 at the Musée d'Orsay of Paris and the Fujikawa Gallery in Osaka.

In Pelle di cedro ("Cedar Skin") of 2002 exhibited for the first time in the anthological exhibition of Penone's work by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2004, an imprint of the bark of a tree is impressed on the cowhides tanned using traditional methods. The roughness of the bark transferred to the hides and displayed in negative resembles a pattern of veins, as in the Anatomie. Bark also underlies the casts that appear in Lo spazio della scultura ("The Space of Sculpture") an installation presented at the recent exposition at the Studio per l'Arte Contemporanea Tucci Russo at Torre Pellice and the Museum Kurhaus Kleve between 2006 and 2007.

"The structure of fluids is the same whatever the element. A watercourse, a growing tree and a pathway have similar forms" writes Penone of the work titled Albero giardino ("Tree Garden"), produced for a former railroad site in Turin in 2002. In this outdoor work, the human action, hence culture, is compared to the force of natural elements and expressed in the design of a path traced by the vegetation, whose outline represents the growth of a tree.

Between 2003 and 2007, Penone was involved in the production of a large scale installation of sculptures for the seventeenth-century Palazzo di Venaria in Piedmont. This work, titled "The Garden of Fluid Sculptures," includes fourteen sculptures made in bronze, wood, and marble and spread over several acres of the outdoor gardens. In 2007 Penone was also invited to the Venice Biennale where he set up an installation for the new opening of the Padiglione Italiano.

In 2011 Penone participated in the Art Gallery of Ontario "Galleria Italia," which included his work Repeating the Forest (2007-2008). With this work Penone had carefully removed rings of growth from a fir tree to reveal its former young shape hidden beneath decades of growth, and Versailles Cedar, 2000-2003. "Penone arrives at these forms by carving the tree trunk leaving the knots in place until they emerge as limbs, revealing the sapling within." Regarding this work, he stated "My artwork shows, with the language of sculpture, the essence of matter and tries to reveal with the work, the hidden life within."

Since 1969 Penone has been one of the leading representatives of Arte Povera, the critical theory coined by Germano Celant in 1967 and based on the work of a number of Italian artists, including Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Gilberto Zorio. These artists rejected traditional artistic languages. The appearance of Penone in this group of artists coincided with the emergence in the critical elaborations of the "magical and wonder-arousing value of the natural elements". This was at a time when dialogue and debate with the coeval international avantgardes was becoming most intense, conducted through a series of group surveys in which Penone took part. These events included Konzeption-Conception at the Schloss Morsbroich in Leverkusen in 1969, conceptual art arte povera land art at the Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna in Turin and Information at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1970.

Germano Celant, Arte Povera (Milan: Mazzotta, 1969)

Jean-Christophe Ammann, ed., Giuseppe Penone ex. cat. (Lucerne: Kunstmuseum Luzern, 1977)

Germano Celant, Giuseppe Penone ex. cat. (Essen: Museum Folkwang Essen, 1978)

Jessica Bradley, Giuseppe Penone ex. cat. (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1984)

Catalog of Giuseppe Penone Sculture du Linfa, Biennale di Venezia, 2007

Daniela Lancioni, and Carlos Basualdo, Giuseppe Penone: The Inner Life of Forms (New York: Gagosian, 2018)

Media related to Giuseppe Penone at Wikimedia Commons

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Giuseppe Penone (born 3 April 1947, Garessio) is an Italian artist and sculptor, known for his large-scale sculptures of trees that are interested in the link between man and the natural world. His early work is often associated with the Arte povera movement. In 2014, Penone was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award.

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#AndyGoldsworthy

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Andy Goldsworthy (born 26 July 1956) is an English sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings.

Goldsworthy was born in Cheshire on 26 July 1956, the son of Muriel (née Stanger) and F. Allin Goldsworthy (1929-2001), a former professor of applied mathematics at the University of Leeds. He grew up on the Harrogate side of Leeds. From the age of 13, he worked on farms as a labourer. He has likened the repetitive quality of farm tasks to the routine of making sculpture: "A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it." He studied fine art at Bradford College of Art from 1974 to 1975 and at Preston Polytechnic (now the University of Central Lancashire) from 1975 to 1978, receiving his BA from the latter.[citation needed ]

Sculpture by Goldsworthy in the National Museum of Scotland

After leaving college, Goldsworthy lived in Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Cumbria. He moved to Scotland in 1985, first living in Langholm and then settling a year later in Penpont, where he still resides. It has been said that his gradual drift northwards was "due to a way of life over which he did not have complete control", but that contributing factors were opportunities and desires to work in these areas and "reasons of economy".

In 1993, Goldsworthy received an honorary degree from the University of Bradford. He was an A.D. White Professor-At-Large in Sculpture at Cornell University 2000-2006 and 2006-2008.

In 2003, Goldsworthy produced a commissioned work for the entry courtyard of San Francisco's de Young Museum called "Drawn Stone", which echoes San Francisco's frequent earthquakes and their effects. His installation included a giant crack in the pavement that broke off into smaller cracks, and broken limestone, which could be used for benches. The smaller cracks were made with a hammer adding unpredictability to the work as he created it.

Art process

The materials used in Goldsworthy's art often include brightly coloured flowers, icicles, leaves, mud, pinecones, snow, stone, twigs, and thorns. He has been quoted as saying, "I think it's incredibly brave to be working with flowers and leaves and petals. But I have to: I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole."

Rather than interfering in natural processes, his work magnifies existing ones through deliberately minimal intervention in the landscape. Goldsworthy has said "I am reluctant to carve into or break off solid living rock...I feel a difference between large, deep rooted stones and the debris lying at the foot of a cliff, pebbles on a beach...These are loose and unsettled, as if on a journey, and I can work with them in ways I couldn't with a long resting stone." Goldsworthy's commitment to working with available natural materials injects an inherent scarcity and contingency into the work.

In contrast to other artists who work with the land, most of Goldsworthy's works are small in scale and temporary in their installation. For these ephemeral works, Goldsworthy often uses only his bare hands, teeth, and found tools to prepare and arrange the materials. His process reveals a preoccupation with temporality and a specific attention to materials which visibly age and decay, a view which stands in contrast to monumentalism in Land Art.

For his permanent sculptures like "Roof", "Stone River" and "Three Cairns", "Moonlit Path" ( Petworth, West Sussex, 2002) and "Chalk Stones" in the South Downs, near West Dean, West Sussex he has employed the use of machine tools. To create "Roof", Goldsworthy worked with his assistant and five British dry-stone wallers, who were used to make sure the structure could withstand time and nature.

Goldsworthy is generally considered the founder of modern rock balancing.

Photography

Photography plays a crucial role in his art due to its often ephemeral and transient state. Photographs (made primarily by Goldsworthy himself) of site-specific, environmental works allow them to be shared without severing important ties to place. According to Goldsworthy, "Each work grows, stays, decays - integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its heights, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit."

Photography aids Goldsworthy in understanding his works, as much as in communicating them to an audience. He has said, "Photography is my way of talking, writing and thinking about my art. It makes me aware of connections and developments that might have not otherwise have been apparent. It is the visual evidence which runs through my art as a whole and gives me a broader, more distant view of what I am doing."

Documentary films on Goldsworthy

Goldsworthy is the subject of a 2001 documentary feature film called Rivers and Tides, directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer. In 2018, Riedelsheimer released a second documentary on Goldsworthy, Leaning Into the Wind.

Personal life

In 1982, Goldsworthy married Judith Gregson; they had four children together before separating. He now lives in the Scottish village of Penpont with his girlfriend, Tina Fiske, an art historian.

Exhibitions and installations

Publications

References

Further information

Articles:

Books:

Film/Documentary

External links

General:

Art:

Online preview of the Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue DVD Volume 1: 1976-1986. A collaborative effort involving Goldsworthy, The Crichton Foundation, and the University of Glasgow's Crichton Campus and Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII). The DVD documents, visually and textually, the first ten years of Goldsworthy's ephemeral outdoor practice. It replicates Goldsworthy's "Slide Cabinet Index", and includes previously unpublished material from "Goldsworthy's Sketchbook Diaries".

"Wet feathers/Wrapped around a stone/Before the incoming tide, Carrick" (1999). Photograph from the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

"Snowballs in Summer" (2000), photographed in Charterhouse Square and Smithfield Market in Smithfield, London, UK. Photographs from the Conway Collection, Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

"Three Cairns" (2002), Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa, US.

Photographs by Andy Goldsworthy in the UK Government Art Collection.

Photographs of Andy Goldsworthy's sculptures at Flickr

Andy Goldsworthy's Portfolio at the Cass Sculpture Foundation

SaveLandArt.org - Media Initiatives to Protect Land Art from Urbanization, Industry and Overcuration.

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Andy Goldsworthy (born 26 July 1956) is an English sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings. Goldsworthy was born in Cheshire on 26 July 1956, the son of Muriel (née Stanger) and F. Allin Goldsworthy (1929-2001), a former professor of applied mathematics at the University of Leeds.

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#Mona-Ha

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Mono-ha (もの派) is the name given to an art movement led by Japanese and Korean artists of 20th-century. The Mono-ha artists explored the encounter between natural and industrial materials, such as stone, steel plates, glass, light bulbs, cotton, sponge, paper, wood, wire, rope, leather, oil, and water, arranging them in mostly unaltered, ephemeral states. The works focus as much on the interdependency of these various elements and the surrounding space as on the materials themselves.

Origin of the Term "Mono-ha" and its Members

"Mono-ha" is usually translated in a literal manner, as "School of Things." The Mono-ha artists regularly assert that "Mono-ha" was a term disparagingly coined by critics (specifically Teruo Fujieda and Toshiaki Minemura in Bijutsu Techo magazine in 1973) well after they had begun to exhibit their work, and they did not begin as an organized collective. The artists' writings and conversations were published before critics coined the term, including the seminal article by Lee "World and structure-Collapse of the object [Thoughts on Contemporary Art]" in 1969 and the noteworthy artists' round table "Voices of emerging artists: From the realm of Non-Art" published in 1970. Many of the Mono-ha artists were first exhibited at Tamura and Maki Galleries in Tokyo owned by Nobuo(Shinro) Yamagiishi who was also an art writer and whose archives are in the collection of The National Art Center Tokyo.

Toshiaki Minemura explains in his 1986 essay "What Was Mono-ha?," that in terms of their academic background and intellectual exchange, the Mono-ha artists are divided into three groups:

1. "The Lee + Tamabi Connection." This comprises Nobuo Sekine, Kishio Suga, Shingo Honda, Katsuhiko Narita and Katsurō Yoshida in the painting department in Yoshishige Saitō's class, and Susumu Koshimizu in the sculpture department at Tama Art University (aka Tamabi) as well as Jiro Takamatsu and Lee Ufan, a Korean artist who is a close friend of Sekine.

2. "The Geidai Connection," a group of artists around Kōji Enokura and Noboru Takayama, who were both graduates of the Tokyo University of the Arts (aka Geidai), and Hiroshi Fujii and Makoto Habu, who were involved in Mono-ha later on.

3. "The Nichidai Connection," students from the Nihon University (aka Nichidai) Fine Arts Department-whose central figure was Noriyuki Haraguchi-also known as the "Yokosuka Group," due to Haraguchi's upbringing in Yokosuka and his critique of the local US military presence through his work.

Mono-ha emerged in response to a number of social, cultural and political precedents set in the 1960s. With the exception of Lee Ufan, who was a decade older, most of the Mono-ha artists were just beginning their careers when the violent student protests of 1968-69 occurred.

At the same time, there was much protest against the second extension of the US-Japan Security Treaty (known in abbreviated Japanese as ) in 1970, binding Japan into providing logistical support for the US war in Vietnam. Coupled with demands for the reversion of Okinawa by 1972 and the removal of nuclear weapons based there, the climate of protest during this period was symptomatic of a growing distrust of the United States' intentions towards Asia and its dominant position in the bilateral relationship with Japan. The activism of the " Anpo generation" gave rise to a highly intellectual counterculture that was both critical of US imperialism and acutely self-aware of its Japanese identity.

The Mono-ha artists typically deny involvement with student activist movements at the time, though it is thought that the tense political climate influenced their work, allowing them to grapple with and make sense of their unease and disillusionment with postwar modernity in their different ways.

In 2012, Blum & Poe gallery introduced the Mono-ha art into the US with the survey exhibition "Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha," curated by Mika Yoshitake. The gallery has also held solo exhibitions of Lee Ufan, Kishio Suga, Susumu Koshimizu, Koji Enokura, and Nobuo Sekine.

Nobuo Sekine's Phase-Mother Earth is considered to be the initial work of the Mono-ha movement. Originally created in Suma Rikyu Park in Kobe, and without official permission. The work was re-created in 2008 and 2012. It was a large cylindrical tower made of packed earth, which was removed from a cylindrical hole with the same shape.

Japon des avant gardes: 1910-1970. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1986.

Chong, Doryun. Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012.

Koplos, Janet. Contemporary Japanese Sculpture. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.

Munroe, Alexandra. Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc, 1994.

Yoshitake, Mika. Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha. Los Angeles: Blum & Poe, 2012.

Kishio Suga. Los Angeles: Blum & Poe, 2012

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Mono-ha (もの派) is the name given to an art movement led by Japanese and Korean artists of 20th-century. The Mono-ha artists explored the encounter between natural and industrial materials, such as stone, steel plates, glass, light bulbs, cotton, sponge, paper, wood, wire, rope, leather, oil, and water, arranging them in mostly unaltered, ephemeral states.

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Shinto, Taoism, Wu-Wei, Wabi-Sabi, Japan

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Shinto, Taoism, Wu-Wei, Wabi-Sabi, Japan

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#MasculineTenderness#Masculinity

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Wu Wei: The Ancient Art of Non-Doing. Lao Tzu. Taoism

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Wu Wei: The Ancient Art of Non-Doing. Lao Tzu. Taoism

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Wu Wei: The Ancient Art of Non-Doing | UPLIFT

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The practice of Wu Wei allows you to effortlessly align with the natural flow of life.

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#Shinto#Interiour

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Minimalist Wooden House in Shinto designed by SNARK + Ouvi - Homes - Aesthetics of the Everyday

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House in Shintou is a minimalist wooden architectural project in Shinto, Japan by SNARK + Ouvi Photography by Ippei Shinzawa

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Activity

How would you answer Chanel Miller's "I was, I am, I will be" prompt? Would your answers look like Miller's, or would they look different?

GRADE LEVEL: High School (9-12), College and Beyond

Activity

Reflection: Inside/Outside

Visible from Hyde Street outside the Asian Art Museum are Chanel Miller's I was, I am, I will be, Jas Charanjiva's Don't Mess With Me, and Jenifer K Wofford's Pattern Recognition.

GRADE LEVEL: Middle School (6-8), High School (9-12), College and Beyond

Activity

Mapping Your Special Space

Personal Space (2001), a layered, dreamlike painting by Kolkata-based artist Jayashree Chakravarty, is an imaginary map built up from painted strips of paper. In this activity, create your own map based on your special place.

GRADE LEVEL: Elementary School (4-5), Middle School (6-8), High School (9-12), College and Beyond

Activity

Make your own torn-paper collages inspired by the images created in the teamLab experience.

GRADE LEVEL: Elementary School (4-5), Middle School (6-8), High School (9-12)

Teacher Packet

Pattern Recognition: Activity Packet

In this packet, you will engage with Wofford's mural, learn about different Asian cultures and identities, and celebrate Asian American artists from the San Francisco Bay Area. With what you've learned and researched, you will then create your own patterns in a digital collage art project.

GRADE LEVEL: Elementary School (4-5), Middle School (6-8), High School (9-12), College and Beyond

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Shinto Art and Architecture - Education - Asian Art Museum

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Activity How would you answer Chanel Miller's "I was, I am, I will be" prompt? Would your answers look like Miller's, or would they look different? GRADE LEVEL: High School (9-12), College and Beyond Activity Reflection: Inside/Outside Visible from Hyde Street outside the Asian Art Museum are Chanel Miller's I was, I am, I will be, Jas Charanjiva's Don't Mess With Me, and Jenifer K Wofford's Pattern Recognition.

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#Shinto#ShintoArt

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The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

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The ancient Japanese found divinity manifested within nature itself. Flowering peaks, flowing rivers, and venerable trees, for example, were thought to be sanctified by the deities, or kami, that inhabited them. This indigenous "Way of the Gods," or Shinto, can be understood as a multifaceted assembly of practices, attitudes, and institutions that express the Japanese people's relationship with their land and the lifecycles of the earth and humans. Shinto emerged gradually in ancient times and is distinctive in that it has no founder, no sacred books, no teachers, no saints, and no well-defined pantheon. It never developed a moral order or a hierarchical priesthood and did not offer salvation after death. The oldest type of Shinto ceremonies that could be called religious were dedicated to agriculture and always emphasized ritual purity. Worship took place outdoors at sites proclaimed to be sacred. In time, however, the ancient Japanese built permanent structures to honor their gods. Shrines were usually built on mountains or in rural areas, often on unlevel ground, without any symmetrical plan.

In Japan, anthropomorphic representations of gods were unknown before the spread of Buddhism, although deities were symbolically associated with sacred objects, such as mirrors, swords, and jewels, that became imperial insignia. Following the advent of the new religion, Shintoists began to make images. The form of worship, however, did not change, as representations of gods were hidden away in the inner sanctuary of the Shinto shrine, adherents demonstrating their faith-at the entrance-simply by clapping their hands.

Department of Asian Art. "Shinto." In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/shin/hd_shin.htm (October 2002)

Mason, Penelope. History of Japanese Art. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004.

Varley, H. Paul. Japanese Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000.

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Shinto | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

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The ancient Japanese found divinity manifested within nature itself. Flowering peaks, flowing rivers, and venerable trees, for example, were thought to be sanctified by the deities, or kami, that inhabited them. This indigenous "Way of the Gods," or Shinto, can be understood as a multifaceted assembly of practices, attitudes, and institutions that express the Japanese people's relationship with their land and the lifecycles of the earth and humans.

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#Wabi-Sabi

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#TransgenerationalTrauma

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Transgenerational trauma is the psychological and physiological effects that the trauma experienced by people has on subsequent generations in that group. The primary modes of transmission are the uterine environment during pregnancy causing epigenetic changes in the developing embryo, and the share…

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#Grayson Perry#TheDescentOfMan#Masculinity

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The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry review – a man’s man is yesterday’s hero

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Grayson Perry’s timely, accessible book explores how rigid masculine roles can destroy men’s lives

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#JudithHalberstam#FemaleMasculinity

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Constantin Brancusi, Tom Sachs, Isamu Noguchi, Akima Yo

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Constantin Brancusi, Tom Sachs, Isamu Noguchi, Akima Yo

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#MinjaeKim#Southern-Korea#Furniture#LacqueredStool

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#MinjaeKim#Furniture#Southern-Korea

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#MinjaeKim#TheBionicChair#2022#Furniture#DouglasFir#AluminiumRoofingPaint

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#Brancusi#TheSorceress#1916

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#AkiyamaYō#Ceramic#Japan

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#Ceramic#CeramicArt

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#PhillipJonker

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Het is nu bewezen: kartonnen boot is echt

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#JoostConijn

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Met een zelfgebouwd vliegtuig van Amsterdam naar Kenia. Met een op hout gestookte, houten auto naar Oost-Europa. Joost Conijn (Amsterdam, 1971) houdt ervan zichzelf op de proef te stellen - bijvoorbeeld door zelf machines te maken. Wat hij tijdens zijn reis in deze vervoersmiddelen meemaakt, legt hij vast op beeld - film en foto - en in woord.

Conijn wil met zijn werk de ruimte bevechten om dingen te kunnen doen waar menigeen van zou zeggen dat het niet mogelijk of niet verantwoord is. Meestal zoekt hij die grens op door iets te maken dat van meet af aan een onzekere aangelegenheid is; hij zegt te houden van de spanning of iets hem al dan niet zal lukken.

Dit gegeven komt op een meer beschouwende manier ook tot uiting in de film Siddieqa, Firdaus, Abdallah, Soelayman, Moestafa, Hawwa en Dzoel-kifl uit 2004. Hierin volgt Conijn een jaar lang zijn buurkinderen, die met hun ouders in een kraakpand wonen onder de rook van Amsterdam, aan de rand van een haventerrein. De kinderen gaan elke dag op ontdekkingstocht, waarbij ze veel gevaarlijke dingen doen - vuurtjes stoken, hout hakken met een bijl, een caravan aftuigen. De film is een ode aan hun speelse manier van ontdekken waarbij de angst niet overheerst. Het is een film die Conijns visie nog eens benadrukt, dat we ons teveel laten leiden door ons idee van wat kan en niet kan, wat mogelijk en wat onmogelijk is.

"Ik hou er niet van om dingen te herhalen. De ervaring van iets voor de eerste keer doen, daar gaat het mij om, de overwinning op iets waarvan je eerst niet wist of het zou lukken. Het ene volgt uit het andere, daar vaar ik op."

Conijn studeerde aan de Gerrit Rietveld Academie (1992-1995) en het Sandberg Instituut (1995-1997), beide in Amsterdam. Naar aanleiding van zijn reis met het zelfgebouwde vliegtuig OK-NUL 43 schreef hij het boek Piloot van goed en kwaad. Conijns werk was te zien in Palais de Tokyo (Parijs), Museum Volkenkunde (Leiden), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam) en Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Høvikodden, Noorwegen).

REGISSEUR VAN DIT PORTRET:

Carin Goeijers

Muziek: Tim Knol, Jeroen Tenty, Eric Lensink

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Met een zelfgebouwd vliegtuig van Amsterdam naar Kenia. Met een op hout gestookte, houten auto naar Oost-Europa. Joost Conijn (Amsterdam, 1971) houdt ervan zichzelf op de proef te stellen - bijvoorbeeld door zelf machines te maken. Wat hij tijdens zijn reis in deze vervoersmiddelen meemaakt, legt hij vast op beeld - film en foto - en in woord.

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#TomSachs

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#Brancusi#BirdInSpace#1931#PolishedBronze#Bronze#Sculpture

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#Bachelard#ThePoeticsOfSpace

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The Poetics of Space ( French: La Poétique de l'Espace) is a 1958 book about architecture by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. The book is considered an important work about art. Commentators have compared Bachelard's views to those of the philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Bachelard applies the method of phenomenology to architecture, basing his analysis not on purported origins (as was the trend in Enlightenment thinking about architecture) but on lived experience in architectural places and their contexts in nature. He focuses especially on the personal, emotional response to buildings both in life and in literary works, both in prose and in poetry. He is thus led to consider spatial types such as the attic, the cellar, drawers and the like. Bachelard implicitly urges architects to base their work on the experiences it will engender rather than on abstract rationales that may or may not affect viewers and users of architecture.

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home.... Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts-serious, sad thoughts-and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

-  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Bachelard also discusses psychoanalysis and the work of the psychiatrist Carl Jung. Comparing the psychoanalytic and phenomenological approaches to his subject matter, he sees merit in both, but finds the phenomenological approach preferable.

The Poetics of Space was first published by Presses Universitaires de France in 1958. In 1964, the Orion Press, Inc. published the book, with a foreword by the philosopher Étienne Gilson, in an English translation by the writer Maria Jolas. Beacon Press republished the work in English in 1969. In 1994, it republished it in a new edition with an added foreword by the historian John R. Stilgoe. In 2014, Penguin Books published an edition with a foreword by the novelist Mark Z. Danielewski and an introduction by the philosopher Richard Kearney.

The Poetics of Space has influenced the philosophers Paul Ricœur and Edward S. Casey, and the critic Camille Paglia. Ricœur was influenced by Bachelard's understanding of the imagination. Casey identified The Poetics of Space as an influence on his work Getting Back into Place (1993). He wrote that Bachelard shared Heidegger's "emphasis on the importance of dwelling places." However, he added that neither Heidegger nor Bachelard "adequately assessed the role of the human body in the experience of significant places." Paglia identified The Poetics of Space as an influence on her work of literary criticism Sexual Personae (1990). She has commented of Bachelard's "dignified yet fluid phenomenological descriptive method" that it "seemed to me ideal for art", and described Bachelard as "the last modern French writer I took seriously."

Joan Ockman gave The Poetics of Space a positive review in Harvard Design Magazine. She compared Bachelard's views to Heidegger's, and wrote that, alongside works such as Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) and his essay "Building Dwelling Thinking", The Poetics of Space was a key text for the architect Christian Norberg-Schulz. She also compared Bachelard's views on epistemology to those of the philosopher Thomas Kuhn and described him as an influence on the philosopher Michel Foucault, finding it apparent in Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). Danielewski compared The Poetics of Space to the critic Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973), the essayist Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1983), Steve Erickson's novel Days Between Stations (1985), and Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day (2003).

Other authors who have praised The Poetics of Space include Gilson, Stilgoe, Kearney, and the philosopher Gary Gutting. Gilson credited Bachelard with making "one of the major modern contributions to the philosophy of art". Stilgoe praised his discussion of "the meaning of domestic space". Kearney described The Poetics of Space as "the most concise and consummate expression of Bachelard's philosophy of imagination." Gutting credited Bachelard with subtly explaining the meaning of archetypal images.

Bibliography

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The Poetics of Space ( French: La Poétique de l'Espace) is a 1958 book about architecture by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. The book is considered an important work about art. Commentators have compared Bachelard's views to those of the philosopher Martin Heidegger.